How to secure green hydrogen for all

White Paper: Rules for an Energy-Secure Green Hydrogen Economy

Hydrogen is not just another fuel. Hydrogen is expected to serve as a primary industrial fuel in the 21st century, just as coal drove the 19th century and oil drove the 20th century. Decarbonised hydrogen – produced by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable electricity (‘green’ hydrogen) or other low-carbon variants that sequester carbon emissions – could be a game-changer in strengthening energy security and powering the energy transition.

However, there is no energy security architecture to protect the countries that will drive future energy demand or secure the necessary fuels. Countries are thus trying to unilaterally secure access to hydrogen value chains using their own energy security strategies.

This race to secure hydrogen could intensify resource conflicts, exacerbate the already-intense global energy insecurity, and obstruct decarbonisation by restricting the access of most economies, especially the developing and Least Developed Countries (LDCs), to this crucial clean energy source.

A robust rules-based architecture is needed to secure the supply and demand of this critical fuel by governing technology development, production, trade and transport, storage, and use.

This White paper proposes eight principles of a rules-based architecture for decarbonised hydrogen and the paper is split into three sections:

• the first maps the existing global governance landscape for decarbonised hydrogen including existing networks and alliances;
• the second explains the eight principles;
• the final section examines the potential design of such a cooperative framework and suggests their adoption by the G20.

Authors

Arunabha Ghosh, Tulika Gupta, Shuva Raha, Hemant Mallya, Deepak Yadav, and Nandini Harihar.

About CEEW

The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) is one of Asia’s leading not-for-profit policy research institutions. The Council is also consistently ranked among the world’s top climate change think tanks.