A Critical Assessment of National Hydrogen Strategies

The scope of this study is to provide a qualitative, high-level overview of the hydrogen strategies currently being pursued worldwide. Hydrogen is a “hot topic” in the envisaged energy transition, and, consequently, a significant amount of material is currently being published. The definition of strategy is not straightforward, as each country adopts specific criteria to set the pace for the deployment of hydrogen. In our review, we selected only official and government-issued documents, for the sake of completeness we include finalized documents and draft versions alike. Specific attention is paid to the socalled “green strategies”, specifically targeting the roll-out of green hydrogen. We assess the documents across a set of qualitative indicators, based on geography, sectorial differentiation, quantitative target sets, information content and word search. The data is not homogeneous and, where possible, we rely on clustering to infer industry trends and patterns and draw conclusions. We also derive a series of counterfactual considerations from these strategies, in terms of i) objectives pursued, ii) sectorial coverage and iii) internal consistency