Hydrogen: the honest version

Hydrogen is discussed as a future Ukrainian export, and there is a real case underneath the enthusiasm. It is worth stating the case and its conditions separately from the announcements.

What is genuinely plausible

Ukraine has excellent wind and solar resource, a large existing gas pipeline network running westward, and industries — steel, fertiliser, refining — that already use hydrogen made from gas and could use hydrogen made from electricity instead.

That last point is the strongest part of the case. Replacing existing hydrogen consumption with cleanly produced hydrogen requires no new market and no new transport; the customer is already on site.

What is harder than it sounds

Transport. Hydrogen has low energy density by volume, embrittles some steels and leaks through fittings that hold methane. Sending it long distances through repurposed pipelines is technically possible and is not a simple conversion.

Electricity supply. Electrolysis consumes a great deal of power, and every megawatt-hour used to make hydrogen is one not sold into the grid. The economics only work with genuinely surplus renewable output.

And cost, which currently favours making hydrogen from gas nearly everywhere.

How to read announcements

A memorandum is not a project. The questions to ask are: is the electricity contracted, is the offtake contracted, and is the transport solved. A proposal missing any of the three is a statement of intent.

The reasonable position

Build for domestic industrial use first, where the customer exists and the transport problem does not. Export later, if the cost curve allows it.

Twenty years have taught me the difference between a memorandum and an order: the first is signed for the photograph, the second to open a letter of credit. Almost every hydrogen document I have seen is still of the first kind. Separating what is technically plausible from what has been announced is the most useful skill you can bring to this subject.