Stahl-Holding-Saar tendered in March 2024 for up to 50,000 tonnes a year of hydrogen produced locally in Saarland to supply its Dillingen and Saarstahl plants. No electrolyzer of that scale has been built in the region, and the large-scale projects once expected to supply it have been abandoned. The 17-kilometre pipeline section that broke ground in Wallerfangen on August 28 assumes a hydrogen source, whether domestic or imported, that remains substantially unresolved on both ends of the border it crosses.
Creos Deutschland’s groundbreaking ceremony for its section of the Franco-German mosaHYc pipeline drew Saarland’s Minister-President, a federal state secretary, Luxembourg’s economy minister and the CEO of Creos parent Encevo, marking construction start on a pipeline whose completion timeline has already slipped once, from an originally stated 2027 commissioning to 2028, before this ceremony took place. What the speeches did not directly address is where the hydrogen intended to fill that pipeline will come from. Stahl-Holding-Saar’s own March 2024 tender sought up to 50,000 tonnes annually of renewable hydrogen produced locally to decarbonize its Dillinger and Saarstahl operations, an ambition that assumed Saarland-based electrolyzer capacity at meaningful scale. That capacity was never built. The large-scale electrolyzer projects proposed for the region were dropped, following a pattern that has played out across German heavy industry over the past two years rather than as an isolated local setback.
That pattern is well documented elsewhere in the country’s steel sector. ThyssenKrupp indefinitely postponed its tender for green hydrogen to supply a planned 2.5 million tonne per year direct reduction plant in Duisburg in March 2025, citing bids that came in far above expectations and a hydrogen market developing more slowly than anticipated. Salzgitter announced in September 2025 that it would delay the next phase of its Salcos low-carbon steel project by three years, pushing a final investment decision from 2026 to 2028 or 2029, citing the same slower-than-expected hydrogen market development alongside regulatory delays. ArcelorMittal cancelled a 1.3 billion euro German hydrogen steel project outright. Each of these decisions rests on the same underlying constraint: converting blast furnace steelmaking to hydrogen-based direct reduction only makes financial sense if renewable hydrogen becomes available in industrial quantities at a price competitive with the natural gas-based hydrogen currently used, and across Germany’s largest steel producers, that price and volume combination has not materialized on the timeline the projects were designed around. Notably, ThyssenKrupp’s position has not been static in one direction: in June 2026 the company halted a planned sale of its steel division to Jindal and said it would instead press ahead with its own hydrogen-based steel production plans, a reminder that the sector’s retreat has not been uniform even as individual project cancellations accumulate.
The financing gap behind these cancellations extends well beyond Germany. In August 2026, the US Department of Energy withdrew a 1.66 billion-dollar loan guarantee previously extended to Plug Power after the company failed to meet its first drawdown deadline, a decision that affected the company’s planned Antwerp facility, a 100-megawatt electrolyzer designed to produce roughly 35 tonnes of liquid and gaseous green hydrogen daily using wind and solar power. Plug Power had already reported a 2.1 billion loss for 2024 before that withdrawal. The pattern of large green hydrogen projects losing their financing after initial announcement, rather than being built out as originally scaled, is now visible across multiple continents and funding structures, from US federal loan guarantees to European industrial tenders to the broader ambitions once attached to large-scale hydrogen export from regions with strong solar and wind resources, few of which have attracted the capital commitments needed to reach construction.
The technical challenge of moving hydrogen through steel pipelines, separate from the question of where the gas itself will come from, is a genuine and extensively studied engineering problem rather than an incidental detail. Hydrogen embrittlement occurs when atomic hydrogen, formed as molecular H2 dissociates at the steel surface, diffuses into the metal’s crystal lattice and concentrates at microstructural defects and areas of high stress, reducing fracture toughness and accelerating fatigue crack growth over the pipeline’s operating life. The effect is more pronounced in higher-strength steels and at higher operating pressures, which describes most long-distance transmission pipelines built for natural gas rather than hydrogen service. Engineering responses to the problem are established but require specific design choices: selecting steel grades and welding procedures rated for hydrogen service under codes such as ASME B31.12, inserting a hydrogen-resistant inner liner within an existing steel pipe in a pipe-in-pipe configuration, or blending in small concentrations of gases such as oxygen that inhibit embrittlement at the steel surface. Mosahyc’s French section involves converting roughly 20 kilometers of existing pipeline alongside 5 kilometers of new construction to Bouzonville, while the German section Creos is building is entirely new pipe, and public project materials reviewed for this piece do not specify which embrittlement mitigation approach, if any beyond standard hydrogen-service steel specification, has been adopted for either segment, an omission worth noting given how central this design choice is to a hydrogen transmission pipeline’s long-term integrity.
The one confirmed commercial relationship attached to mosaHYc illustrates how far the project’s actual supply chain has already shifted from Saarland’s original ambition. Stahl-Holding-Saar’s supply agreement, announced in September 2025, is with French producer Verso Energy rather than any Saarland-based electrolyzer operator, commits to at least 6,000 tonnes of hydrogen annually beginning in 2029, and depends on production capacity in Carling, France, not the local Saarland generation the March 2024 tender had originally sought. That substitution, importing hydrogen through the pipeline from a French producer rather than generating it domestically as originally planned, is the practical resolution to the local electrolyzer cancellations the region has already made, even though it was not the specific outcome addressed in the speeches marking construction’s start.
