Clean hydrogen is not likely to become easier to finance through long-term offtake agreements being made, so another approach is needed. In Europe, this could include an institution being created to buy up any surplus hydrogen that’s being produced with some kind of transparent pricing attached.
The idea was floated by Christian Stuckmann, Vice-President of Hydrogen for the state-owned German energy company Uniper, speaking as part of a panel debate on the bankability of clean hydrogen projects at the FT Hydrogen Summit 2025 in London.
“Europe needs to buy the hydrogen,” said Stuckmann. “There are mechanisms out there that it could adopt, such as the H2Global model. It is [an intervention] that is needed because long-term offtake agreements are not going to be signed. It is too complex a space for those commitments to be made.”
Stuckmann was speaking as part of a five-person panel, with moderation by Camilla Palladino of the Financial Times. Also on the panel were Sundus Cordelia Ramli, CCO of Power-to-X for Topsoe, Werner Lieberherr, CEO of Switzerland’s MorGen Energy, Patrick Gjelstrup Rosenquist, Head of New Energy for the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, and Leslie Labruto of US non-profit the Environmental Defense Fund.
“The main challenge [to bankability] is the offtake,” agreed Cordelia Ramli. “Raising debt finance normally requires that, but we are talking here about first-time plants. There isn’t the track record that financiers like to see.”
Lieberherr of the Swiss green energy supplier MorGen said that other forms of government support could also make a difference. He singled out the UK’s approach to hydrogen as a good approach that others could learn from or partially adopt.
Denmark’s Gjelstrup Rosenquist said that a long-term commitment to hydrogen remained key. He said that once there was 100GW of installed green hydrogen electrolyser capacity in Europe, which might take another ten years, that would really start to impact on the cost per kilogram.
“It is a future goal, of course. We need to stay committed,” he said.
“We need to think long term in Europe,” said Lieberherr. “China thinks in centuries, Europe [only in decades], and the US in quarters. That is why China has pulled ahead.”
The European Commission has selected 15 green hydrogen projects for nearly €1bn public funding following the second European Hydrogen Bank auction in May.
Eight of the projects are in Spain, three in Norway, and two in Germany, with one apiece in Finland and the Netherlands.
The projects – funded by the Innovation Fund, sourced from the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) – are expected to produce nearly 2.2 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen over 10 years.
In April, the UK government shortlisted 27 low-carbon hydrogen projects under the Second Hydrogen Allocation Round (HAR2).
