Why Industry Leaders Are Telling Governments to Stop Debating Hydrogen and Start Building It

At this year’s World Hydrogen Summit, the Hydrogen Council opened proceedings with a CEO-led declaration titled “Hydrogen for a Resilient World.” The underlying argument was blunt: the years-long argument over green versus blue hydrogen has become a distraction. What matters now is whether governments treat hydrogen as a serious pillar of energy resilience—creating demand, funding the gap between cost and market price, and putting the physical infrastructure in place to move and store it at scale.

It’s a message aimed squarely at policymakers who are stretched thin by competing short-term pressures. And it carries weight precisely because it comes from the companies that would have to deliver.

Three Things the Coalition Wants

During a roundtable with ministers and executives, the group set out a clear agenda built around three priorities.

The first is to write clean hydrogen into national emergency and resilience planning—using fuel cells and ammonia as backup power when grids fail rather than treating hydrogen purely as a future decarbonisation tool.

The second is demand creation. Without buyers, projects don’t get financed. The coalition is pushing for mechanisms such as contracts for difference, long-term offtake guarantees, and public procurement commitments that give investors something concrete to underwrite.

The third is deployment of the hardware itself: electrolysers, high-pressure storage, repurposed pipelines, and the import-export terminals at major ports. Suppliers including catalyst maker Johnson Matthey and storage specialist Hexagon Purus lent their names to the call, which tells you how much of the supply chain sees policy hesitation—not technology—as the real bottleneck.

What “Infrastructure” Actually Means Here

A working hydrogen economy is unglamorous and physical. It starts with electrolyser plants drawing on wind or solar power to split water into hydrogen, typically through PEM or alkaline processes. Those facilities don’t exist in isolation—they need grid reinforcement, water treatment, and compression equipment before the hydrogen can go anywhere.

Storage splits into two broad jobs. High-pressure composite cylinders handle mobility and short-range needs, while underground salt caverns are far better suited to seasonal, large-volume storage. There’s also the option of converting existing natural gas pipelines, though operators have to manage genuine engineering risks around embrittlement and leakage before that becomes routine.

At the coastline, ports such as Rotterdam are building liquefaction and ammonia-cracking terminals—the connective tissue between regions that can produce hydrogen cheaply and the industrial users who need it. Without that link, low-cost production risks being stranded in remote renewable-rich locations with no economic way to reach demand.

The Real Sticking Point Is Demand, Not Engineering

Announcements don’t finance plants. Developers need predictable revenue, and clean hydrogen still costs more to produce than the fossil-based alternatives it’s meant to displace. Closing that gap is where policy tools earn their place.

A contract for difference works by fixing a guaranteed price, absorbing the difference between what the market pays and what clean hydrogen actually costs to make. Offtake guarantees and lead-market schemes do something similar from the buyer’s side, committing government or corporate purchasers to agreed volumes over a defined term and stripping out much of the demand uncertainty. Layer in procurement quotas for products like green steel or low-carbon ammonia, and you start to manufacture structural, durable demand.

Strip these mechanisms away and the long list of announced projects tends to stall—which is exactly the outcome the coalition is trying to head off. Their point is straightforward: binding offtake deals are usually the thing that unlocks private capital for electrolysis and storage, and those deals rarely close without policy underpinning them.

Hydrogen vs Batteries: A Coexistence Problem

It would be a mistake to assume hydrogen has this space to itself. Battery storage is advancing quickly, it’s cheaper per kilowatt-hour, and smarter grids are getting better at shifting demand around. Where batteries struggle is long-duration storage and the heavier end of industrial energy use.

Hydrogen’s genuine edge sits in the applications that are hard to electrify directly—long-haul shipping, high-temperature industrial heat, and synthetic fuel production. But that advantage only materialises at scale. If governments default to batteries for grid balancing and let hydrogen drift, the likely result is a fragmented market that under-serves the sectors hydrogen is uniquely placed to decarbonise. Utilities are watching both options closely, aware that whoever shapes the policy framework effectively sets the direction for the next decade of clean energy.

Suppliers Are Already Making Their Case

Two coalition members moved early to reinforce the message. Johnson Matthey, the UK catalyst specialist, is positioning its support strategically—promoting its low-emission electrolyser catalysts and fuel cell components while pressing governments to align policy with manufacturing reality. Hexagon Purus of Norway took a similar line on storage, cautioning that refuelling and compression infrastructure simply won’t multiply without clear, stable demand signals.

The coordinated messaging makes the subtext obvious: equipment makers won’t commit to multi-million-pound investment programmes on the strength of ambition alone. They want binding agreements first.

Rotterdam as the Test Case

Hosting the summit at Rotterdam Ahoy was no accident. The city is openly positioning itself as Europe’s hydrogen gateway, and its terminal capacity and planned salt cavern projects map neatly onto the infrastructure the declaration is calling for. Anchoring the initiative there reinforces the central theme—that liquefaction docks, ammonia terminals, and pipeline links into the Rhine basin have to follow the policy talk, not replace it.

If Rotterdam delivers, it sets a template other ports can copy. If it doesn’t, cross-border hydrogen networks stay largely theoretical. Local authorities are offering subsidies and faster permitting to attract the necessary capital, but the same conditions keep surfacing: investors want binding offtake and internationally recognised certification before they move.

The Bottom Line

For all the strategy and infrastructure detail, “Hydrogen for a Resilient World” ultimately rests on political will—historically the scarcest resource of the lot. The coalition’s demands aren’t new; integrating hydrogen into crisis response, covering the cost gap, and building physical capacity have been on the agenda for years. What slows them down is familiar too: budget pressure stalls long-term price guarantees, and cross-border pipeline negotiations can drag on indefinitely.

Meanwhile the wider energy transition keeps moving. Direct electrification, battery storage, and efficiency measures are all competing for the same finite pool of investment. The task facing hydrogen’s advocates is to prove their projects can deliver real-world resilience on a credible timeline—not just produce another round of plans. That case gets harder, not easier, once finance ministries start weighing it against fiscal limits and the practical headaches of water supply, land rights, and permitting that no roadmap resolves on its own.

Image credit: World Hydrogen Summit