EU green hydrogen targets for 2030 'unrealistic', says EU Court of Auditors

The European Union is not able to achieve its objectives in terms of production and import of hydrogen in 2030, estimated Wednesday July 17 the European Court of Auditors, which draws up a critical assessment of the deployment of this strategy presented as a major lever for industrial decarbonization.

“The Commission has set unrealistic targets for hydrogen production and imports, and the EU is not on track to meet them,” concludes its report, which recommends that the European Commission “update its hydrogen strategy based on a careful assessment".

Brussels published its hydrogen strategy in mid-2020, then supplemented it in 2022 with even more ambition via the REPowerEU plan, a roadmap aimed at ending the continent's dependence on Russian fossil fuels by 2030.

Hydrogen can be produced either from gas (by reforming) or from water with the addition of electricity (by electrolysis). The Commission has made the deployment of hydrogen produced from renewable electricity a crucial lever for greening the heavy industries that are most difficult to decarbonize (fertilizers, petrochemicals, steel, cement).

But, for the control body based in Luxembourg, “the Commission has set too ambitious objectives concerning the production and import of renewable hydrogen, each supposed to reach 10 million tonnes by 2030”.

“These objectives were dictated by political will, without being based on rigorous analysis,” believe the authors of the report.

“The EU's industrial policy on renewable hydrogen must be subject to a reality check,” according to Stef Blok, member of the Court and head of the audit, quoted in the communicated.

The report notably underlined that "the divergent ambitions of Member States were not always aligned with the objectives" and that EU funding (18,8 billion euros for the period 2021-2027) was scattered over several programs, complicating the choice for companies.

While he recognizes the regulatory work carried out by the Commission, which proposed "most of the legal acts in a short time", he judges that "delays in the adoption of the rules relating to renewable hydrogen have slowed down the development of walk".

“Our work is far from finished,” responded the spokesperson for the European Commission. “We now need to accelerate the deployment and adoption of renewable and low-carbon hydrogen in Europe, and further develop this emerging market.”

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.