Germany’s hydrogen core network is designed to carry around 280 terawatt-hours annually by 2032. The government’s own National Hydrogen Strategy puts actual expected need at 95 to 130 terawatt-hours by 2030. The 17 kilometre pipeline section Creos Deutschland just broke ground on in Saarland is a small, specific illustration of that same gap between built capacity and confirmed demand.
Creos Deutschland has started construction on its 17 kilometre share of the mosaHYc cross-border hydrogen pipeline, connecting the French border near Leidingen to Dillingen in Saarland. The wider project, developed jointly with Engie subsidiary NaTran, is intended to link hydrogen producers in eastern France’s Moselle region with German industrial offtakers, and it is designated both an EU Project of Common Interest and part of the Hy2Infra Important Project of Common European Interest scheme. That designation mattered directly to financing: NaTran took final investment decision on its French section in April 2024 despite Creos’s German portion remaining contingent on IPCEI state aid approval, funding that arrived three months later when Germany awarded €44 million toward Creos’s share of the roughly €110 million total project cost.
The section now under construction is narrower than what was originally described at that 2024 investment decision. Coverage of the April 2024 FID described a roughly 90 kilometre cross-border project with GRTgaz, NaTran’s French pipeline subsidiary, managing 50 kilometres and Creos responsible for 40 kilometres in Germany. The groundbreaking now underway covers 17 kilometres of Creos’s network, within a total project figure now described as 95 kilometres, a discrepancy against the originally reported 40 kilometre German commitment that the current announcement does not explain, whether through phased construction, a revised route, or a genuine reduction in scope. The project’s commissioning date has also moved since the original decision. Engie’s 2024 statements on the FID described commissioning as scheduled for 2027. By October 2025, before visible construction had begun on the German side, project materials from the Grande Région Hydrogen initiative were already describing a revised 2028 commissioning date, a slippage of a full year that occurred before ground was even broken.
The demand actually attached to this specific pipeline remains limited relative to the infrastructure being built to carry it. The first and, so far, only confirmed supply agreement tied to mosaHYc, announced in September 2025 between French producer Verso Energy and German steel group Stahl-Holding-Saar, commits to at least 6,000 tonnes of renewable hydrogen annually for ten years, and that supply does not begin until 2029, two years after the pipeline’s original commissioning target and a year after its already-revised one. Verso Energy’s supporting production plant in Carling, France, is planned to start at 70 megawatts with potential expansion toward 300 megawatts, equivalent to roughly 50,000 tonnes of hydrogen, a capacity that exists on paper well ahead of the volume actually under contract. Grande Région Hydrogen’s own network materials project the wider mosaHYc system carrying around 60,000 tonnes of hydrogen annually by 2030, a modest total against the pipeline’s engineered capacity of up to 120,000 cubic meters per hour once fully converted and connected.
The single confirmed contract underpinning this pipeline also depends on a subsidy commitment an order of magnitude larger than the pipeline itself. Stahl-Holding-Saar’s decarbonization plan, replacing blast furnaces with electric arc furnaces and a hydrogen-based direct reduction plant at its Dillingen and Völklingen sites, carries a separate €2.6 billion grant from the German government, approved under European Commission state aid rules, on top of the €44 million Creos received for its pipeline section and the roughly €110 million total original construction budget for the full cross-border network. The pipeline cannot generate a commercial case on its own without that much larger, separately negotiated subsidy flowing to the one industrial customer whose demand currently justifies connecting to it.
Germany’s national hydrogen infrastructure numbers tell a similar story at larger scale. The country’s planned 9,040 kilometre core hydrogen network, backed by roughly €18.9 billion in largely private financing supported by €3 billion in federal guarantees, is designed for 101 gigawatts of feed-in capacity and 87 gigawatts of offtake capacity by 2032, a network the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate itself says will be positioned for a take-off capacity of around 280 terawatt-hours that year. Germany’s own National Hydrogen Strategy, by contrast, estimates the country will need only 95 to 130 terawatt-hours of hydrogen by 2030, meaning the network’s designed capacity runs to roughly double or, against the low end of that range, close to triple the government’s own current demand projection. Transmission operators reported in August that almost 6 gigawatts of capacity across the network had been reserved on a paid basis, nearly double the figure reported three months earlier and concentrated heavily in Germany’s industrial northwest, where several zones are already oversubscribed. That growth is genuine and is plausibly being accelerated by the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive III, which requires renewable hydrogen to make up at least 42% of industrial hydrogen use by 2030, rising to 60% by 2035, giving industrial users a regulatory reason to reserve capacity ahead of physical supply. Even at that accelerated pace, 6 gigawatts remains under 6% of the network’s eventual 101 gigawatt design capacity, a ratio broadly consistent with what mosaHYc itself shows at a smaller scale: a hydrogen transport network being constructed, funded and in some cases already scoped down from its original plans, well ahead of the confirmed contracts that would justify building it to its full designed capacity.
