The Daily View: Reality check

THE one-year, possibly fatal coma into which the International Maritime Organization’s carbon tax plan was unceremoniously chucked last month could not have come at a worse time for the embryonic green hydrogen industry.

The past four years saw a host of start-ups, a legion of tyre-kickers and a small handful of serious energy majors pile into the technology, seen as the holy grail for decarbonising hard-to-abate industries such as shipping and aviation.

They have since run into a brutal and continuing reality check about what is possible, with project cancellations now so frequent they’re barely newsworthy.

It’s unclear if the Net-Zero Framework would have lifted e-fuels for shipping off the ground. But the IMO result means there won’t be any hydrogen for shipping, at least while Trump and his ilk still run America and cower the rest of the world with tariff threats.

But what about the bigger picture?

Attendees at Wood Mackenzie’s 2025 Hydrogen Conference will have been hoping for a convincing riposte to the arguments of BloombergNEF founder Michael Liebreich, hydrogen’s most prominent sceptic.

But if anything, Liebreich’s main thesis — that green hydrogen’s fundamental cost problem means it will never happen — was bolstered by hydrogen bosses at the London event.

In short, there’s no market today, and there won’t be one in future barring a huge increase in political support for paying higher energy costs in the name of fighting climate change.

Making green hydrogen in Europe will be too expensive to work. In China it will be cheaper, but heavy use of subsidies makes the business case opaque.

Producers are scouring the globe for helpful regulations, but there’s little chance of those regulations lasting long enough to give buyers, sellers and financiers the certainty they need.

Chevron’s head of hydrogen sales said his two-year search for policy support felt like “constantly running into a brick wall”.

I’ve argued that the IMO’s unique power to bind the global industry could make it an exception to the grim prognosis for clean hydrogen overall. That shipping could provide enough demand on its own to get supply chains built. Now, sadly, it looks like I was wrong. Was I?

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Declan Bush
Senior reporter, Lloyd’s List

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