Hydrogen Europe has prepared a position paper titled “Delivering REPowerEU through a robust European hydrogen industry” in response to the European Commission’s Fit for 55 policies and targets and the newly reaffirmed ambitions of the REPowerEU communication (click here to read it).
One of the primary foundations of REPowerEU is the Hydrogen Accelerator, which outlines a strategy to double the previous EU renewable hydrogen target to 20 million tons of annual domestic production and 20 million tons of annual imports.
To achieve these objectives, the EU must greatly expand its production capacity for novel equipment such as electrolyzers. Infrastructure must also be rapidly created and modified to enable the transportation, distribution, and storage of hydrogen, both produced domestically and imported from nations with abundant renewable energy resources. New investments in gas import terminals and pipelines should be hydrogen-ready and future-proof.
A summary of our key recommendations:
- Increase the renewable energy target to at least 45% by 2030.
- Keep the ambition of the 50% RFNBOs binding target in industry by 2030.
- Ensure the 2.6% RFNBOs target in the transport sector is maintained and consider an increase of up to 5%.
- Introduce intermediary targets in 2027 for both targets in industry and transport and corrective measures should the target not be on truck.
- Maintain the current ambition of the AFIR – Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation proposal in Member States.
- Increase the 2030 sub-target for synthetic aviation fuel (e.g., e-kerosene) from the currently proposed 0.7%, in line with a 5% target before 2035.
- Keep temporal correlation to a monthly resolution in the Delegated Act on RFNBOs.
- Ensure a grandfathering clause on additionality for hydrogen projects commissioned before 2027 in the Delegated Act on RFNBOs.
- Consider as additional those existing renewable energy power plants that are already out of support scheme and are approaching a decommissioning decision.
- Define low carbon hydrogen by 2023, with high-level principles already agreed in the Hydrogen and decarbonised gas package.
- Consider introducing thresholds in the Industrial Emissions Directive to treat the various hydrogen production sites different depending on their sizes.
