Nature Energy intl_tech D1

发布：2025-01-14 · 事件：2025-01-14

Download PDF Subjects Economics Energy modelling Energy policy Energy supply and demand Hydrogen energy Abstract Green hydrogen is critical for decarbonizing hard-to-electrify sectors, but it faces high costs and investment risks. Here we define and quantify the green hydrogen ambition and implementation gap, showing that meeting hydrogen expectations will remain challenging despite surging announcements of projects and subsidies. Tracking 190 projects over 3 years, we identify a wide 2023 implementation gap with only 7% of global capacity announcements finished on schedule. In contrast, the 2030 ambition gap towards 1.5 °C scenarios has been gradually closing as the announced project pipeline has nearly tripled to 422 GW within 3 years. However, we estimate that, without carbon pricing, realizing all these projects would require global subsidies of US$1.3 trillion (US$0.8–2.6 trillion range), far exceeding announced subsidies. Given past and future implementation gaps, policymakers must prepare for prolonged green hydrogen scarcity. Policy support needs to secure hydrogen investments, but should focus on applications where hydrogen is indispensable. Similar content being viewed by others Probabilistic feasibility space of scaling up green hydrogen supply Article 08 September 2022 Worldwide greenhouse gas emissions of green hydrogen production and transport Article 21 June 2024 Future hydrogen economies imply environmental trade-offs and a supply-demand mismatch Article Open access 15 August 2024 Main There is a widespread consensus among scientists 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , industry 6 and increasingly also policymakers 7 that green hydrogen, produced from renewable electricity via electrolysis, is critical for reducing emissions in end-use applications that defy straightforward electrification. Additionally, hydrogen is a promising candidate for long-duration energy storage of renewables 8 , 9 and the precursor to all electrofuels 10 , which are highly versatile yet costly 11 . Consequently, policy measures to stimulate the ramp-up of the hydrogen market are gaining momentum as more than 40 governments have already adopted hydrogen strategies 1 , 7 . Prominent examples are the supply-side subsidies implemented through the the US Inflation Reduction Act 12 and the EU Hydrogen Bank 13 . Such policy support is urgently required: to meet the median ambition in 1.5 °C scenarios, namely, 350 GW by 2030, green hydrogen production needs to grow 380-fold, more than doubling each year. However, implementation is not going according to plan. Following a surge of enthusiasm 14 , 15 , the green hydrogen market and associated expectations have recently entered a phase of consolidation 16 as high costs 17 , 18 , limited demand 19 and lagging implementation of support policies 1 are hampering deployment. Shortfalls in the announced deployment of electrolysers, the key component for green hydrogen production, are representative of the systemic challenges of scaling up supply, demand and infrastructure at the same time. In 2022, instead of the 2.8 GW electrolysis capacity initially announced, eventually only 0.62 GW was realized on time (Fig. 1a ). Similarly, in 2023, of the 7.1 GW initially announced, only an estimated 0.92 GW was realized and operational. In stark contrast to these recent setbacks, announced future growth rates of green hydrogen have increased substantially over the past 3 years, indicating a backlog of projects as well as further increasing ambition (Fig. 1b ). This raises questions such as whether recent failure rates and the looming ‘valley of death’ 20 can be overcome to meet updated project announcements, whether the expected role of hydrogen in ambitious climate change mitigation scenarios has changed and what plausible implementation pathways exist given currently announced hydrogen support policies. Fig. 1: The green hydrogen ambition and implementation gaps in the past and the future. The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. Full size image a , Past green hydrogen implementation gaps in 2022 and 2023, defined as the difference between project announcements and realized projects (denoted as (1), also see Fig. 3 ). Realized projects in 2023 show the outcome of project announcements by 2023, based on our own research ( Methods ). b , Green hydrogen ambition and implementation gaps in 2030. We define the 2030 ambition gap as the difference between 1.5 °C scenarios and project announcements (denoted as (2), also see Fig. 4 ). The depicted data range shows the IEA Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenarios, while the full analysis includes further scenarios (Fig. 4a , Extended Data Fig. 1 and Methods ). We define the 2030 green hydrogen implementation gap as the difference between project announcements and our estimate of projects that are either supported by implemented demand-side policies or by currently announced subsidies (denoted as (3), see Fig. 5 and Supplementary Fig. 17 ). Th