February 2020

This latest Hydrogen Council report (Jan 2020) shows that the cost of hydrogen solutions will fall sharply within the next decade – and sooner than previously expected. As scale up of hydrogen production, distribution, equipment and component manufacturing continues, cost is projected to decrease by up to 50% by 2030 for a wide range of applications, including trucks, making hydrogen competitive with other low-carbon alternatives and, in some cases, with conventional options.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) report, published in June 2019, finds that clean hydrogen is currently enjoying unprecedented political and business momentum, with the number of policies and projects around the world expanding rapidly. It concludes that now is the time to scale up technologies and bring down costs to allow hydrogen to become widely used.

Hydrogen is an essential element in the energy transition and can account for 24% of final energy demand and 5.4m jobs by 2050, says the study by the FCH JU, “Hydrogen Roadmap Europe: A sustainable pathway for the European Energy Transition“ published in February 2019. Developed with input from 17 leading European industrial actors, the study lays out a pathway for the large-scale deployment of hydrogen and fuel cells until 2050 and quantifies the associated socio-economic impacts.