Little to lose: the case for a robust European green hydrogen strategy
arXiv:2412.07464 · doi:10.1016/j.joule.2025.101974
Abstract
The EU targets 10 Mt of green hydrogen production by 2030, but has not committed to targets for 2040. Green hydrogen competes with carbon capture and storage, biomass and imports in reaching emissions reductions; earlier studies have demonstrated the great uncertainty in future cost-optimal development of green hydrogen. In spite of this, we show that Europe risks little by setting green hydrogen production targets at around 25 Mt by 2040. Employing an extensive scenario analysis combined with novel near-optimal techniques, we find that this target results in systems that are within 10% of cost-optimal in most considered scenarios. Setting concrete targets is important in order to resolve significant uncertainty which hampers investments. Targeting green hydrogen reduces the dependence on carbon capture and storage and green fuel imports, making for a more robust European climate strategy.
Main text: 26 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables. Supplementary information: 18 pages, 26 figures, 1 table
References in corpus (12)
- The green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap
- Impact of different time series aggregation methods on optimal energy system design
- The Potential Role of a Hydrogen Network in Europe
- Speed of technological transformations required in Europe to achieve different climate goals
- Import options for chemical energy carriers from renewable sources to Germany
- Endogenous learning for green hydrogen in a sector-coupled energy model for Europe
- Modeling all alternative solutions for highly renewable energy systems
- Intersecting near-optimal spaces: European power systems with more resilience to weather variability
- Using power system modelling outputs to identify weather-induced extreme events in highly renewable systems
- Broad Ranges of Investment Configurations for Renewable Power Systems, Robust to Cost Uncertainty and Near-Optimality
- Trading off regional and overall energy system design flexibility in the net-zero transition
- Shifting burdens: How delayed decarbonisation of road transport affects other sectoral emission reductions