Setting a target per-kilo price for producing hydrogen is not that useful, since every hydrogen project has its own dynamics and attached economics.
The price question was posed and tackled in a panel session on hydrogen project risks at analyst group Wood Mackenzie’s Hydrogen Conference 2025, taking place this week in London.
Christian Stuckmann, Vice-President of Business Development in Hydrogen for the energy company Uniper, said the company’s projects in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands had no top-level target price attached for good reasons.
“Every business case [in every market] is bespoke,” he said. In the Netherlands, for example, Stuckman noted that energy grid fees apply, which pushes up the cost.
“It is a cost you are unable to hedge because those costs are socialised.”
He added that the UK and Germany have different cost structures and regulatory dynamics – all of which influence cost. Uniper had been “doing great in proving how to reduce costs”, he said, but there is no one-size-fits-all price. Instead, progress comes from incremental improvements on each project.
John Gunn, Global Manager of Operations for the Energy Transition at the global EPC Bechtel, said the question about costs and targets always came back to specific projects and how they stack up, whether a green or blue hydrogen opportunity.
“If you look at the [US] Gulf Coast, there is a grey ammonia project being retrofitted with carbon capture because of … access to [the right] infrastructure and investors and customers. That makes it work. ”
Gunn noted that the competitiveness of blue or green hydrogen projects depends on scale, location, and other local factors.
On lowering green hydrogen costs, he suggested that OEMs were making progress with electrolysers and with standardised engineering, but the pricing question never really returns to hitting a target price per kilo as a general standard.
Besides, electrolyser capital costs make up just one part of the levelised cost of hydrogen, with renewable power pricing holding the biggest sway.
“Typically [hydrogen] projects don’t get cheaper with time,” Gunn added.
It was not like in the solar energy space, where prices have fallen dramatically, he added. Gunn said that no equivalent fall should be expected in hydrogen, given all the cost variables that attach to projects. He also noted how the uncertain scheduling that attaches to many hydrogen projects, due to policy and market uncertainty, also pushes up costs or keeps them high.
