A crucial component of China’s energy transition for reaching carbon neutrality and creating a more sustainable economy will be hydrogen, especially green hydrogen.
In China’s most recent “Hydrogen Industry Medium- and Long-Term Development Plan (2021-2035)” as a long-term development direction, the strategic importance of green hydrogen has been stressed.
With a need of more than 33 million tons per year, China has emerged as both the world’s greatest producer and consumer of hydrogen. The chemical, steel, and heavy transportation industries will need a lot of green hydrogen to complete the zero-carbon transition as a result of China’s ambition to become carbon-neutral. The yearly need for hydrogen could rise to 100–130 million tons by 2060, including 80–100 million tons of green hydrogen.
In-depth information on China’s plan to create 100 GW of green hydrogen by 2030 is provided in the paper titled Opening China’s Green Hydrogen New Era, with a focus on its application in the chemical, steel, and heavy-duty transportation industries. Additionally, it takes sectoral demand, available resources, and prospective upgrades to industrial capacity into account when calculating the renewable hydrogen capacity in seven areas by 2030. The analysis predicts that the Northwest China region would create the greenest hydrogen (24 GW), thanks to its high supply of renewable energy sources and the need to decarbonize its historically coal-based industries.
The paper also makes a number of practical proposals from both the governmental and market perspectives that might hasten the adoption of green hydrogen and its long-term application across sectors in order to support the 100 GW by 2030 target.
