UNIDO International Conference on Hydrogen in Industry

Please kindly take a seat. We are starting.

Hello everyone.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this very first conference on hydrogen and industry here in Vienna. I'd also like to welcome the people who are joining us online right now from all over the world. And just to make sure you don't miss anything, there is translation throughout the whole day in different languages. So make sure you check the right channel and you get your language and understand everything and can follow the program, which is also true for you sitting here. If you don't speak English, then please use the translations. My name is Marie Lang. I'm a journalist, podcaster, and moderator at the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, and it's a real pleasure for me to be hosting this event for you and to join you throughout the whole day. This is a very big international conference with representatives from more than 70 countries who will discuss today the role of hydrogen that it can play in the future of sustainable industry. This conference is hosted by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, seated here in Vienna, and supported by the Global Environment Facility. So what can we expect from this program today? In panel discussions and fireside chats, we will explore opportunities hydrogen offers for industry, for economies, and for people, and also how we move forwards in a time that feels Well, everything but straightforward, I would say, because the reality is the headwinds are pretty strong, but they're also pushing us to act faster. And that's really important. And that's why we've come together today. Energy security, food security, sustainable industrial development. These are no longer abstract goals. They've become immediate priorities. So throughout the day, we will focus on solutions. We will focus on how to scale clean hydrogen technologies and how to unlock finance. That's one thing we're going to start today. Also, we'll focus on how to build markets for green industrial products and how to strengthen technical readiness across sectors and across regions. And just as important as everything that I've mentioned right now is that we want to make space for real conversations today. Open, honest, and of course inclusive. We have voices here from emerging, from developing, and industrialized economies, and I want to highlight in particular the perspectives from the Global South partners who will share their concrete experiences, priorities, and visions for a global hydrogen economy and industry. Well, I wish us all a very inspiring and also productive day, and I'm really looking forward to all the conversations that are going to take place today, and of course, all the partnerships that are going to be built today here. This event, and I just said partnerships, we need each other, we need partners, strong partners to get this thing forward. And also, we had very strong partners to make this event possible. Without the support, support of them, and I think we're going to see all the partners right now, this event would not have been possible. So thank you very much for your contribution and also your collaboration in making this conference happen. Now we want to start with some opening words, and they will come from Austria's Minister of Economy, Energy, and Tourism, Wolfgang Hartmannstorfer. He will join us a little bit later live here at the conference, and in the beginning, he sent us a video.

Excellencies, distinguished guests, first of all, it's a great honor and pleasure to welcome you in Vienna, and it's also a pleasure to address the UNIDO International Conference for Hydrogen in Industry. Hydrogen is a key element in the decarbonization of our industry. For Austria, maintaining industrial competitiveness while decarbonizing requires access to stable and affordable renewable energy, of course including hydrogen. We are therefore advancing the development of a comprehensive policy and regulatory framework to enable a hydrogen economy. We expect that the significant share of Austria's future hydrogen demand around 2/3, will need to be covered through imports complementing domestic production. Our objective is to establish strategic partnerships with producer countries, develop reliable import routes, and reduce risks for key infrastructure investments. A key transnational project in this context is of course the Southern Hydrogen Corridor. This corridor will connect North Africa via Italy to Austria and Germany, linking renewable hydrogen production regions with industrial demand centers in Europe. At the same time, the development of major hydrogen import corridors requires also stronger coordination at the European level, particularly with regard to cross-border infrastructure and the mobilisation of financing and de-risking instruments. To conclude, Austria is committed, strongly committed, to contributing to this development by creating the necessary framework conditions, by supporting infrastructure and partnerships, and by working closely with European and international partners. So finally, all our topics are always a question of cooperating and a question of friendship. Only if we act together, only if we share the same vision and the same goals, we will be successful. And I think that's our goal, to be successful together. So once again, Thank you so much for coming to Vienna. Thank you so much for participating in this conference, and I'm looking forward to see you in person.

And we will now continue with some opening words, and I'd like to invite 3 distinguished speakers to the stage, bringing perspectives from governments and multilateral landscapes, all actively shaping the future of hydrogen. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Yuko Yasunaga, Deputy Director-General of UNIDO, Ambassador Wael Aboul-Makt, Assistant Foreign Minister for Climate, Environment, and Sustainable Development of Egypt. Hello, welcome, welcome. And last but not least, Jean-François Gagné, Head of the Clean Energy Ministerial Secretariat. Thank you for coming here and joining me on stage, and I'd like to invite Mr. Dr. Yasunaga, for his speech. The floor is yours.

Thank you very much. Good morning, His Excellency Ambassador Wael Ahmed Abdel-Majid, Assistant Foreign Minister for Climate, Environment, and Sustainable Development of Egypt, and Mr. Jean-François Garnier, the head of the Clean Energy Ministerial Secretariat. Thank you. Distinguished participants, esteemed partners, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to Vienna and to UNITIL's first International Conference on Clean Hydrogen: Shaping Sustainable Industries' Future. This title reflects the ambition that brings us together today to identify practical ways forward. For this study, we need to look beyond the headlines and exchange honestly about opportunities, constraints, challenges, and possible solutions. I would like to thank all of you present here today— partner countries, international organizations, financial institutions, and industrial industry leaders. Your presence demonstrates that there's an appetite for such dialogue, and it demonstrates that something else is that despite apparent setbacks, the clean energy, clean hydrogen remains part of the solution for sustainable industry. Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a decisive decade. Industry accounts for nearly one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Steel, fertilizers, chemicals, cement, and papers— these sectors, sectors that provide the basic materials that underpin modern economies, but they are also among the hardest to decarbonize. If we are serious about climate action, we must be serious about transforming industry, and clean hydrogen can play an important role in this transformation. But let's be clear, hydrogen is not a silver bullet. It is not a magic solution, not a magic wand. It is a strategic tool, and like any tool, it must be applied wisely, realistically, and responsibly. In recent years, expectations around hydrogen have grown rapidly in a wide range of industrial sectors. There are ambitious targets, bold announcements. Some projects are moving forward, the others are facing delays or reassessment. Demand remains uncertain, Costs remain high, and infrastructure gaps persist. But this is not a failure. It is the reality of structural transformation we inevitably shall overcome. And that is precisely why we are here today. Taking this opportunity, I want to emphasize the importance of 3 critical challenges for us to develop hydrogen economy. First, as I briefly mentioned, we need to create solid demand for hydrogen. Everyone knows that hydrogen will play a key role to decarbonize many industrial sectors. However, investors have become hesitant in making huge investments into hydrogen production and use under the unclear market situation. It is a matter of industry policy. At turning points of industrial development, we still remember that we have experiences to overcome those challenges. Please remember the cases of market penetration of solar power, wind power, promotion of circular economy, and many others. Where there is a challenge, governments, private sectors, financial sectors, and academia collaboratively develop coordinated measures to stimulate markets for creating demand. It is a kind of a typical chicken and egg issue. However, we have wisdom to overcome. Second, we need to lower the cost of producing, transporting, storing, and using hydrogen. This is also a field of collaboration among a wide range of stakeholders. Water can be separated to oxygen and hydrogen. This is the starting point, or the basic knowledge, where even elementary school students know. However, we also know that the technical efficiency of the current electrolyzer is not 100%, of course. Next-generation water electrolysis technologies including new catalysts, electrodes materials, and others, are still in the R&D phase. Hydrogen is gas. We inevitably need a technology to transform hydrogen from gas to liquid form for easier handling, transportation, and usage. There are many alternatives such as liquefied hydrogen, ammonia, organic compounds, and so on. In order to further promote these R&D activities, the responsibilities of governments are critical. Incentivizing collaboration among public sectors, private industries, and academia will play a key role. Third, we need to develop infrastructures for the hydrogen economy. Technology paradigm sometimes drastically changes. From our experiences, however, industries make the utmost efforts to utilize existing infrastructure with the necessary modification. Please look at the current situation. Yes, it is still underinvested, but many stakeholders to redirect existing infrastructures for hydrogen. For example, we have a huge infrastructure network for LNG, liquefied natural gas, LNG tankers, LNG pipelines, and LNG storage tanks. Those are good examples to be used for also for hydrogen. Ammonia, one of the potential hydrogen carriers, are the basic chemicals, and its handling methods and technologies are already matured in industries. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel, replacing coal and heavy oil in industrial furnaces. We need to encourage new infrastructure development, such as hydrogen fueling stations for fuel cell vehicles, but we also need to think about maximum use of the current infrastructure with a small modification. Please be engaged in an honest dialogue. To ask difficult questions, to wipe off the existing myths, and to move from vision to implementation. Excellencies, the geopolitical landscape is rapidly changing. Energy security has become a strategic priority. In this context, clean hydrogen is not only about climate, It is about industrial development, resilience, and economic opportunity, especially for developing and emerging economies. Many of them possess abundant renewable resources, including solar, hydro, and so on— solar, hydro, wind, and so on. They can become producers and exporters of green hydrogen. But production alone is not enough. The real opportunity lies in creating the value chain. A just hydrogen transition means access to energy and water for local communities, fair land use, skill development, job creation, shared prosperity. Those are some of the UNIDO's mandates. and the UN system. Ladies and gentlemen, today's program reflects our balanced approach. We will discuss international cooperation between North and South. We will address financing and carbon markets. We will examine sustainability and standards. This is not about abstract arguments, but about implementation on today's economic reality. Ladies and gentlemen, we shall be very serious about the certain conditions that need to be met for turning hydrogen's potential into industrial reality. We need predictable policy environments. We need regulatory clarity. We need financial instruments that de-risk the first movers. We need to promote cooperation between technology providers and industrial users, and we need trust between products, producers and buyers, between north and south, between public and private sectors. This is where UNIDO works through our Global Program for Hydrogen in Industry, supported by the Global Environmental Facility. We are working with partner countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to build these foundations. We support policy development. We strengthen technical capacities, especially in the developing and emerging countries. We are working with the— we help advance standards and sustainability framework. We facilitate dialogue among wide range of the governments, private industries, finance, and academia. Excellencies, industrial transformation is really dramatic. It is complex. It is gradual. It is shaped by markets, institutions, and people. And structural transformation requires patience, They require realism. They require cooperation, and they require trust among stakeholders. This is why today matters as a platform, platform for honest dialogue, for aligning ambition with reality, for identifying practical next steps. Let it— let us use today's discussion not to inflate expectations, but to build credibility to develop a hydrogen economy. UNIDO stands ready to work with all of you. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Yasunaga, for those opening words and for enrolling the topic this conference is all about for us. today. I just saw that a lot of people just came into the room, so I want to say a warm welcome to all of you who came a little late. The queue was long. I said this is an international conference. People coming from all over the world, from more than 70 countries, are here today. And also to all of you who join us online, who maybe came a little late, a warm welcome to you as well. We'd now continue with Mr. Aboul-Makt, and I'd like to ask you for your opening words. Welcome.

Thank you, thank you very much, Mr. Yasunaga, Mr. Gagné, Excellencies, distinguished participants. Let me begin first and foremost by expressing appreciation to UNIDO for convening this important conference that forms part of a broader set of engagements here in Vienna, which come at a particularly critical moment. As evolving geopolitical dynamics are reshaping global energy systems, supply chains, and investment patterns. In this context, hydrogen is emerging not only as a central driver of the clean energy transition, but also as a strategic lever for enhancing energy security, diversifying trade flows, and reducing exposure to fossil fuel volatility. For developing countries, hydrogen represents both a strategic opportunity and a critical inflection point in their development trajectory. With the right enabling conditions in place, countries can leverage abundant renewable resources, build competitive production capacity, and integrate into emerging low-carbon value chains. However, in the absence of these conditions, there is a significant risk of limited and unequal participation in the hydrogen economy. This gap between opportunity and participation is driven by a set of persistent constraints, including high cost of capital and limited access to concessional finance. Fragmented infrastructure and underdeveloped project lines, pipelines, gaps in regulatory frameworks and standards, and insufficient— occasionally insufficient alignment between hydrogen strategies and broader industrial policy in any given country. Addressing these challenges requires a shift in approach. In this regard, 3 areas in our view deserve priority. First, scaling project preparation. Many projects do not reach bankability, not due to lack of ambition, but due to insufficient early-stage support. Expanding project preparation facilities is essential to finance feasibility studies, engineering design, and project structuring. Second, de-risking early investments. Blended finance guarantees and concessional funding are needed to address cost of capital differentials and enable first mover projects to reach financial close. Third, supporting demand creation and market access. This includes long-term offtake frameworks, support for green product markets, particularly in fertilizers, which I understand there's going to be a session dedicated to later, and greater clarity on certification and standards. In Egypt, hydrogen is being developed as part of a long-term industrial strategy. The policy and institutional foundations of Egypt's hydrogen economy include the National Low-Carbon Hydrogen Strategy approved in 2024, which establishes a phased pathway to 2040 with the objective of positioning Egypt as a hub for hydrogen production and trade while also at the same time expanding domestic industrial use. The National Council for Green Hydrogen has been created, A dedicated legislation providing incentives and guarantees has passed, and streamlined approval mechanisms and measures to facilitate land access, infrastructure, and export logistics. This vision is being operationalized through a growing project pipeline, particularly in the Suez Canal Economic Zone. The deputy head of the Suez Canal Economic Zone is going to be with us, joining us, and he'll be addressing again, a session later, and we'll highlight some of the actions that are being taken. These projects benefit from Egypt's strong renewable resource base, strategic location, and industrial infrastructure. However, it is equally important to underline that the growth and competitiveness of Egypt's green hydrogen sector is significantly influenced by external factors beyond national control. While these may be our Challenges I trust that many developing countries may be sharing some of the same concerns and exposed to the same challenges. These challenges include uncertain and evolving global demand with limited long-term offtake commitments and unclear price signals which complicate investment decisions. Intensifying subsidy competition as major economies deploy large-scale industrial policies and financial incentives that risk diverting investment away from emerging markets. Higher cost of capital in developing countries, which directly affects price competitiveness despite strong natural advantages. Fragmented and evolving international standards and certification systems, creating uncertainty for market access. Infrastructure and market readiness gaps in importing countries, including transport, storage, and distribution systems. Taken together, these factors risk creating an uneven global playing field where countries with strong resource potential, such as Egypt, may face structural disadvantages in accessing markets and finance. Addressing these challenges, the obvious things that need to be addressed, first and foremost, stronger international cooperation, which is the concluding point by His Excellency the Minister earlier. Which we cannot emphasize enough. We need more predictable and bankable demand signals, fair and harmonized certification frameworks, targeted financial support to bridge competitiveness gaps. Distinguished participants, hydrogen alone will not determine the future of industry, but the way it is developed, the partnerships it enables, and the value it creates will shape whether or not the future is inclusive and balanced. The responsibility before us is therefore clear: to ensure that hydrogen contributes to an industrial transformation that is not only low carbon but also equitable, resilient, and development-oriented. I thank you.

Thank you very much, Ambassador Appelmarkt, for emphasizing on the opportunities but also on the challenges. we have to face in hydrogen in industry. We'd now like to close these opening words with Mr. Gagné from the Clean Energy Ministerial Secretariat, who will now bring us a multilateral perspective on the topic. Welcome.

Thank you very much, Madam Moderator, Lady Yasunaga, Mr. Ambassador, colleagues. Let me start by thanking first UNIDO for the very longstanding and successful partnerships that we've had over the many years. addressing 2 of the key issues we're going to be discussing today: industrial decarbonization and hydrogen trade. At the Clean Energy Ministerials, we try to look holistically at all energy transition issues. We look at all sectors, we look at all technologies. We also look at the socioeconomic aspects and the people aspects of the transition. And handling the high-emitting, or as many call them, the hard-to-abate sectors, has been a key part of our agenda for many, many years. But when we do so, we try to look at these holistically. That's why in 2023, under Brazil's leadership during their G20 presidency, we launched a Future Fuels Action Plan that is looking at how we can make sure that there are available sustainable molecules to help decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors. And when we do so, we really try to do so, as I said, holistically, looking at all sustainable molecule source of course, biogenic sources, but hydrogen and all its derivatives altogether, making sure that we look at a united approach. As united we stand, we also really, you know, bring together stakeholders from all demand sectors— heavy industry, transport— really being able to come up with credible demand signals to be able to align investment into all these sustainable fuels. But we also look at linking the supply and the demand. That's looking at, you know, the infrastructure. Did you— Yasunaga mentioned technologies out there. We work, for example, with ports and shippers to make sure that we are able to transport fuels from where there are low-carbon resources to where there is demand. But we also look at market structures and especially looking at how we can have coherent and interoperable carbon accounting mechanisms so that we can ensure full supply chain decarbonization. And it's because of that holistic approach that last year during COP30, the Brazilian presidency asked the CEM to be the official implementer of the Belém Pledge of quadrupling sustainable fuels by 2035, a pledge that now has about 75 different countries assigned to it. And I want to thank Brazil, but also the Netherlands and Italy, for having key stakeholders within the Clean Energy Ministerial to advance the work in this area. And there is a lot of work happening in this area, working holistically but also digging deep. With UNIDO and our partners at the Hydrogen Council, we launched 2 years ago an International Hydrogen Trade Forum, looking at really how we can make sure there are cross-border trade corridors that allow us to really help, you know, create the linking the demand to the supply aspects. At COP30, there was a launch of a public-private implementation statement where our governments actually pledged to really put in place the policies such as public procurement regulations and mandates and financial support to be able to support the industry, but also creating buyers alliances again to have those credible coherent signals together. We also are looking at creating global cross-border value chains to make sure that we basically leave no one behind and maximize the value in all areas. And we will be looking at sharing best practices in terms of carbon accounting, again, making sure that from an entire supply chain value, we can make sure that decarbonization is full. And we're also extremely happy to work with UNIDO on other aspects of these issues, such as support being a partner in terms of their implementation of the Belém Global Green Industrialization Pledge. At the CEM, we've been looking at creating demand for low-carbon industrial goods through the co-led with UNIDO Green Public Procurement Pledge for iron, steel, and cement. But we also look at making sure that the technologies to support that decarbonization are there, hydrogen being one of them, but CCUS and many others, just looking at, sure, again, holistically that we have everything that we are, and of course, having the policies from the governments to support that aspect. So, all in all, I'm very, very happy to be here. I encourage, you know, very strong and candid discussions amongst everyone. And at the CEM, we look very much forward to link the outcomes of today's discussions into a broader discussion and really help link it to the CEM work, bringing together energy stakeholders with the rest of the clean energy transition aspects. In our view, it's very important when we get to implementation that everybody come to the table with each of the levers they have to be able to enable the slow-carbon transition, and we all need to remember that in these days more than ever, energy policy is climate policy is industrial policy is development policy, so we really need to build bridges around silos, and this is what we hope to be able to do in the Clean Energy Ministerial, and just to basically say we will really welcome you all in when we host our ministerial meeting in October in Riyadh this year. Thank you again. Thank you, UNIDO. Thank you, moderator, and look very much forward to the discussions.

Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'd now like you 3 to come together for a group photo because of course we want to take a lot of pictures today. So this very first conference of UNIDO on hydrogen in industry will go out into the world and we will all be able to see who was here and what we were talking about and what the topics were that were discussed here. So where is the official photographer?

He's there.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Looking at the news these days, It's pretty clear that we have an energy crisis. It is real and it's global, and it's one of the biggest challenges we're facing these days. And we now want to talk about exactly that. And I cannot think of a better person to guide us through this topic. Please welcome Petra Schweiger. She is— Petra Schwager, sorry. She's chief of the Climate and Technology Partnerships Division at UNIDO. And she's an expert on clean hydrogen in industry. And I'm very much looking forward to your insights, Petra. Welcome on stage.

Thank you very much. Welcome to Vienna. Welcome to our honest dialogue on clean hydrogen. We have heard already a lot, but let me tell you a little bit more. An honest dialogue on clean hydrogen in today's circumstances needs certainly to include our entire energy system, food security and industrial competitiveness, and climate change. Our reality shows that an economy that depends on centralized fossil-based energy systems makes us all vulnerable. Damages to just a few centralized fossil infrastructures have global repercussions. Our system is fragile, costly, and exposed to current political instabilities. But today, we need to give not only reactions to the current situation, Instead, we need to be proactive and look forward and shape a new system that is more resilient. It is no longer just about energy affordability. It's about availability. Clean hydrogen, especially from renewable energy and from diverse regions and sources, needs to be part of the solution. As we will discuss later, clean hydrogen, and you all know this, can power hard-to-abate sector, fertilizer, steel. It is the backbone of e-fuel production and very important to energy storage, which we will need more than ever in the future. But despite its great potential, we are not moving fast enough. Let's look at the numbers. There are some good news, and I want to start also with some good news. Investments in clean hydrogen increased by 80% from 2030 to 2040 and reached $4.3 billion. However, this represents less than 0.2% of global investment in the energy transition. What does this say to us? Investment in clean hydrogen is simply too low. And if we don't counteract, it might even go down further in the current political situation. Despite production growing by more than 40% since '23, clean hydrogen today represents only 1% of global hydrogen supply, which stands at 100 million—

Million.

Million tons per year. Let's look at 2030. Government goals predict 20 or would like to see 25 million tons of clean hydrogen by 2030. Industry announcements stand at 37 million tons. If we continue on the current pathway, we will only reach 4 to 5 million tonnes per year, and these are projects that have FID, final investment decisions. And here we are talking about the year 2030. This is a fivefold increase from today, but we are still far away from our ambitions. To reach government goals, to reach our ambitions, to shape a more diversified and resilient energy matrix with clean hydrogen, we need to address at least 3 challenges, and some of them were already stated today. We see inconsistent regulations and uncertain demand. We're still facing high costs and investment risks. These costs even increased during the last years due to several crises. And there's a lack of strategic and diverse global partnerships. So how do we do that? We need consistent, forward-looking regulations. Policy and market uncertainties are the key reasons for announced projects' calculation— cancellation, as you can see here on the slide. Good news is that some of these encouraging policy measures already exist. We see global auctions like H2Global in Europe. We see national auctions in India bringing down very much the costs of clean ammonia lately. And we also see more investments of governments in infrastructure. Like recently approved for the southern part of Germany, and we need more infrastructure corridors like the Southern H2 Corridor that connects Europe with other parts of the world. So diversification is key. Similarly, binding and realistic industrial quota, as well as reinvestable carbon taxes, might have a major impact. So let's see more of these policies. And countries that are moving faster, like China, provide clear hydrogen strategies aligned with their overall energy strategy and industrial development strategy. So this is the key to success. And with this, China might reach 1.2 billion of green hydrogen production in 2030 and become the leader globally. Second, we need to accelerate project deployment. Most announced projects today are very large. Many of them are above 1,000 megawatts, and they are still in early development stage. Please do not misunderstand me. Their potential is real, but many risk of not being realized because of high cost and unstable policy frameworks. Renewables and LNG development faced similar challenges at the beginning and in making large infrastructures bankable. And instruments like contracts for difference that helped them to bring this infrastructure further should also be and can also be applied to clean hydrogen. Targeted project mechanisms like green hydrogen clinics in South Africa, hydrogen hubs in Brazil, and blended finance might drive the spiral upwards even further. We also need to facilitate investment in smaller Grid-connected, off-grid projects, not just large ones. And these projects play an important role in securing local food security and energy availability. Relying— sorry, we need to facilitate this business. Finally, the present geopolitical instabilities clearly show that we need more diverse partnership, global partnerships. Look around in the room, we have a lot of potential partnerships here sitting. So relying on a few countries only to provide our entire energy is not sustainable and fails to take advantage of opportunities around the globe. If all currently announced projects were realized. Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia could deliver 9 million tons of clean hydrogen in 2030. But the bad news is only half a percentage of these projects have committed investment. Again, strategic global partnerships and innovative business models as we will hear this afternoon, can change this and transform our system, transform the sectors that we are going to discuss about. Collaboration along the entire hydrogen value chain enables value-added national production such as ammonia and fertilizer and stimulates domestic demand. Ladies and gentlemen, a sustainable global clean hydrogen economy cannot rely on exporting molecules only. We need to create national demand. We need to have national offtake, and we need to stimulate this local value, delivering local value to all countries involved is critical to bring us forward. Let me conclude. The current global situation and its energy crisis is a wake-up call. We cannot continue business as usual. And remember, we need 3 forward-looking— we need 3 elements: forward-looking and consistent policies. We need to accelerate projects and reduce costs and risks. And we need strong and diverse partnerships. And ladies and gentlemen, we need to be persistent. Rome was not built in a day, and neither will the clean hydrogen infrastructure and global economy. So please be persistent and use this conference to engage in new partnerships and new discussions. I wish all of us fruitful and inspiring dialogues during the conference. Thank you very much for being here.

Thank you very much, Petra. And thank you for this powerful reminder that the situation is really urgent, but it's also full of opportunity. And maybe the most important takeaway was this, that no country will be able to manage the hydrogen transition alone. So if this should work, if this is going to work, it will only work through partnerships, but real partnerships, partnerships where ambition exists on all sides and where countries don't just participate but actively shape the new hydrogen economy, and they shape it on their own terms. So the question is, how do these partnerships actually look like? And how do we make them work in practice? That's exactly where we're turning to now. Without announcing them, they already entered the stage, but I want to introduce them nevertheless. We have a truly international panel right now, and I'm going to go to this side so you can see all of the panelists. And they will bring together perspectives from across regions that are already actively shaping the hydrogen industry and the landscape. The session will be moderated by Paul Durant from the United Kingdom. That's you, I guess. Welcome. And he's joined by Joseph Mukendwa from Namibia, Rodrigo Pinto Scholzbach from the Netherlands, Lais de Souza Garcia from Brazil, Gunter Gratwohl from Germany, Rebecca Maserumule from South Africa, and last but not least, Roberto Cianella from Italy. The stage is yours now, Paul, and all the others. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I hope you can all hear me. It's a real pleasure to be able to join you today. As you've heard, my name is Paul Durrant. I'm the International Head of Green Industries Innovation and Electrification in the UK government's Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. So, we're all about fostering international collaboration on those topics. Of which hydrogen is very much at the heart. And in that vein, I also— the representative of the UK as a co-lead of the Hydrogen Breakthrough. More on that in just a moment. You're going to hear from an exciting group of countries who each in their own way are playing a leadership role in global hydrogen transitions, but crucially are also instrumental to the cooperative networks that have been established over recent years that are fostering the transition that we need. In a moment, I'm going to ask our panel to introduce themselves, but before I do so, Chair's prerogative, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that Hydrogen Breakthrough that I referred to. So, if you're not familiar, the Hydrogen Breakthrough is part of a wider initiative called the Breakthrough Agenda that was established at COP26, so a little over 4 years ago now, to foster deeper international collaboration and provide a framework for bringing together all of the actors active in a particular area, in this case hydrogen, bringing all the different initiatives, companies, organizations who are interested in international cooperation and collaboration to drive the hydrogen agenda. Over the last 4 years, we've focused the attention and work of various coalitions of the willing, and I think we've made excellent progress through that. But COP30 represented a tipping point, a turning point, if you will, where we saw the action agenda. And the action agenda is the part of the COP process that brings together coalitions of the willing, state and non-state actors, to work in varying configurations to actually drive implementation. A lot of the COP is about negotiating multilateral outcomes, but increasingly it's also about building those collaborations that can drive implementation. And a huge credit to our Brazilian colleagues for using their COP presidency to establish a much stronger and robust framework, the Global Climate Action Agenda, that sets out how we can work collaboratively together in a more coordinated fashion over the next few years, in principle all the way out for the next 5 years. Some key elements to that around convening groups and tracking progress, but the most useful thing that came from that was a host of plans to accelerate solutions. Not the catchiest name, but they do what they say on the tin. They set out how a coalition of countries and organizations and initiatives can work to strengthen collaboration. The hydrogen plan to accelerate solution is a particularly strong example of that. It captures much of what's going on internationally, to drive and support hydrogen transitions. If you've not heard of it and you're working on aspects of collaborative action on hydrogen, come talk to us. The PATH is led by our Hydrogen Breakthrough Facilitator, Harley Higgins-Watson, who's around somewhere. Come talk to me, come talk to Harley, and we'll try and ensure that your work is reflected in that plan, and that will help you connect and join up with other things that are going on. So that little plug over, let me now turn to my panel who've got some fascinating insights into how we can strengthen collaboration. Let's start with just a 30-second introduction, if you will. Tell us who you are, your organization, your interest in hydrogen, and then we'll get into the discussion. Joseph.

Thank you. Thank you so much, and thank you for the opportunity, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Joseph Mukendwa. Substantively, I am the head of policy planning and strategy at the Namibia Green Hydrogen Program, but I'm also the interim head of the program itself. The program essentially is a central coordinating and catalyzing body, an extension of the government of Namibia to advance green industrialization in the country. Our interest in green hydrogen, I think, is quite obvious. We're obviously trying to ensure that we leverage on the natural resources, world-class natural resources, to be able to support the global agenda on decarbonization, but also use that to industrialize our country and create opportunities for Namibians. Thank you.

Rodrigo Pinto-Scholbach, working at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy of the Netherlands. First of all, many thanks for the invitation. So a pleasure to be here. I'm coordinating the international and European activities of the ministry, but I am also here representing the International Hydrogen Trade Forum that was established a couple of years ago to facilitate the dialogue between future exporting countries and future importing countries in the area of hydrogen, trying to bring them discussion, the dialogue at the level of our ministers. also with the involvement of the private sector. We are working very closely with Hydrogen Council, representing a lot of important companies worldwide, and also working very closely with UNIDO, who is also supporting us in the coordination of our activities.

Many thanks. Hello. It's a pleasure to be here, this beautiful city, and among friends. I'm Laís Garcia. I'm the head of the Renewable Energy Division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil. Brazil, and our area has been involved in several of the initiatives that Paul mentioned last year with the Action Agenda, renewable energy in general, fuels, hydrogen. So, it's going to be a pleasure to discuss those topics with you today. Thank you.

Yeah, good morning. Thank you very much for being here. My name is Gunter Gradwohl. I'm head of division for hydrogen imports and the international ramp-up of the hydrogen economies. And I'm working for the German government in the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Hello, my name is Roberto Chanella. I work at the Italian Ministry of Environment, Energy Security. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak in this forum. I'm the senior expert for the implementation of hydrogen and its derivatives policy and also the focal point for the activity of Southern Hydrogen Corridor at the ministry.

Good morning. I'm Rebecca Massarumuli. I'm the program director for green hydrogen at the Just Energy Transition PMO. It's the— I would say it's a special delivery unit which reports into the presidency and which is hosted at the IDC. Really, our role is a single point of contact for private and public sector if you're serious about green hydrogen investments in South Africa, but also we see ourselves as, I think, an honest broker of information, between key stakeholders who are interested in building the green hydrogen ecosystem in South Africa.

Brilliant. I hope you'll agree we've got a fantastic panel. Let's get into the discussion then. We're going to start with Laís and get a Brazilian perspective on this. Clearly, countries have multiple pathways to decarbonize energy and industry across electrification, biofuels, carbon capture, hydrogen, and given the scale and investment required and difficult choices need to be made about where to prioritize. Brazil's got a variety of strong advantages in renewable energy and globally competitive biofuel sector. You championed the Belém 4x Sustainable Fuels Pledge at COP30. In that context, how should Brazil determine where hydrogen production should be prioritized within a broader sustainable fuel strategy? And how can international cooperation help with that?

Thank you. Um, before we go directly into the hydrogen policy and what we should prioritize, I would like to mention that last year we launched the Belém 4 Times pledge that aims at quadrupling the production of sustainable fuels, liquid and gases, fuels such as hydrogen, biogases, biofuels, and e-fuels by 2035. And this is— it's a very timely pledge because we see now how dependency on fossil fuels can be taxing on countries, on developing countries, and how important it is to diversify energy sources and find alternatives to fossil fuels. And so we are glad that more than 30 countries have joined this pledge. And I think that one thing that this pledge brings to the table is a clear idea of what we need to do to scale the production of these fuels, make them economically available. And I think most of the issues have been already mentioned here today in the interventions that we have. Such as increased demand and supply of fuels to reduce revenue risk, works towards common sustainability criteria, which is such an important topic if you want to scale up to create markets, support innovation, narrow cost gaps, develop supply chains, and make financing more accessible. So all these topics are addressed at the pledge. on the pledge, because we need to foster international cooperation on this. And I think that this is a great opportunity to do just that. So, we will continue to support discussion on that. We have an implementation plan that is led by the Clean Energy Ministerial, because we have several initiatives that are already dealing with that. And discussing this today is an example of how we can foster each other's initiatives on that and support each other in looking for these solutions and making them available to our countries and to everyone. Regarding hydrogen, which is such a very, very important aspect of the energy transitions, of reducing emissions in the industry sector, but not only the industry sector, the pledge that was based on IEA assessment of how we should be doing things and be aiming at things, we should have a 5-time-fold increase in production from 2030 to 2035. There's a lot of work to be done ahead of us. I think it's, especially for Brazil, it's been a very important learning curves in these last years. And one thing that we see happening for us that aim to be a country that will have domestic consumption of hydrogen, but also aiming at exports at some point, we see a dual strategy. So there has to be balance between what we are doing to support the domestic market, but also the international.

Markets.

And we see that these 2 sides support each other because medium and smaller scale projects can help also inform decisions about larger scale ones. But we see that we— our domestic regulation is technology agnostic, and it does not— it has a very strong certification part. It's already based on ISO regulations, so we're very aligned with international standards. But we see that the sectors that already rely on fossil-based hydrogen should be among the targets for decarbonization. Should the hydrogen projects should be prioritized in context where a favorable set of conditions already exist, demands the steel sector, for example, is, is one of those that come to mind, should also use When we can reduce exposure to geopolitical risks, hard-to-abate sectors, of course, should be prioritized. Fertilizers also is something that we have been looking with a lot of attention in Brazil. What we've been trying to do is fostering these discussions so we can also exchange best practices and make sure, especially in this context now that we see a diversity of countries, that we can see developing countries being integrated and being part of these international supplies chains that are being created by the energy transition. This is something that is paramount to Brazil, also supporting projects that will give us opportunities that will mean that we are adding value in Brazil for these low-carbon products. Thank you.

That's excellent. Thank you. A lot in there, but I particularly drew out that in terms of prioritization, focusing on those areas where we're heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Obviously, in the context of the current energy crisis globally, that reliance on nationally produced energy sources clearly can be critical. But also that other point you made at the end there about the importance of the role of emerging markets, developing economies in shaping the international market for hydrogen. region, critical in that respect. That brings us neatly to Namibia, who are for many years now been positioning yourselves as a major producing country or an aspiration to be so. From Namibia's perspective, what do producing countries still lack from international partners? Finance, infrastructure, development technology cooperation, credible demand commitments? Where are the biggest gaps between where the partnership announcements are and actual implementation to drive projects forward?

Great. Thanks, Paul, for that. Before I get into the specifics of the question that you've asked, it's maybe important just to set the scene for some of the attendees who may not have an appreciation of Namibia and its current demographics. We have amazing renewable resources in wind and solar, some of the best in the whole world. We have an amazing mass of land, over 800,000 square kilometers, but with a population of only 3 million. But we also have social challenges. You know, the population, majority of which, 70% or more, are below the age of 35. Unemployment is north of 40%. So we have a bit of a ticking time bomb. But we also have a number of political positive sort of aspects to Namibia, I think, that make us a great partner in as far as producing the molecules and being a partner to the rest of the world in terms of global decarbonization. That includes political stability and actual commitment from the politicians around green hydrogen and green industrialization at the highest level. We've actually embedded this in our national Development Plan that was recently launched by our president, and there is a clear strategy that is driven by the program to be able to advance that. The one thing that we've done pretty well over the years is our first mover advantage, where we've, as you put it, we've been able to position ourselves as, uh, you know, strategically position ourselves as a credible producing country to the extent to which we've been able to raise significant funding to support various projects. And also technical support in that regard. I want to highlight here that I don't think we would be where we are now without the partnerships that we've been able to establish, but I think it's really important now to take them from just your typical MOUs that are essentially political signals to seeing projects actually being bankable, producing, and delivering on their mandate and so forth. I must say, where we are now as a country, we have over 8 projects at different stages of development. We have at least one project that is actually producing something that is being bought, so where there's offtake, and we have a few in the pipeline that are also showing signs thereof. But at the core of it, which comes to the question that you've asked, what is it that we need? At the core of it is really the credible demand signals. What is it that the Global North needs? How can we ensure that we are able to then meet each other halfway? Because without those long-term offtake agreements, it makes it difficult for the projects themselves to be bankable because they need access to financing as well. How will they be able to do so if they don't have a clear line of demand? I know typically the Global North, and in this case Europe, is, for Namibia at least, the primary export destination and trading partner outside of South Africa. I think that's the first. The second speaks to financing. Obviously, concessional financing is important for us as a country for the majority of the projects. We on the panel here have noted we have Brazil, we have South Africa, and ourselves as Namibia participated in an industry decarbonization program where we were able to access, or will likely be able to access, up to about $250 million to support green industrialization efforts, which is commendable. But if you look at the extent of the support from a financial perspective that these projects need, a lot more needs to be done. There's a need for blended financing. Our international partners can play a key role in taking up first-loss positions, among others. Certainly, financing is the second key. component. Then thirdly, I know that time is ticking. There's a lot that can be said. I think falls in the space of technology cooperation, and I mentioned it in my introduction. For Namibia, the aspiration is not just to be exporting what we produce. We want to find a way to ensure that we develop local green industrial value chains, and it was mentioned by my colleague from Brazil. We need to ensure that we can create opportunities for Namibians and be a strategic partner to the Global North and other parties to ensure that we have skills transfer embedded in our partnerships and that we are not only producing the molecule and exporting it, but we are truly partners in industrial development and Namibia as a country gets to be able to progress as well. I think those are some of the key focus areas. If time was able to allow, I would have been able to export a lot more or expand a lot more, but I think those 3 are the top of mind. Thanks so much.

There's so much more that I'd love to dig into, but time's against us. I mean, you highlighted very briefly demand, finance, technical cooperation. What was your 4th?

It was really those 3.

It was those 3. Brilliant. Okay, that's very good. I mean, that technical cooperation and those partnerships, at the heart of the potential for global trade in clean hydrogen. Aspirations as a producer country, other countries are aspiring to be importers. Turning to the Netherlands, so from an importing country perspective, a country that aspires to be a heavy importer, large-scale investment in hydrogen production will ultimately depend on those credible long-term demand signals that Joseph was alluding to. From the perspective, from the Netherlands' perspective, as a major hydrogen import and distribution hub, what will it take for those importing markets to move from, from a strategic interest to concrete demand and firm offtake agreements? And how's Netherlands working to facilitate that?

Many thanks, Paul, for the question. Um, before I answer your question, I would like to explain a little bit what we have been doing from the side of the International Hydrogen Trade Forum. I already said that it's a platform to facilitate the dialogue between exporting countries and importing countries. If you look at this new market, it could be the first time in history that we will be able to move from one continent to another huge volumes of renewable energy. It is a big chance that we have altogether. I think that The number of people attending this conference is an illustration of the interest also from the Global South to create this new market together. From the side of the importing countries, if you look at Europe, that was also already mentioned by the Minister of Austria, 2/3 of the volumes needed in this country will be imported. That is also the case of the Netherlands. That is also the case of Germany. That means that we have in Europe one of the main demand centres worldwide, but if you look a little bit further, Japan, South Korea, they will be also depending on imported volumes. That means that we have a common interest. If you look at the Global South, hydrogen is offering an important chance to create a new industry, I think that the case of Egypt is also a very good example. We see also the same situation in Brazil, in the northern part of Brazil, and so I can continue mentioning countries, but the main message is we have to deal with a common interest, and that is the starting point of the International Hydrogen Trade Forum that we started 3 years ago, and in the meantime we have 60 members. At the highest levels that we have, we try to mobilize the ministers to define a common agenda, to mobilize also the private sector. I already mentioned the role that the Hydrogen Council has been playing in trying to focus on very, very concrete issues related to the development of this new market. We started looking at the development of the corridors. We will see several corridors worldwide. We have been able to mobilize the main actors of a lot of corridors, and you see that the commitment of the private sector, the government, is really big to work together. That means that international cooperation is a necessity. Without international cooperation, these corridors are not going to fly. That is also the case In Africa, you mentioned also your project. We have been working also very, very closely together from the side of the government, with the side of the government of the Netherlands, together with your— Together with your government. That means that the first topic was the development of the corridors and we defined also a new agenda. Based on discussions of ministers of the Global South and the northern part of the planet, an agenda focusing on demand creation. If you look at the process of the last 6, 7 years, we started with a very ambitious plan from the side of many, many governments. We launched a lot of strategies. It was the moment to support the production side from the side of the Dutch government. We mobilized a lot of financial means, but it was clear that without demand for green products, this market is not going to fly, and that is why we have been moving the attention to demand creation. We already see worldwide a lot of initiatives— Brazil, regulation also in Chile— we see also in countries such as India demand aggregation among the power plants to create, let's say, the market for the products that will be produced. And from the side of, let's say, the Global North, we have been also developing several instruments to support the production and export of volumes to the demand centres. We We will continue the explorative activities from the side of the Global North. In the case of the Netherlands, we are looking at new instruments, mechanisms to mobilize the demand of the industry and the transport sector. We have to deal with a lot of targets in Europe. That means that we already have the, let's say, the regulatory framework to take the next steps. We all know that after this, let's say, euphoric initial phase, we saw a kind of realistic phase, Paul, during the last 2 years. I think that realism was needed. But if you look at the current geopolitical situation, I think that it is time to redefine the position of hydrogen within the energy mix of many countries. Volatility of gas prices is here to stay. That is not going to disappear. We have been seeing a crisis, energy crisis, 2 crises in less than 5 years. I think that despite that gas prices will go back to a more normal level, they will remain very, very high. And we already see in some parts of the planet India, that green ammonia is becoming a little bit more competitive. I'm not saying that this will be the situation in a very short time, but competitiveness of hydrogen could be one of the scenarios. And I think that it is up to us also in this room to redefine the position of hydrogen within the energy mix. And we have to do it together, the Global South and the Global North. Many thanks, Paul.

Excellent. Thanks so much. You, like so many of our speakers, referenced demand there as one of the critical enablers. You talked about demand creation. I don't love that phrase because the demand is there. What we need to do is turn that demand into firm offtake agreements. That's the challenge. One of the enablers of that is a stable regulatory environment with appropriate standards. And certification regimes in place. The EU has been leading the charge on establishing such setups with renewable fuels of non-biological origin requirements under the Renewable Energy Directive. Now, Germany has been at the heart of that and has been supporting partner countries to navigate and comply with those frameworks. More broadly, how can sustainable standards be designed in a way that maintains credibility whilst ensuring that emerging hydrogen producers are not unintentionally excluded from global markets? Gunther, can you take that?

Sure.

Before I come to your question, I would like to start with a clear statement. Hydrogen remains very important for the German economy. If we want to stick to reach the climate goals of Paris, And if we want to keep our industry in the country. So, our so-called new government, which is now more or less one year in place, has monitored the state of place of the energy transition in Germany, and it turned out that we will keep continue to to to be dependent or to need— that we need hydrogen in future from 2030 on. We are living in uncertain times now, so it's not quite clear how much hydrogen we will need, but it is clear that we will need hydrogen. And it is also clear that we cannot produce the hydrogen we need domestically because our country is not ideal place for producing green electricity, the power we need for producing hydrogen. So now I come to your question, what is the role of the government here? I think there are 3 pillars. First is regulation. That was— you touched upon with the RFNBO criteria. And from my point of view, we have to be careful with the regulation. We have to find the right balance between a regulation that takes economic viability into account and the needs for saving the planet and keeping the Paris goals. Here, perhaps, the RFMBO criteria have been a little bit too strict. So, with other countries, we went to the Commission and asked them to be a little bit more flexible here. Because if we are too strict, then there is a danger that we cannot reach the ramp-up of the hydrogen economy. And producers are not able to provide the amounts of hydrogen that are important here and we need. So, this is, I guess, a general approach for regulation. Not to be too strict, to be flexible, to be pragmatic. And RFNBO criteria are one example where we have been perhaps too strict. Then in Germany, we have another regulatory measure now, which is the so-called subquote. In the context of the REDD3 implementation, the greenhouse gas quota, we want to have a specific quota to use green hydrogen within the greenhouse gas quota. And the government now has proposed 1.2% in 2030, and that will increase up to 8% in 2040, but it's now under discussion in the parliament, so I cannot say what the outcome of the discussion is for the time being. Then, if you allow, I have 2 other pillars for the government here in this context. One is infrastructure. Infrastructure matters. That is the reason why we have in Germany already established legally and partly also in reality, a so-called core network for hydrogen, which is in the end should be around 9,000 kilometers long and connecting all the important industrial areas in Germany. And they are interconnected also with other countries, for example, with Austria as well, Italy, and so on. And the third pillar of the government's role is financial support. Here we have several state aid programs, for example, H2Global, also for cooperating with other countries in the world, with the Global South, and fostering also there the hydrogen ramp-up.

Fantastic. Regulation, infrastructure, finance, and Germany has gone a long way to putting those in place. Sticking with Europe and a European perspective on this, but we'll move away in a second. Roberto, Italy is positioning itself as a key gateway for hydrogen imports into Europe, leveraging your geographical location and existing gas infrastructure. How are you actually translating your Mediterranean hub ambition into concrete import partnerships? And how does Italy see its role in shaping the EU hydrogen policy to enable that free flow of hydrogen into Europe?

Thank you.

Thank you for your question. So I think that for enable the trade of hydrogen and also to make viable in terms of trade the possibility of import hydrogen, there are some essential points that have to be carried out. The first one regards a stable and clear regulatory framework. The other regards initiative that that can connect matching demand and offer. And the third point, I think that is very important, is a robust certification system. For the legal framework, Italy is implementing the EU directive on hydrogen and decarbonized gas. Regarding the demand, Italy has included in its national law the target for the use of hydrogen in industry and transport sector starting from 2030. But when we're talking about the match between the demand and the offer, we have to consider that at the extreme side of the import-export value chain, we have different subjects with different needs. We have on one side the producer and exporter country that need long-term guarantees to invest in large plant for production, production of hydrogen. On the other side, we have the domestic off-taker that may need more flexibility. So we need some instrument that they risk the investment, but also they try to reconcile and balance these 2 different necessities. Let me also say that it's quite important, the certification process. We have the RFMBO delegated act, and we fully agree that we need more flexibility on one side, but we we also need to keep a very robust system of certification because the real value of hydrogen as a decarbonization instrument is not the hydrogen in itself, but the sustainability requirement associated with hydrogen. So it's quite important that we cooperate with the exporter country to create a mutual recognition of these sustainability requirement. Another relevant point are the infrastructure. We, for the geographical position, we are very open to, to import hydrogen, and we have started to import hydrogen using our maritime infrastructure. And also think to the importation by ships, by the ammonia cracker. But we consider the infrastructure infrastructure, the piping infrastructure, very relevant to scale up the market. That's why we are strongly committed in the developing of a Southern Hydrogen Corridor. This is a very relevant project to connect North Africa with Italy and crossing the entire peninsula, reaching Central Europe. This project we realize building a large-scale pipe infrastructure to transport hydrogen, and it's quite important because could create opportunity of collaboration. We are just working with the Austrian and German colleague at Operation Alevne, also with Algerian colleagues, and happy, happy to, to work with Tunisian colleagues. We consider the opportunity to collaborate for hydrogen, both in terms of import by ship and by pipe, an important occasion not only for the transport of hydrogen, but also to create local growing opportunity and let me say technological collaboration and opportunity for for economic development. In this sense, we think that UNIDO can give an important— can have an important role as a neutral actor and very specialized in this kind of activity, and also to implement the inclusive growth. We think that it's very important for hydrogen to keep aligned the view of hydrogen as a decarbonization carrier, but also as a driver of widespread economical development.

Yeah, excellent. I love that framing. Hydrogen is a decarbonizing carrier, but it is also an enabler of economic development and growth. That's got to be at the heart of any partnership. Let's get out of Europe and back into Africa and talk about how the demand that colleagues here have been talking about is potentially supplied. To end on a fairly provocative question, Africa clearly has vast potential for clean hydrogen production. But many of the projects that we've seen mooted in Africa have yet to reach final investment decision. There is clearly a risk that if producing countries and their institutions are consistently required to underwrite the earliest and riskiest stage of development without the strength of those offtake agreements and other things in place, those countries are essentially de-risking projects for others at their own cost. From a South African perspective, what would genuine burden sharing actually need to look like within partnerships to avoid a generation of green hydrogen projects not making it over the line?

Thanks for that question. Before I dive deeper into green hydrogen, I want to say that in 2009, South Africa was at the same time— was in the same reflection that we are today in 2023. 2026, and this is with renewable energy. I think the first thing is South Africa has shown how to transition to a greener economy. We've done it with renewables successfully, so we've moved from strategy and policy to execution very well. I think today we're standing here in 2026 because we had a great run of moving to renewables and getting projects on the ground. This is what makes the next stage of green hydrogen, which is really just adding an electrolyzer, moving the molecule either for domestic or export, really enabling for South Africa. This is why I know we can do it without any doubt in my mind. Now, moving on to the partnerships and what the sharing is. Now, I'm in place because of the Just Energy Transition implementation plan, which really outlines how the Just Energy Transition Partnership between South Africa and a number of partners— so we see the Dutch government here, Netherlands is here, I see UK here, I see Germany here, and other partners are bringing in. So there was actually a commitment of 1.7 trillion rands made to South Africa through the Just Energy Transition Partnership. Now, the reality is all of that funding has not come through. Of course, the majority was for renewable power, you know, I mean, so forth, and a portion was earmarked for green hydrogen as one of the 6 portfolios. And we have seen some funding. So, again, thank you to the Dutch government through the climate fund managers. We received €50 million, again, through the German government, through KFW received about €40 million. Thank you. Most of it has been grant money that has been used to de-risk early-stage projects. We actually have seen some progress. Also, I think what's important is that we need to support what I call the first movers with actual funding to make things happen. We know there was a lot of hype years ago around hydrogen, and the green premium is much higher than we expect because of inflation. So I think if we're going to actually really, really move these projects or get the first movers— well, I would say those who are so courageous to move into the sector across the finish line and create more first— the next wave coming through, we're actually going to need more funding, more financing, concessional funding to get things through. But then I would go a step further and say that even as producers are producing ammonia, hydrogen, and so forth, we would actually need a reduction in our operational cost. It's good to bring in funding for grant for your CAPEX, but if we can find some way to reduce the OPEX cost, you actually get those projects to go over that green premium that we're seeing between gray hydrogen and green hydrogen. Also, I think technical assistance is actually very important. And I'll just give an example. We have a program for what we call first movers in South Africa. It says 6 steps that we're taking. So the very first step is we looked at identifying who the first movers are based on an online platform. We actually benefited from work that JIZ completed for EIB to qualify projects with 120 questions. Seems like a lot, but in 60 minutes you can fill in this questionnaire online and we can understand how far you're away from final investment decision. Then again, partnering with those first movers to take them to international conferences. Next month, we'll be in Rotterdam. A delegation led by the Minister of Electricity and Energy will be in Rotterdam for South Africa, assisting those first movers with discussions with off-takers, and then even in terms of assisting those first movers with assistance around their environmental impact assessments and so forth, ensuring they understand, because again, that's the challenge that we have, and training for officials who do EIAs is actually just as important. Last but not least, how do you structure the project? You may need $400 million or $1.5 billion, But how you structure that project actually has huge implications for how much financing you really need. Having vertical integration between your off-takers and your upstream producers, we've seen projects in Netherlands where the off-taker actually has equity in the upstream renewable energy assets. How do we structure our projects? I think technical assistance from countries that have been successful in that to South African project developers would actually go a long way. It's not always about money. I think that's number one, but also very dedicated technical assistance to those first movers who I believe are very courageous to take the step forward.

Fantastic. Concessional financing, yes, but reducing OpEx costs, critical to bringing down the total But I'm loving this support to first movers, absolutely essential. We need a few successful examples. We need to get over this hump, and then being creative about how you structure the project sounds like there's some fascinating case studies to be learned from that. Thanks so much to the panel. I'm looking at the time, and we are slightly over time. I was hoping to go to the audience, but I fear that there isn't enough time. Apologies for that.

Thank you.

Let's close it on hopefully an upbeat note. Rapid-fire now, 5 words maximum, please. Looking at global progress today, what gives you the greatest reason for optimism about hydrogen's future? If you want to, what's the biggest risk? Focus on what gives you the reason for optimism.

Thank you. I'm optimistic about the conversations that are being had and the commitments that are on the table. I think it's hard not to be optimistic about that. For me, I think the biggest risk, again, is policy uncertainty. I think if we can get that right, because it speaks to a lot of the things that producing countries actually need. Thank you.

Okay, brilliant.

Looking at the next, let's say, 2 or 3 years, I would like to see an active attitude and position of the governments and the demand centre to develop mechanisms and instruments to create the demand needed for the production that will take place in the southern part of the planet. I am optimistic because of the need and the current crisis, not only in Europe but also in Asia, Japan, South Korea. My expectation is they are going to move. That means that we have to be optimistic and we have to— once again, we have common interest, the Global South and the Global North. This is more than 5 words.

Sorry?

This is more than 5 words.

Thank you.

It's a positive message. Thank you.

Please. I'll do my best. I'm very optimistic because I see that we have the opportunity. But just to be very, maybe, direct, I think we need to replace the complementarity idea with shared prosperity. I think this is what is going to make everyone move, when everyone sees that They can benefit from changes.

Shared prosperity, love it. Yeah, I'm also optimistic. Although there are projects that are failing or delayed, I see more and more projects that are not failing, that are succeeding, and that are economically viable. And that makes me optimistic.

Okay. Project's actually working. So 2 key words for the risk related to the cost, for the optimistic view to the integration. Let me very briefly explain. The risk that the forecast for cost reduction will not be confirmed in the future. These are real important risks for the hydrogen development. On the other side, the optimistic view is related to the integration because hydrogen is a very flexible carrier and can be used and is necessary to be used in an integrated approach of GHG reduction, also overcoming the shortcomings of the other decarbonization carriers, biomethane and CCS, CCUS.

Okay, thank you. Rebecca, final word.

Okay, I'm going to go with 6 words because everyone else obviously did more than 5. I want to say hydrogen anchors the global future energy mix.

Love it. Okay, I think that sums us up nicely. Thanks very much to the panel. Thanks for your attention.

Thank you so much to all of you for this lively and very interesting discussion. And it's good to have more than 5 words to close with because it shows that the topic of hydrogen and how to make the sustainable industry with hydrogen even more sustainable and how to make it our future, it shows that it's a really, really interesting and important topics. So thank you to all of you. We now want to continue with a short coffee break. I think it's necessary because it was a lot this morning, and it will take around 20 minutes. So I kindly ask you to come back in 20 minutes to this room. And 2 more words— not 5, but maybe more than 2 words— this coffee break is kindly supported by our partner INNEO, a company deeply committed to hydrogen-ready energy solutions, and you will be hearing from them later this afternoon. Also, thank you for everyone who's joining us online. We'll be back shortly after the coffee break. I hope you can also have a coffee break now. And you find in the lobby outside some postcards where you can write your ideas or impressions of this morning and share it with us on the whiteboards, and I think nobody's listening anymore, so have a good coffee break.

Thank you.

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We want to continue. The break was a bit overrun. I said 20 minutes, now it's more than 30 minutes, so I have to be a little stricter when we go into the lunch break. It will happen soon, but before that, we still have very interesting things on the agenda. And I think in the morning we were talking a lot about partnerships. We saw in the last panel discussion how important partnerships are. And I hope that you use the coffee break also to make new partnerships, to network, and to exchange ideas, and also maybe solutions that you're already using in the topic, in the field of hydrogen. The real game changer though is— yes, partnership of course is important, but the real game changer of course is finance, because without investments, and at scale, the hydrogen economy remains, well, just an idea. Before we dive into that, maybe a quick snapshot of what's already happening through the collaboration between Global Environment Facility and UNIDO's Global Clean Hydrogen Program. We're seeing real momentum projects across Africa and Asia. We were talking about it this morning— $15 million in GEF funding leveraged into $168 million in co-financing. And the impact, up to 15 million tons of CO2 reductions while supporting a just and equitable energy transition. So the potential is real. Now the question is, how do we scale it? And that brings us to our next panel session. Fireside chat is about to start. That is talking about how to unlock investments. And I'm very pleased to welcome to the stage now Cornelius Mattes. He's CEO of DII Desert Energy, and he is in conversation with Dolf Guillén from the World Bank, Raquel Ansures from the Development Bank of the Philippines, and Alicia Eastman, co-founder of Intercontinental Energy. Welcome here on stage, and I'm very pleased to announce your fireside chat. Thank you.

Hello. Good morning, everybody. It's really amazing to see such a full house. Congratulations to the UNIDO colleagues for pulling up such an important conference. I hear it's the first hydrogen conference of UN in general, so that's a very important occasion. And thank you very much for inviting me to moderate this panel here, to the dear UNIDO team, which we've been cooperating closely over the past few years. So my name is Cornelius Mattes. I'm the CEO of DII Desert Energy. You might remember. Some of you— I see many of our partners actually here in the room. We started 17 years ago with Desertec Industrial Initiative, solar and wind in North Africa, Middle East deserts. I co-founded the MENA Hydrogen Alliance with my colleague Frank Wouters. The hydrogen movement in the region, we started in 2017, you can say. And yeah, Neom Green Hydrogen, for example, as the world's largest green hydrogen project under construction. We hosted the first discussions there that is being realized by some of our partners, 90% completed, $8.4 billion. So quite exciting, actually. So if we look at the global development, we've had a bit of a boom, you can say, a few years back, and then we set more towards realism. But there's a lot of facts and figures that underpin that the development is actually happening in the region. For example, with DI, we maintain a project tracker. We have 127 hydrogen projects, a vast majority of them green. Why? Because you have the world's lowest cost renewable energy, wonderful combined solar and wind. You have offtakers just next to here. But at the same time, the development is not going as fast as us. I'm joining from Dubai. I came in yesterday from Dubai. We've been massively impacted, UAE under attack over the past 5 weeks. So lucky to, to read the news from this morning so I can most likely go back to my family in a few days from now. The whole developments in the region, they will for sure dramatically, dramatically change global energy and hopefully accelerate energy transformation. For the panel today, the focus is on financing. I'm glad we have a wonderful lineup here with Dolf Gielen, who is lead for hydrogen innovation. World Bank leads the H4D, the Hydrogen for Development program. We have Raquel with the Development Bank of the Philippines, and development banks, they play a crucial role, obviously, in particularly early-stage and de-risking projects. And my friend Alicia, she's founded Intercontinental Energy. I think that was almost 20 years ago, really as a pioneering initiative in Asia originally, you know, to connect Australia to Singapore with cable, then big green molecules. But she's also managing director in APC, which is a private equity fund. So we have the investor and developer viewpoint. Let us start with Dolf, just very briefly, how you see, let's say, the main challenges for the current development. So why don't we move fast enough? What is really holding back, let's say, the speed and the faster deployment of clean and low emission hydrogen projects globally?

Well, first, let me respond to the issue of, is there a huge problem? We had mid-last year 2 gigawatts of electrolyzers in operation, but we had 16 gigawatts under construction and 4 additional gigawatts with FID. It was like an order of magnitude growth is already baked in, right? So the sector is growing. And for me, the most important number last year was a number of offers for renewable ammonia at $600 per tonne. Today's spot market for ammonia, $750 per tonne, grey ammonia. So with, with, with today's security situation, you're in the money. The point is prices may come down again, but we're not that far off from something which is competitive. Innovation, reducing that cost gap is what will bring us there and what will create a market.

Thank you very much. The recent Reliance offtake agreement with Korea, you're probably referring to, but also Uniper from Germany and others. That's very good for the market. As you said, it brings confidence and the facts and figures show. Raquel, how do you see the main challenges from the Philippines?

In the Philippines, actually, renewable energy has always been supported by the national government. In the case of hydrogen, The Philippines is already exploring a number of partnerships with foreign investors, and I think for speaking as a development bank, it's very important that the viability is explored first, especially for this new kind of technology. Those that would want to invest will have to prove to banks that they are really viable. And technology is quite new in the Philippines, so I think it's very important that financial institutions are aware of how this technology works for it to be financed. Because, you know, a lot of banks in the Philippines are open to financing projects like this, especially with the cost of fuel, with sustainability goals that that needs to be met by even financial institutions. I think what is important is, of course, assistance from other countries for the Philippines to be able to really adapt to this technology. Second is also explore, since financing is very critical, blended finance to lower the costs of investment.

Yeah, thank you very much, Raquel. So, Alicia, what do you think? Is it the famous offtaker? He speaks about the offtaker. Or is it other things like financing? Is it geopolitical certainty in general? Or what is the main challenge?

Well, I think first of all, the expectations were outsized from the start. I think that hydrogen was sort of run by people who are more used to technology, so it fell into a clean tech sort of bubble. These people know how to take a tech company public, and your grandma probably does too, but they didn't know how to do project finance. I think that was what was absolutely necessary from the start. If they did know how to do project finance, they never would have promised FIDs within a year. They would have had a lot better understanding of how important the offtake was, and how to get started on that right away. So I think that there was a little bit of delay for a number of players that just didn't understand the business and how it works. And now that's changing. You're seeing successful projects actually happen, and it's inevitably done by people who are using project finance tools. They're using export credit agencies. They're helping to change the— a number of the different regulations, and they're getting subsidies from countries. I mean, it's an uphill battle. We are fighting with fossil fuels who are subsidized, and we're supposed to somehow be cheaper. And that is— it's an uphill battle. But I do think that it's achievable, and we are showing progress. One of my other hats is I'm a podcast host for Everything About Hydrogen, and my co-host recently did a LinkedIn post titled The Death of Hydrogen Has Been Greatly Exaggerated, and I fully agree with that. There are a lot of people are getting traction. It is moving. Our projects are moving. We have 125 gigawatts in Australia. We have subsidy from the Australian government, a lot of other support from the Australian government. government, and a lot of offtake negotiated. We are not announcing, but we have offtakes. I think it's going very well now, actually. The wars, if anything, are showing that it's not really the trilemma anymore. Green is actually more secure in a lot of ways.

That's a good point, the volatility factor. I think apart from the business case that has improved dramatically, particularly over the past weeks. I think people are sick about volatility and energy security. I think that's energy autonomy factor. But let's have a look at the role of IFIs, Adolf, of development banks. If you look at emerging developing economies, they traditionally face many challenges, among them, of course, way significantly higher cost of capital, and to obtain finance at all. So could you outline a bit how development banks could come in and de-risk projects, and maybe there are some also non-traditional financing structures, financing approaches?

So these projects face a number of risks, and For a number of these risks, development banks can play a role to mitigate these risks. The prime reason why costs of financing are high has to do with country-specific risk. We know how to deal with country risk because that's not specific to hydrogen. You have it for all kinds of projects. There are instruments, in place you can buy to deal with these. For example, in the World Bank context, MIGA offers these, or export credit agencies offer such instruments. Then there is technology-specific risks. The development banks generally are a little bit hesitant to take these on board, but the export credit agencies can deal with some of these risks. Then, of course, there is the question around the enabling infrastructure, and there's a role for government to make sure that that infrastructure is in time, in place to enable these projects. Then you have the category of offtake, and as I said earlier, a key part of dealing with that is to make sure that your project is sharply priced. I mean, we recently looked at electrolyser systems and we found huge cost ranges from less than $1,000 per kilowatt to a European average of $2,500 per kilowatt. So there is quite some room to optimise costs. Yeah, and then we need to find a solution to deal with that remaining offtake risk. So far, development banks are a little bit hesitant to take that on board. Of course, we have H2 Global, but that is still a limited volume. So that's something we need to work on more.

Yeah, thank you for that. And if you look at a few successful developments, well, China, I think, is approximately one-third of global hydrogen projects, investments. India, we just talked about the offtake agreements and in general being based in the Gulf, actually India is really making big headlines in terms of the prices they offer. Some say in Dubai the Indians are almost ruining the market because how can they offer such low prices, but also Gulf itself. I think there's a few good positive developments. What could we learn from that? Maybe how could that help to boost other countries?

Well, I mean, some of the projects we see moving ahead, for example, IFC is recently engaged in the Atom project in Paraguay. So that's a nitrogen fertilizer project, but it serves a market that faces much higher fertilizer costs than what you see on the spot market in the world, and because of that, in combination with cheap hydropower, they come to a business case. India is a little bit a similar situation, a country, a huge fertilizer market without natural gas or sufficient natural gas resources, therefore, significant subsidies for fertilizers. Again, there is a specific business case for that, and there are similar markets we're currently looking at in Africa. These are the early opportunities we see.

Yes, that's very good points, and the current situation in countries like India with the high gas prices, but coming to the Philippines now with Raquel, I think, You're also massively impacted by the energy crisis. I think there's rationing already, so it's really tough times. You have wonderful solar resources, wind resources, you have geothermal even. How do you see the current situation now and the role also of the Philippines Development Bank to maybe boost the development and take this crisis as an opportunity?

Development banks like the Development Bank of the Philippines' role is really to provide as a catalyst. You know, we start up this investment and if you think that it would be viable or if it works already, then the private banks will come in. So generally, DBP as a development bank acts as a catalyst. So we deal with agencies like the World Bank that provides us also assistance. Being able to provide financing to these startup projects, like projects that are still in incubation period or those that is still only starting, it gives us at least a comfort, especially for private banks, to really finance this type of project. So as a development bank, it is really our role to, you know, try to de-risk projects by using blended financing, because I think one of the bottlenecks is really the cost of funding. So being able to tap funds that would provide concessional rates would be able to really help in this investment, especially hydro is very new in the Philippines. We have financed a number of projects already, like we started with solar, which is actually working very well. And with hydrogen, I think there are also potentials because what I know is there are other sources that have been discovered in the Philippines, which is a potential source of energy.

Thank you, Raquel. Is there any specific points on hydrogen? I think you launched a program you mentioned briefly, and maybe other things in concrete terms that development banks of the Philippines, but maybe other IFIs could do as well on concrete points in an early-stage process to kickstart more projects, to de-risk projects? Instruments, initiatives?

What we do is we do direct financing. However, of course, there are private investors which are usually— they are the one who starts up this type of project. We can do project financing to be able to really help develop this project. Private sector plays a very important role because usually they start up this investment. Which the bank is more comfortable dealing with because they are, you know, really into making— ensuring that the project is, you know, would really be viable for, for a, uh, being a startup, and that, um, this project, um, will be replicable, especially considering that, you know, there are assistance that would come to be able to help develop this technology.

Yeah, thank you, Raquel. Let's bring an investor perspective. Alicia, well, you have very long experience, 2 decades with Asian Renewable Energy Hub. You just told me some exciting recent developments. So we've seen that this developer, but you also have the investor perspective. So what is really missing from investor perspective to make projects bankable, What needs to be done to accelerate the development?

Well, I think what most investors want is certainty. They really don't like it when things are ambiguous, and they don't like retroactive changes once they've counted on a subsidy or they've counted on some kind of offtake. It's not nice to change the rules mid-game. That's one thing that investors look for. They want it to be solid. I think that one of the biggest issues for investing in this space, which requires getting other investors to invest in you, I mean, it's really turtles all the way down with investment. You've got fund of funds, you've got superannuation funds that are investing in fund of funds, which are investing in funds, which are investing in smaller funds, which are investing in companies. Like, it's a lot of different people that you have to educate. And I think that in terms of politics and policy, we've done a very poor job of educating about hydrogen and what it can do. And I think that the average person, the layman, understands possibly better than most of the politicians even And that's still very low level. And I realized this actually last summer. I had an interesting engagement with BMW because BMW is coming out with a hydrogen X5. They have an electric X5, and they wanted to talk to, I guess, thought leaders, but in various different places, writers that come from different backgrounds, not just finance or Not energy, just normal people, but very intelligent normal people. And so they brought this group of people together, and the discussion was about, you know, mobility. What do we think will be used— hydrogen will be used for? What do we think electric will be used for? And at the start of this, they sort of all had the same opinion that it was done. Electric cars had won. It wasn't going to be hydrogen. And I was asking, well, then what led you to believe that? Why do you think that? You live in London, you don't have a garage, you don't have a driveway, you don't have a parking spot. So how are you gonna charge your car? Like, you of all people should understand that it's difficult to have an electric car here. And it turned out that most of them actually thought that if you get your energy from the wall, It's green. That is what almost everyone thought. And these are very intelligent people, but they had no idea how a power station works. They had no idea what the power station was being fed with, fossil fuels, or if it's being fed with renewables. No idea. So they immediately thought, well, electric is— that's green. That's completely clean. And, you know, it would require new infrastructure for the hydrogen. But at the end of this day, it was leaning more towards hydrogen, actually, just by explaining how things work and where things come from, and sort of disputing this belief that oil and gas are this frictionless, completely lossless enterprises, as if, you know, we just get it on our doorstep and it didn't cost a lot of money or require a lot of damage to get it to where you're using it. And I just think there are a lot of things that people believe about the industry, energy in general, that make them incapable of understanding what hydrogen can do and why it's different and why the pricing is the way that it is. And so I think general education would be really helpful. Because when I invest, you know, I'm— or any investor, they're going to their investment committee. They might have a couple people on the committee that know exactly what you're doing and they understand the dynamics of the market, but a couple of them have no idea. So they're getting their information from Financial Times or they're getting their information from wherever, and there just isn't information out there for the average non-focused investor that tells the story of hydrogen. And I really think that that would help a lot.

Yeah, you made a very good point. And this is also a core part of our work as an independent think tank. On top of not being informed, there's obviously fake news, disinformation, which makes the whole thing worse. So, not an easy one, but I think We all need to work together to improve that. Unfortunately, we only had 20 minutes for the panel, and the 20 minutes are basically up, and I was asked to close on time, but I wanted to give everybody the opportunity to close with a brief statement, maybe just 30 seconds, on how this second massive energy crisis in just 4 years might present a big opportunity for hydrogen, to move even faster?

Dolf?

I mean, what we see at the moment is that there is a strong interest for hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives from the viewpoint of energy security and from the viewpoint of jobs and economic growth. So these are— it's not only a climate argument.

Very good. Raquel?

Although new technology, hydrogen has become one of the sources of renewable energy. Starting with solar and wind, hydrogen, I think, is one of the next that banks like development bank can actually really help to develop and be a mover also when it comes to energy security. Thank you.

Alicia, you have the last word.

I have to speak on behalf of another one of my hats now, just to cover them all. I have an investment in a company called ChipX Global, which does make semiconductors using very little energy and operating with very little energy. I think data is going to be the number one use of energy going forward, absolutely growing faster than any other use case. And a lot of people don't want to have data centers next to them and they don't want to have their cost of power go up. They also don't want nuclear. That seems to be like the second most least popular thing. So I think that there's a huge role for hydrogen and BESS and working with all these different types of renewables in order to support data centers and AI R&D centers that are co-located. That, that's going to be a huge use case. And I think that that will be— that's one positive thing that's coming out of the market. Then the security, which I think Dolph said as well. The current war, Ukraine, all of these things have taught us that being able to have energy within your own country, or at least have partnerships with people that you trust, is absolutely necessary for energy security. Also, you can hit all 3 of the trilemma. It can even be cheaper. It's it's more reliable, more sustainable, and also safer.

Yeah, thank you very much for mentioning this. And for data centers, by the way, you have in your bags a report, a piece of thought leadership we did last year specifically on sustainable data centers. You can check this out. That was a joint production with our lead partner, INNEO. Markus is also here. So thank you very much for Thank you very much for your attention. There was a brief panel, but really liked a lot of comments, spot on. So thank you very much, and please join me in applauding our panelists.

Thank you so much for this very interesting fireside chat on finance. And also, you mentioned the data centers and AI, and we will focus on this later in the afternoon as well. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah, of course, financing and capital of hydrogen-related projects is key and is important, but the question is, when it comes to sustainability, what makes hydrogen projects viable in the long run? Not only technically, but also economically and sustainably. That's exactly what our next session is going to focus on, and I'm very pleased to welcome to the stage now our moderator, Patricia Marcos Huidobro from the GEF, together with Gabriela Prata Dias from UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre, Francesco D'Adaglio from ISO, Degas Zaygin from the OECD, Smita Fokir from UNIDO, and Dario Liguti from UNISI. Welcome here on stage, and I'm very pleased to announce the following panel.

Thank you. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Patricia Marcos. I'm from the GEF, the Global Environment Facility, one of the funds providing support to the Global Clean Hydrogen Project that is being led by UNIDO. I'm very excited to be here today in this panel on green hydrogen and sustainability. I know we have a little bit of a time constraint, so let me start by giving our speakers a minute to introduce themselves and explain a little bit about what their— the role of their organization on the clean hydrogen agenda. So yeah, we can start.

Good morning to everybody, and I'm Dario Ilgutti. I lead the Energy and Housing and Land Management division at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe based in Geneva. And we have been having for many years a hydrogen task force which includes experts from around the world that look at hydrogen from the various perspectives, whether from supply, demand, and etc., all the type of hydrogen. And a particular focus has been on certification and standards to facilitate the building of a hydrogen ecosystem.

Thank you. Yes, good morning everybody. First of all, thanks a lot to UNIDO for engaging with UNEP. I'm from UNEP Copenhagen Climate Center, and we've been partnering on several occasions with, with UNIDO in initiatives around green hydrogen. And our main work at the center is basically working with national governments or even subnational governments on developing policies and strategies for clean energy implementation. We also delve sometimes in business models and financing. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. My name is Derya Saygın, and I head up the Industry Transformation Unit at the OECD. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here today. I'm Smita Fokir from UNIDO. I've been in the hydrogen team of UNIDO, and we've been working steering global issues on hydrogen for the last 4 years. We also have a JEF program under the Global Program for Hydrogen in Industry. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for having me at this wonderful meeting. I'm from ISO, so the International Organization for Standardization. Those of you who may not know, it's an international non-governmental organization that develops voluntary consensus-based international standards. Specifically, I'm a program manager and I'm here to support the energy transition of our members and the growth of this industry. Thank you.

Well, thank you so much all. So today's panel is going to be about how the conversation is moving from just hydrogen, but also to a broader understanding of hydrogen sustainability. This is not just about reducing carbon emissions, which it is, but also is also how hydrogen can support economic opportunities, local value creation, skill developments, and inclusive industrial growth. And in this sense, we hope today with this distinguished panel, we will be addressing a set of complex questions that the emerging hydrogen economy raises. For instance, we hope that we can address the issue of how We ensure that hydrogen development creates real economic value and local industrial opportunities. How do we build the policy frameworks, standards, and innovation systems needed to support sustainable markets? And how do we ensure that this transition supports the skill developments and inclusive economic growth rather than just reinforcing existing global divides? So, those are the complex challenges that we need to address and that we hope to get some clarity through these panels, and that sits in the intersection of policy, standards, innovation, and workforce development. So, without further ado, I will get deep into the questions. I will start by maybe Dagur from the OECD. Yeah. So, my question to you today is many countries are developing hydrogen strategies and announcing major projects. Often with the expectation that hydrogen will create new industries and economic opportunities. From the OECD perspective, what minimum policy and market conditions are more critical to ensure hydrogen development actually delivers both industrial development and social benefits? And where do governments more often get hydrogen policy wrong? And what are the risks undermining the long-term economic potential of hydrogen industry?

Thank you.

Please.

Thank you. Maybe I'll try to summarize this question a little bit. It's long but very important to start this panel. At OECD, to utilize the benefits of clean hydrogen for economic development, but also to facilitate cooperation to create markets, there are 2 topics that come forward. One is financing. You heard quite a bit about that in the in the previous panel, and that's something we focus on very much and work very closely with Dov's team at the World Bank as co-chairing their financing working group. The other one is policy, and that's what brings me here today, and that's congratulations to the UNIDO team for this new project and giving the role to the OECD on the policy working group chair. In the OECD work where we support OECD members, but also non-OECD countries, emerging markets, and developing economies on clean hydrogen, we assess case studies. The simple reason for that, case studies meaning successful projects that reach final investment decision or just close to reaching investment, we look at the success factors. There are 4 parts which I want to highlight for your attention today. One business model, the project business model, as one main success factor. Now, what we see is those projects that are closely linked with mature value chains for industrial production, steel, fuels, and so on and so forth, have an additional, let's say, starting point. They start one step before other ones, and they are also benefiting from You heard that in the 2 previous panels before, long-term premium offtake contracts. That helps to secure predictable revenue. That's, I think, quite obvious. Now, when it comes to how you supply power, there's differences. Some are co-located with renewables. Some get very good PPA contracts. It depends on the situation, but that is an important policy aspect to highlight. Highlight. The second is project governance. We've heard again today one thing which I want to bring to your attention again is the vertically integrated partnerships that generally helps to support reaching a final investment decision with the offtaker, with the financier being on board in the project. What we see is generally dedicated special purpose vehicles, SPVs, holding companies that are being established for specific projects. Sometimes the PPP model with the government being involved, taking part of the de-risking becomes important. The third one which I want to highlight is enabling market conditions and de-risking. We've heard some instances about the importance of this stable regulation, both supply-side and demand-side policies, especially for industrial products like steel, et cetera, where there is also excess market capacities, how do you ensure that instead of the, let's say, fossil steel, green steel with hydrogen is being invested, but also demand being created? On the risk mitigation, there is a long list of possible instruments that are available, but we did a survey and I want to highlight a few of them that came to attention from hydrogen project developers, governments, and bankers that see a potential of their use for the risking projects across the value chain of hydrogen production. Contract for differences, and if there is a carbon market in the country, carbon contract for differences, offtake guarantees, political risk insurance, currency-related risks and hedging solutions for that, performance guarantees are all— or these these 5, let me put it that way, became priority when we've consulted different stakeholders in the hydrogen sector. And the very final one on the financing, that's the 4th area that I want to highlight for your attention. And we've heard it in the previous part also, equity is expensive, but for hydrogen it has a, let's say, a higher share than, than maybe other clean energy projects. So we need to see how we can reduce that, mobilize private capital. Concessional finance is key. Yes, very important, and there is a lot of interest now. But when you look at the size of the hydrogen projects, the upfront capital cost is very high. So it's important that, that, that the risks are mitigated already, and, and concessional finance is used very strategically where it's needed across the value chain, and if it can create a high impact for mobilizing private capital. So we need to be careful and strategic there. That's one main recommendation that comes from OECD work. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Dagur. So I'm hearing business models and demand side and supply side policy partnerships, also very important enabling conditions, and finally finance, including the good use of concessional finance.

Thank you.

Very good summary. I'll move now to my left, to Dario from the UN Economic Commission for Europe. So, from your perspective, what institutional and policy measures are needed to prepare the workforce for a hydrogen economy? And how can governments ensure that hydrogen development supports a just transition? Transition by creating quality jobs and strengthening industrial skills systems? Thank you.

Thank you. Um, so there isn't a lack of technical skills because you have the oil and gas and the chemicals industry who has plenty of, of, uh, very competent people working on it. Um, what is the difference there is obviously is the certification and standards and the safety rules that are specific to the hydrogen industry, to the building of a hydrogen ecosystem. And for that, what you need is basically partnerships between industry and vocational training and educational institutions, which will be supported by policies such as upskilling and reskilling. It is happening already in the area, for example, of renewable energy. Where there is plenty of support for people to reskill or to upskill. They already have the relevant skills, but they just need to apply in a different sector. Here it's different because you have— safety rules are very important when it comes to the building of the hydrogen, of a hydrogen ecosystem, because of the nature of hydrogen itself and the fact that the certification, which the creation of a certification scheme that is actually portable by the people who can therefore go around the world and work wherever there are opportunities. I think those 2 issues are very important. And if the industry wants to facilitate the creation of this, you know, the development of these skills, etc., it's through partnerships, basically, and establishing regional training hubs. The importance of the language is very clear. What we do, for example, in the UN, we've been working around the world with many regional training hubs on methane mitigation, for example, or on the development of skills for the application of renewable energy. We will be looking at doing the same for hydrogen, where it's basically owned by the people, the training, and all the curricula are adapted to the local economies and the local languages, which is very crucial for, for this system, particularly because we believe that when you build— the way you will be looking at building the hydrogen ecosystem is just starting locally. I think the first phase for a hydrogen ecosystem is to create the opportunities for hydrogen to be produced where there is the need, where there is consumption, and therefore that takes place very much locally. That's where, as well, it links up with creating the value, added value, the first pieces of the value chain, of the hydro value chain in those countries where there are those opportunities, you know, the value of the famous value addition, because what you want to do is to create opportunities not only for development of workforce in our countries, in developed countries, which are decarbonizing faster, but you want to create those opportunities as well in developing countries where hydrogen constitutes another development opportunity, as we heard some of the panelists in the previous talks. That is the way we should be looking at that. There's nothing new into that perspective. We've been done it and the technical skills are there. It's just a question of organizing the different stakeholders. stakeholders and creating the opportunity to build these specific skills which are related to the hydrogen industry.

Thank you, Dario. Very inspiring. I like very much what you say about building the hydrogen ecosystem by starting locally. I think that was a really inspiring sentence. Yeah, and I think maybe, yes, as you say, the skills are there. It's just how we organize that. And again, the word partnerships came up really highly in the discussion. So, thank you so much. We're going to move to Gabriela from UNEP and maybe now focusing a little bit more on the environmental and social sustainability of clean hydrogen. So, Gabriela, how How can we ensure that hydrogen development delivers climate and environmental benefits rather than just simply shifting emissions and environmental pressures elsewhere? Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, in UNEP, we like to address and work with the governments on a holistic base. Of course, we pay attention to the opportunities that arise around transformative industrial development and all the needs that are out there around skill sets. But mostly, since the energy sector is the most emitting sector, we see green hydrogen as an opportunity as well for decarbonization. And there are solutions associated with green hydrogen linked to storage, into clean energy deployment, energy access, flexibility of the energy systems, and the overall outreach. Since we have the technologies and the solutions somehow available, we would like to make projects develop well. Here, from the environmental perspective, We would like to raise the attention to issues such as leakage. When we store, when we transport, there are issues that could be issues around leakage. Hydrogen per se is not a greenhouse gas, but it oxidizes easily and can become an important greenhouse gas. Also around critical minerals, we know that electrolyzers also use this type of materials, so that's therefore sustainability around the use of these materials is also critical. Also around land use competition, we know that for green hydrogens, development based on renewable energies, we need as well space, we need land, we need a place to install wind turbines, solar systems, etc. This should not be a competitive activity towards, for example, agriculture. Another one very much linked to agriculture is water use. If we use water for producing hydrogen, also high-quality water tends to be scarce where solar and wind also is available. These are the main factors that we look into. Anyhow, we see green hydrogen as a good vehicle, not the silver bullet, but a good vehicle to include in the energy mix, especially for hard-to-abate sectors. At the moment, just to leave you with a few examples before I close, we are running a project funded by the Green Climate Fund where we are working mostly in Latin America and where solutions from blending green hydrogen into natural gas systems, also using green hydrogen in the cement, in the thermal processes in the cement industry in Chile, green ammonia production in Colombia, or even in Uruguay in some port activity, and also in forestry using green hydrogen as vehicle fuels. These are examples, concrete tangible examples that we are working with national governments at the moment. Thank you. With that, I close.

Thank you, Gabriela. Thank you for providing those examples of real projects in which you are trying to address these potential effects that the development of green hydrogen may have, like leakage, use of critical minerals, and, of course, land use and water use. I think it's very nice to see that UNEP is working on that, trying to ensure there is environmental coherence in the implementation of green hydrogen. Thank you for that. Now we're going to move to the next speaker, Francesco, from the ISO. We already heard about how important is certification and standards. So, we're going to now go deeper into that. From your view, how much influence do standards actually have in shaping what can participate in emerging hydrogen markets? And following up question, how critical are international standards for unlocking hydrogen trade? And where do the biggest gaps in the current standardization landscape came but still remain? Thank you. Over to you.

Thank you. Thank you for the question. I think first to explain a little bit about how standards are developed. As I mentioned earlier, they are voluntary and consensus-based. They start usually with a market need, and a working group will be created where experts combine and they work on a standard. And that's one layer of consensus. Once they've reached that, it then moves up one layer and it goes to the national level where the standard is brought to all different stakeholders. The reason why I say that is that they embody a lot of credibility, a lot of trust, and a lot of participation of different countries. The fact that they're voluntary is also a bit of a power because you can or you cannot apply them, but they also can be embedded in regulation. because of the consensus that they embody. In many ways, they will influence the market because as demand— we've heard a lot about demand— as demand increases, you need to have the trust and the credibility behind it that what you are showing or what you're producing is indeed green or that the emissions have been properly accounted for. I would say if you ask someone from ISO whether standards are critical, I would say yes. They're critical. They're part of a bigger equation that also this, you know, these initiatives aim to achieve. And it would definitely in many ways shape the market, because if you think about the EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism in future, anyone who wants to trade with the EU needs to show emissions of their products, including hydrogen. How do you do that if you don't have an agreed methodology for showing that? And that's where standards come in. The other question around complexity and certification, in ISO you'll often hear one standard, one certificate recognized everywhere. It's a bit of a slogan, but it does make a lot of sense because if you harmonize to align everyone along the same requirements, we're speaking the same language, that facilitates and acts as a passport to trade across borders. Of course, you need, you know, well-functioning national quality infrastructure, but we also heard earlier today about the importance of mutual recognition. There's a lot that needs to be put in place, but if you have the standards as a solution, as part of that equation, you already have a very good start because you've aligned industry and many countries that have developed So, I think standards are critical for the scalability because you need to— in one way, it's the beauty of standards. You create something somewhere with that certification. Another country can take that and know that it was produced according to the same code that was agreed. So, it's fundamental. But the biggest gaps, I mean, not to want to join the same bandwagon as everyone, but of course demand is important. Because, as I mentioned, standards are developed against a market need. You need the market to express that need, and then the standards get applied. The biggest gaps at this point, it's difficult to say. There's an ISO committee, TC197, that develops hydrogen standards, and they have produced a methodology for quantifying greenhouse gases from production to consumption. There are a lot, of course, of standards that are going to be needed in this space. I think given the nature of hydrogen and the chemicals and the volatility, the fact that it's quite a difficult substance to move, I would say there's a lot of safety aspects that will need to be standardized in future as it grows in scale and it gets applied in different industries and even in the public. you know, in the public domain. Thank you.

Thank you, Francesco. Yeah, very inspiring too. Maybe as a way to summarize, but I will give you also the opportunity later to summarize your intervention. I heard trust, credibility, scalability. I like the comparison with the standards as a passport to trade. I like that very much. Yeah. And also the— yeah, how the green hydrogen also fits within the bigger agenda. Also, like, having standards from green hydrogen is also useful for the carbon border adjustment mechanism. So, I think that was— those were really important points too. So, last but not least, I wanted to pass it over to Smita from UNIDO to give us his view on the risks of creating a hydrogen economy where many developing countries remain technology adopters rather than innovators. Also, in your view, what role can innovation policies, industrial strategies, and international cooperation play in ensuring hydrogen development supports sustainable industrialization and long-term economic value creation in emerging economies? Thank you, Smita.

Thank you. Indeed, hydrogen innovation and manufacturing currently is located in a few handful of countries where they have the R&D capabilities, they have the industrial basis and the finance that goes with it as well. But at the same time, we're facing a lot of geopolitical disruptions, tensions, and supply chain disruptions, which is tending to make hydrogen not just an energy issue but also a strategic issue. What we're finding is that many countries are feeling additionally increasingly wary of having to depend on a handful of countries for external suppliers for key technologies. So I think this very much reflects a debate that exists in economics on sophistication versus diversification, right? Also, on the one hand, where you are meant to focus on what you're good at, and on the other hand, to diversify your export basket and grow your competitiveness on that side. But I think the thing with hydrogen is that it doesn't have to be an either-or situation. What we need to remember is that with hydrogen, there are more than just— hydrogen equipment manufacturing is one of the many pathways for creating income from within the hydrogen industry. There are several others: hydrogen power-to-X, export, Exports, exporting of those downstream industrial applications, attracting heavy energy industries to the country, etc. So we have all those can help to create the jobs, the skills development, the grid expansion, the just transition benefits that we're talking about without having to go into full domestic manufacturing of hydrogen technologies. The second thing we need to remember is that capabilities are not fixed, right? And that's when policy really comes into play. Innovation policies, industrial strategies, and international cooperation All 3 can help with learning, with technology transfer, and the gradual localization across the whole of the value chain, of the hydrogen value chain. What I'm trying to say is that the goal is not to do everything at once, but to gradually build capacity over time. We've seen it with renewables. Today's leaders in the wind and solar are not necessarily the same ones that were leading at the start. What matters more is how effectively those countries use policy windows to foster learning and upgrading. The risk, the real risk itself is not in concentration, as we see it, but in treating local value creation as static. I'll stop there for now. Thank you.

Right on time.

Thank you, Zmira. Thank you. I heard hydrogen becoming a strategy issue, very important innovation policy, again, international cooperation. Gradually building capacity over time and the risks not being concentration, but more local value that is static, that doesn't move over the time. I think that was very helpful too. I think we are a little bit over the time, so we're going to end this session by a closing reflection by each of the panelists. So, I will this time now go in order. Sorry that I skipped the order before. Starting on my left with Dario. So, if hydrogen fails to deliver on its promise for sustainable development, what will have gone wrong and what must we get right today to prevent that outcome? And if you can try to provide an answer similar to the previous panel in 5 words. You can take some time, or we can skip the order if someone is ready to provide their closing reflection. Do you want to try, or do you want to—

A long question, a tough question with 5 words, difficult to answer with 5 words. I think if— Hydrogen is— I heard in one of the panels, and I believe so— hydrogen is one of the tools in the overall mix of the tools for decarbonizing our societies. Therefore, it has a role in the decarbonization. If we want to succeed, it's a question— it takes all the elements that have been highlighted before to the table and put them together. Hydrogen is a complicated element is a simple element, but it's in a complicated economy.

Thank you, Dario. Gabriela, do you want to go next?

My 5 words would be hydrogen is no silver bullet. Just building on Dario's comment, it's definitely part of the mix. We need to do it well.

Thank you. If it's 5 words, then I'll repeat the 4 categories of success which I mentioned when I was responding to your question, and they were business models, governance, de-risking, and financing. Love it.

Thank you. Smita?

In line with what I said in my answer, I would say start, get going, and learn by doing.

Thank you. And last but not least, Francesco.

I'll also stick to the 5-word challenge. For hydrogen, use ISO standards.

Great. Thank you so much for meeting the 5-word challenge. Really well done. Unfortunately, I don't think we have time for a Q&A. We will have to close given that we are already beyond the time. But maybe from my side, I think they have the exciting role of being speakers. Maybe from my side, on behalf of the GEF, if I can say something on the overall sustainability of green hydrogen. For us, we see this as green hydrogen sustainability as a way to keep policy coherence, right? So, make sure that there is coherence in everything we do. So, we're developing green hydrogen, there is coherence on environmental and social issues of green hydrogen. And this is something that is high in our agenda and that all our— all the projects that are being funded by the GEF, they need to be— to ensure that there is coherence from the environment and social point of view. And maybe just from my side also saying that, yeah, we need to focus on where hydrogen offers clear advantages, And whether other low-carbon options are not viable, and we need to start from there. So thank you so much, everybody. Thank you. I'm going to please ask for a round of applause for this great panel, and hope you enjoy the day.

Thank you. Thank you very much for this very interesting panel. We will go into a break now, but I please ask you not to stand up immediately and run away, because I have a few things for you. for organization to say. Thank you so much for everyone online who was joining us this morning. We will be back in like 1.5 hours, and then we will concentrate on industry. We will focus on industry sessions, fertilizers, steel, and more. So please be back in about 1.5 hours. For you guys here in the room, ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly start into a lunch break, which will be just outside this room. And if you are not only hungry for food but also hungry for thoughts, some more thoughts, there will be another session just in front of the room, the Women in Green Hydrogen session. And when I look around, um, women, women, could you just raise your hands? So we can see there are many, and there will be even more. So the session will focus on women in hydrogen, on looking at roles, on pathways and opportunities for women in the emerging sector, so that there will be even more hands raised in the future if I ask you to. There will be 2 sessions in the lunch break. One is the one I just mentioned, and the other one is highlight presentations of reports. If you want to go there, please go to the ground floor and head to room M4. That's actually everything I needed to say about the lunch break. Someone asked me in the coffee break just before if the sessions and the discussions will be recorded and can be viewed later on. Yes, good news. There is a link on the website of UNIDO. It's hydrogen.unido.org, or you can find all the discussions and all the interviews on UN Web TV.

Thank you.

TV. So if you miss anything or if it was too fast or too much, you can watch it later on. Now I wish you a very nice lunch break and please be back in about 1.5 hours. There will be bells ringing, so see you later. Thank you. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the First International Conference on Hydrogen in Industry here in Vienna. Welcome also to everyone who's joining us via livestream online. It's good to have you back. We were talking about the global energy crisis this morning a lot, and I hope— attention, this is a joke— I hope you could manage your energy crisis after the lunch break very well and you got some water and fresh air and it wasn't as challenging as it is to implement hydrogen in the future of sustainable industry. We will now Take a deeper dive into industry and have a look on how the real work goes, industry by industry, supply chain by supply chain. And we will start with our first panel, and I would like to welcome the moderator of this afternoon session. Her name is Maja Tomanović-Vidović from the Slovene Enterprise Fund, together with our panelists, Ivana Jemelkova from the Hydrogen Council, Samia Boumatsa from the Electricity and Gas Regulatory Commission of Algeria, Yu Wang from the International Hydrogen Fuel Cell Association, Glenn Lievelim from Airbus, Pablo Albon from the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Ecuador, and Julia Bruchbacher from Verbund. Welcome to you all and have a good session. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you had a good time and good lunch, and I also hope that you still have enough energy in the room because we will need it, probably, because now it's quite important and complex topics on the line. Building a resilient heat hydrogen supply for industrial transportation because it requires aligning technology investment and global value chain at the same time. My name is, as you already heard, Maja Tomanic-Vidović. I'm from the Slovene Enterprise Fund. We are dealing mainly with financing, but of course this is also very important for the hydrogen industry. So now I would like to, to ask, yes, Miss Ivana, Jemelkova, CIO of Hydrogen Council, for the introduction presentation. Yes, please. Maybe it's better.

All right, wonderful to be here with you all, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure to see so many friends and so many partners here in this room. On behalf of the Hydrogen Council, I would like to extend our very sincere and warm thank you to UNIDO for convening us here today. On this beautiful day in Vienna. I come here on behalf of this group. It's the world's largest and only CEO-led global hydrogen alliance, currently bringing together some 140 members from 20 different countries. I see a number of their wonderful faces here in the room. Thank you for being with us. And these companies come together because they share the same conviction that hydrogen has a key role role to play in the energy transition. Let me be very clear, and we'll get to this topic in more depth in the upcoming slides. This does not only mean climate. This is not only the clean part of the trilemma, but it is very much the secure and affordable, as in resilient, future as well. And that is really important, especially as we speak about what's happening around the world. We believe strongly that hydrogen in this moment of crisis is one of the bets that will help us build that secure, resilient, and clean future. So with that, let me start with something provocative. Before I get to the numbers, let me say something that I hope in a way captures the mood in the room. We've had some very early years of— many call it hype, right? Let's say great excitement. Hydrogen is the next shiny object. Let's go put out all the strategies. We'll be done in no time. Then we had a moment of sort of reckoning where we realized that, no, it does take a long time to build energy infrastructure. No, it does take a long time to fully, fundamentally rethink the energy systems. And there was a moment of, you know, a bit of a low for the industry, let's say a year ago. Now, what I would like to propose to you is that we have entered an entirely new chapter on the hydrogen journey. And after the emotional roller coaster of the early years, we have actually moved from ambition to delivery. We've moved from PowerPoints and strategies and ideas into actually building. And I think that is so, so critical. We at the Hydrogen Council have been tracking every single publicly announced projects out there over the last 5+ years. Every year we put out the figures in full transparency— what is moving, what is not moving, and why that is happening. Here are our latest numbers. As of 2025, we've had $110 billion in committed capital around the world. We've had 10 times— this means 10 times growth in committed capital in just the last 5 years. And now over 110 projects have passed FID, moved into construction or operation. That is unprecedented. We as industry have shown a 10x scale-up curve. Yes, there have been about 50 publicly announced cancellations. They dominate the headlines. This is where many of our heads now— it's tough. Not every idea turns into an actual built project. The market conditions are not what we expected them to be. The speed and the scale of the rollout, especially on the demand side, is lagging. Much has been promised in policy. Very little has been delivered, or we are mired in complexity and sort of slow motion. The challenges are very real. But let me be very clear. This industry has grown. It has shown a very real curve in terms of committed capital. And we are actually on the verge of seeing more of that. That in 2026 and beyond. When I look at what is happening around the world, let me be also very clear that not every region is moving forward with the same speed. And as CEO of the Hydrogen Council, I have the great privilege to travel around the world, spend time with members, attend key conferences. 10 days ago I was in Beijing, prior to that in Tokyo, Before that, we had a team mission to India, and our most recent CEO summit was on Korea. What I can say when I come back to Europe, which I dearly love and I'm a proud European, is that the real hotspot for hydrogen development right now, without question, is in Asia. And especially what's happening in China is really significant. Not only China is already leading in terms of overall investment, the next 5-year plan positions hydrogen as a strategic opportunity, and that is really important. In Europe, we still think about nice to have, we still think about climate, we still think about net zero. China sees hydrogen as a strategic opportunity for its industry, for its technology leadership, and I think that is the switch of mindset that we are hoping to see in other parts of the world as well. Now, when you look at other growth India, very clear what's happening there. Commercial offtake agreements being reached, multi-billion dollars. We are seeing cost at a scale where we would not quite expect just yet because it is so compelling, and especially with what's happening in the global markets. We're seeing new levels of competitiveness and opportunities for competitiveness. this. North America, um, a bit of a U-turn, if you will, in parts of North America, and doubling down in, in, in Canada. I think a really interesting new dynamic. Middle East, obviously a huge growth opportunity through renewable hydrogen, renewable hydrogen production. If you see Europe right now still ranking 3rd, so China, North America combined, and Europe still ranking 3rd, but things have been slow. Things have been complex. Things have been small in comparison with other parts of the world. That is not to discount the great work that's been done. We have seen large industrial 100, 200 megawatt projects pass FID and move into construction, and some of them even to completion. But much more needs to be done. And especially Europe, in its hydrogen strategies, positioned itself as the number one demand center. Europe in fact has all the policies on the table to become the world's number one demand center, but the implementation again has been very slow, has been very cumbersome, and we are only seeing, uh, bits and pieces of that potential. So I hope that the, um, the circumstances of today really serve as a wake-up call. I believe Petra Schwager used that, used those words in the opening in the opening section and will allow us to rethink how we view the future of energy and will really remind us that we have to think differently. We have to think on a system level, and we really have to think about resilience that will allow us to weather what's ahead. Now, I wanted to actually speak with great transparency also about what makes projects stop, pause, delay, or cancel. We actually asked— we asked the companies that reported delayed, canceled projects, what it is. And the number one thing that comes back is market and policy uncertainty. Again, many things were announced, many things were put on paper, but have they been actually implemented in reality? I think that is the, that is the key question. Now, to end on a, on a good note, because we have the good, the bad, and the ugly in the industry as we speak. And again, we own it, but we don't like the bad. The challenging overshadow what's really moving. And I wanted to give you 6 examples of projects, large-scale industrial projects that are at varying stages of completion. This is significant. Again, we are no longer just looking at PowerPoints. We can visit these projects. We can see the installations. We can touch and feel. Hydrogen is no longer about those beautiful water bubbles on a screen. It's really people people in hard hats. It's pipes, it's tubes, it's concrete, and it's very real. And I think that is again such a game changer in the thinking. It's no longer a promise. We have truly shifted from ambition to delivery. So with that, I want to leave you with a few closing remarks. As Hydrogen Council, we have the enormous privilege to bring together the CEOs of these global companies and they come together, take stock of the market, what is happening, and converge on a few priorities. And last year, in December 2025, we had the great privilege to meet our CEOs and executives in Seoul, South Korea, which was a really inspiring experience because the Korean way to do hydrogen, the K-hydrogen if you will, is a really fascinating one. And we converge on 5 key Demand activation, again, the policy promise needs to be implemented. The follow-through on what we could have needs to happen. Pragmatic policy, those are the days— gone are the days of when we thought everything was possible like this in a click of a finger. We really need to go back to the drawing board in some instances and make sure that the policies support real business and do so quickly. without years and years of, you know, lengthy and complex proceedings. Enabling infrastructure, the missing piece of it all. Now that we have really made a big push on supply, are working to activate the demand, how do we move our molecules around? Global standards to really allow us to define, measure, verify, certify, and value the properties of our molecules in a uniform, globally understood manner. So we have a level playing field and our customers— customers, very important— can choose what kind of molecules they buy and how much they pay. And then finally, strong partnerships. This was also said at the beginning. There's no way hydrogen will happen if we do not pull together. It's critically important, and that includes governments. So thank you to all of you who represent governments. We're really grateful for your support and hard work. It's bearing fruits. Despite the noise in the headlines, it's bearing fruits. Look at the numbers. And my message to you all is let's keep it up. Let's keep building. The case for hydrogen has never been clearer, especially with all we are facing globally right now. And I have great hope that we will be able to deliver this together. So thank you again on behalf of the Hydrogen Council, and I look forward to the conversation. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Miss Ivana, for all these important words. If I can add just for the beginning from my side, also supported investments from Slovene Enterprise Fund as a financial institution should be increasingly linked to the green transition because we all know, we hear, we heard also today in the morning how important it is for decarbonization, hard to update sector and also the advanced energy for transportation, maybe in aviation, in all other sectors. But we clearly see also on the financial level, because we are some other banks, that financing alone is no longer sufficient. Companies also need capabilities, knowledge, and strong partnership, as you mentioned, to adapt all these new technologies and enter into the new value chain and solve all the problems that they have. In this context, we also in Slovenia, together with all our partners, already national partners for hydrogens, are very proud to be also the part of hydrogen global partnership here at UNIDO because it's really helped us. But of course, we will need to do some steps further. Therefore, this session brings together representatives representatives of countries with clean emission hydrogen production potential and aspiration, like Algeria and Ecuador. The production chain will be presented by producer and developer Verbund Green Hydrogen from Austria. The consumption side of this market is presented by Airbus. And, uh, the cons— and how to promote collaboration and facilitate states' fuel cell vehicle rollout and commercialization at nonprofit level will be presented by the International Hydrogen Fuel Cell Association. And with that, I would like to turn to our first panelists. Algeria has a comprehensive advantage to produce low-emission hydrogen, and the geographic position may facilitate export exports to the European market. Accordingly, as you mentioned, the 2023 national strategy sets the targets of becoming a leader in hydrogen production and exports by 2040, intending to produce 30 to 40 terawatt-hours of hydrogen and derivatives by 2040 to meet local needs and export to Europe too. So, Miss Samia Boumaza, director at Electricity and Gas Regulatory Commission from Algeria. Before I ask you a specific question, would you like to add something to this introductory work? How is your institution contributing to this situation in your country?

Thank you. I'm very happy to join this conference and to be a member of this panel. What I can add to what you said, Algeria. Algeria, hydrogen is considered like a key driver of the energy transition. For us, the designation hydrogen is designed to diversify the energy mix. As you know, we are a hydrocarbon country and to reduce dependence on these fossil fuels and to support industry and to switch to more renewable energy in our mix. I'm arriving to your question. It was a small introduction to what we are doing in Algeria. I'm here, I represent the commission regulatory. We are in charge of the execution of the Algerian TIDE project and the global hydrogen project supported by UNIDO. I am actually a gas director and I'm in charge of the coordination of the project. Thank you.

Maybe just a few words about what are the main constraints Algeria is facing in implementing this strategy. How do you plan to overcome these problems?

For Algeria, there is no constraint at the actual time because export, it's the time of export, it's not arrived yet. We are in the initiation phase. This phase is dedicated to pilot project to test technology, assess costs, and Our projects are held in cooperation with European Union, with Germany, and we are working on several pilot projects to test, like I said, the technology assessed and establish regulation framework. Because we know without a clear framework, No one is coming to invest and to put his money on— we know hydrogen is very expensive regarding the other type of energy, so a clear regulatory framework is very important to put it clearly. As I said, the exploitation phase will start after 2040, and we are working— Sonatrak is working on— Sonatrak and Sonelgas indeed are working on the South H2 Corridor. I think everyone have heard this, the name of this project. This project, the achievement of this project will connect Europe to Algeria and will allow producing green hydrogen in Algeria and deliver it to Europe through this cross-border. The phase of exploitation, we start, as you said, after '40. Now we are in the feasibility study project to to learn more. Algeria, on another side, is developing his— is improving his investment environment. Yes, that's the word. 2026 Finance Law comes with very new facilities. The law introduces tax and customs incentives for importing and producing electrolyzers and all the equipment related to hydrogen. We think that Algeria is is doing the best with international cooperation, with, as I said, European Union, Germany, and now with UNIDO. We are preparing the way to be the valuable and strategic supplier of Europe with green hydrogen. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you to share with us this good practice from your country. Let's move now to Ecuador. Ecuador could be the second country with clean emission hydrogen production potential. With us is Mr. Pablo Albán, Undersecretary of Policies for Strategic Sector at the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Welcome. Ecuador is committed also to reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, and the decarbonization of industry would rely on low-emission hydrogen. In line with this, the National Green Hydrogen— also in your country— strategy and roadmap established the targets of 1 gigawatt electrolysis capacity by 2030 and 6 gigawatts by 2050. With this, Ecuador is becoming low-emission hydrogen exporter. However, it's still— you are still at the start, at the start point of this journey, surrounded also by quite ambitious and advanced neighbors. First, is this a threat or advantage? What do you think? What would you say?

Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I would say that it's an advantage if it's well managed properly. I would say 3 points to this. The first one is strategic planning and strategic learning. The second one would be energy fundamentals, I mean developing renewable energy, and the third one is industrial strategy. In that sense, In first place, being a fast follower in general is not a disadvantage, because we can develop certain advantages by adopting proven and bankable technologies, and also some business models now are being proven. Also, Ecuador was presenting a while ago the NDCs, and we have committed to a 7% reduction in emissions by 2035. This means that the hydrogen, green hydrogen, will be one of the main milestones to go for this target. We also have been busy working on several fiscal reforms. In general, we have tried to remove fossil fuels from our economy. Last year, we removed the diesel subsidies and the gasoline subsidy that have been in the country for more than 50 years. This is very relevant because if we keep fossil fuels cheap, in general, the green hydrogen will be also artificially irrelevant. So it's very important to remove all the fuel subsidies. And in general, in terms of the, of this strategy, we, we try to go forward with the electrolysis capacity by 2035 with several pilots. And this is the third point the industrial strategy, we want to go forward first with the refinery. We have a refinery in Esmeraldas in the coast of Ecuador, and they already are using gray hydrogen, but we want to switch to green one. Then another very important pilot would be in transport, heavy transport.

We—

this is the one that we still are having some challenges because it's still using diesel. We recently removed the subsidy, but we need a better solution for it. In this case, the transportation, it's one way forward with the green hydrogen. The last one will be the fertilizers. Ecuador is an exporter of many agricultural products, And we see that there is a big, big, big opportunity to create a new market in terms of internal demand for fertilizers. And our goal is not to be the first one in the race, but to be a reliable partner in South America, reliable and efficient partner. Thank you.

Could you do that without the strategy? Could you reach all these things without the strategy, or strategy really, it's needed to go in this direction? What would you say?

The strategy is really needed. That's why this is a great opportunity with international cooperation to see all the best standards, the best practices, and all the business models that are working in the world. so Ecuador can catch up faster.

Thank you. Thank you to share with us this also. Okay, let's move now to green hydrogen producers and developers. With us is Miss Julia Bruchbacher, Head of Business Development at Verbund Green Hydrogen from Austria. The BELEM 4X pledge and sustainable fuels launched during the COP in last year, 2025, established the goal to expand by at least 4 times the global use of sustainable fuels by 2035, which would call for more hydrogen-based sustainable fuel production. Verbund is one of the key players in this picture, we can say that, and it is involved also in a flagship project, project in several countries like Austria and Tunisia with cooperation with other partners through the supply chain. But at the same time, the company also announced the cancellation of projects, some other projects in Germany, in Austria, as I understood. How would this cancellation affect forecasted production volume? Please, Ms. Julia.

Thank you. Thank you for the question. First of all, pledges like Belgium IV, they set the direction, but they don't give banks the comfort to invest or finance 25-year contracts. Project cancellations in general, they are not an outliner. They are more part of an emerging pattern where lots of large-scale early projects won't make it to FID. Yes, it's true. We announced the cancellation of one project in Austria where the framework conditions from our partner were not yet in place, but at the same time, there were new opportunities created and projects started. For example, one was already announced, our project Heidi in Hallein, where we're producing with a partner green methanol, and then other projects which are not yet have been announced. So we are working closely together with our partners to produce the green hydrogen that we see the demand is there.

Yes, and just which specific, for example, from your side, at which specific point of the supply chain, production, transport, or offtake, lies the main bottlenecks today, and what needs to be changed to restart halted projects? What do you think?

One major bottleneck still is the high cost gap between green hydrogen and fossil alternatives. So this is a problem with multiple layers. First, the production costs are really high. So one side is obviously CapEx still needs to be brought down with involving technologies. But on the other side, which is also maybe even more important, we need to facilitate the production rather than strangle it with regulatory. So, this really strict production criteria for green hydrogen in terms of EU legislation is driving the production costs even more up rather than bringing it down. And this is not seen in any other industry. And what we really need at this point is to make it as easy as possible to produce green hydrogen rather than stop it. And the second part is still offtake is an issue. We see there are certain sectors are advancing like refineries with transport and aviation quotas, and they're leading the way. But other industries are still hesitant, which is totally understandable seeing the global competitiveness they are facing. So what we really need is more incentives and support mechanisms to make it possible that those industries can make the switch to green alternatives, green hydrogen as well. And the third part is still the coordination and interfaces along the value chain, and nobody Nobody can hear it anymore, but still no one has really either tackled it yet, the chicken and egg dilemma. So, one example is Germany, where they have, yeah, at least tackled this issue by having a combination of instruments which made it possible to get commitments and enable first large-scale FIDs. And yet there is a clear framework for the core grid. You have the subsidies for early production and clear regulatory for— to drive demand. So this is a really good start, but we need more like this, especially when we look into the international supply routes. Thank you.

Thank you for this. We will We will go bring closer to this also at the second question for all of you. Now another topic, fuel cell vehicle could create a demand for hydrogen too, but it's still not happening. One of the reasons bring deeply fragmented regulatory and standards landscape. The International Hydrogen Fuel Cell Association brings together over 100 members across 21 countries. Welcome, Ms. Zhu Wang, Secretary General of International Hydrogen Fuel Cell Association. Can you tell us your opinion? How has this fragmentation slowed this commercialization of fuel cell vehicle?

Okay, thank you for your— for having me here, and I'm glad to see A lot of friends, new friends here. Okay, so yeah, I think everyone is very interested about, I mean, transportation used in China, even globally. I think as we know that the global stock of fuel cell vehicle

What do you think is the most important thing that we need to do to accelerate the adoption of FCVs?

I think we need to have some— a lot of areas to do that from the industry. First, I think we need to have policy framework. It's very important to support FCVs because we know that the cost of hydrogen and the fuel cell vehicles are not affordable in many countries. Because talking about the hydrogen cost globally, you know, the cost is much expensive than that of diesel and electricity. Sometimes it's 4 times, 5 times, or even 10 times higher. And also the cost of CVs is also much expensive than the diesel cars and trucks, whatever, because, I mean, the economies of scale has not been materialized. So I think maybe to reduce the cost of hydrogen and FCVs, the industry needs to reduce the CAPEX cost and the CAPEX cost. Okay, so, and also, I will take this opportunity to share some good examples why FCVs works very well in some countries. First, I want to mention, and there's a company called Tianjin Rookchak Steel Logistics Companies. These companies is a steel plant, steelmaking plants in Tianjin, but it deploy hundreds of fuel cell trucks in his plant because they have some reason, because they have strong mandate for decarbonization in plant and also they have stable hydrogen supplier, fixed routes, and high hydrogen filling station utilization. And they have a strong coordination among stakeholders. In Europe, high sector in France also provides another good example by focusing on taxi fleets supported by government incentives such as reduced licensing costs, and they have very strong partnership with Toyota to use Toyota Mirai cars They build stable and economically viable operating models. The other reason I think about— the second reason is about hydrogen supply chain remains underdeveloped in terms of availability and accessibility. As we know, the overall supply chain is very long, including hydrogen production, storage, transport, and utilization. Each link is very critical to the overall value chain. In many cases, hydrogen is still difficult to access, inconvenient to transport, and a challenge to refill because the system has not been materialized. and also optimized scale. So we need to build more stations. We need to establish the overall system. I will give a— maybe you know a very notable event that happened in March, that nearly 60% of hydrogen refilling stations had been shut down in California because of free gel hydrogen supply. I think the industry needs to establish resilient supply chains globally. Third, I want to mention that the policy is very important because policy consistency is another major challenge. In many countries, attitudes towards FCVs and hydrogen keep changing with some policies introduced, adjusted, and even withdrawn quickly. This creates uncertainty and making long-term investment much difficult. I think from the industry side, we need very stable policy frameworks and we need investment a lot in industry. To summarize, I think the real solution that's in building a complete, well-functioning system. Yeah, thank you.

And your association also goes in this direction to help to reach this harmonization?

Yeah, okay. IHFCO, International Hydrogen Fuel Cell Association, is an international platform that we have— actually, we have done a lot to promote the commercialization of fuel cell supply chain. So I think our members covers a lot of leading companies and institutions, universities, and also government partners. I think our strategy is to aligning the UN SDG 27 goals agenda. So actually, you promote to promote the hydrogen development globally. Actually, we had conducted a lot of international projects and collaboration in partnership with UNIDO. We have a lot of industry and also international projects that is under implementing and will be conducted in the future. So I think what do we do, we need to work together with UNIDO to promote more projects to promote the global industry development. Also, we are actually actively engaged to develop a lot of international standards. That's all.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Low-emission hydrogen represents also an opportunity for advancing the energy transition in industry like aviation and transportation. It's true that it's, it's, um, this movement is growing, but slower than— but it's still slower than initially predicted, due mainly due to the cost gap with conventional alternatives. So, Mr. Glenn Lievelnin, Vice President of Hydrogen Aircraft at Airbus, what what role does your company Airbus expect hydrogen will play in the decarbonization in the aviation in the future?

Yeah, thank, thank you, and it's great to be here. I think we should frame this first of all by saying that hydrogen is mandatory for aviation decarbonization. We are not an industry where we can use batteries. We're not looking at ammonia. We're not looking at methanol. Really, hydrogen is critical for, for aviation decarbonization. For sure, we have 2 timelines that we see us using hydrogen in aviation. In the short term, we see that hydrogen use in sustainable aviation fuels. And I think really important for everybody to understand that for those of you who traveled here by aircraft, those aircraft are already compatible with an up to 50% blend of sustainable aviation fuel, which can be a power-to-liquid synthetic fuel with hydrogen as its key ingredient. So in other words, it's not technology that's preventing us here from using significant amounts of hydrogen on board our existing aircraft. The aircraft are compatible today. In the medium term, what Airbus is also focusing on is the use of hydrogen in its raw form. So hydrogen onboard aircraft in its, in its raw form, in its liquid form, specifically powering fuel cells, and then fuel cells powering electric motors which can power the propellers or or the fans. And we're doing that, we're focused on that because we see hydrogen and fuel cells enabling electric aviation on large-scale commercial aircraft. And that is for us a significant value proposition for society. We are talking about close to zero climate impact. The only emissions is, is water vapor. It's a, it's a huge value proposition for airlines, for passengers, for society at large, and of course for, for Airbus. And this is not some long-term pipe dream after 2050s. There are already hydrogen-powered aircraft flying today on a, on a smaller scale for sure. There are fuel cell-powered aircraft that are flown. Over the weekend, we saw in China a 7.5-ton hydrogen aircraft flying, in this case with hydrogen combustion. So hydrogen is, is already starting to get a foothold in aviation and it will play a significant role. Now, why is it that it is such a small— sustainable aviation fuel is such a small share of aviation fuel today. And I think the key point is that it's not blocked by technology. It's really— and referring to various mentions already today and even in this panel so far— the key point is about policy and incentives. And this is what needs to move in order for these fuels to be taken on board in much higher quantities. For our industry, it's important and it makes it more difficult. Of course, it's important that this is a global movement because aviation being a global business, if we make policy changes in one place, it can influence the competitiveness in those locations. And so we need to be careful that we have level playing field and that we have an evolution at a global scale which could allow this shift.

Thank you to share with us this positive effect, the positive energy for the future. It's really interesting, yes, and we will continue to try to find out or to go in this direction that really this energy will be used also in a broader way, also in aviation sector. But according to the time now, maybe just to move to the final question for all of the panelists, also including Ms. Ivana. Producers won't produce without buyers. It's like a chicken and egg question. Producers won't produce without buyers, who cannot commit without supply, and neither can move without infrastructure, which will not be built without both. Could each of you very clearly answer who must move first to unlock low-emission hydrogen growth and how? So how to increase it? You mentioned policy, but maybe just your words, Ivana.

Thank you so much, Maya, and I'm so glad this question brings us back to where we started with the panel. We've entered a new chapter of hydrogen development. There are some concepts from the early days that absolutely no longer serve us. We can spend hours and hours endlessly finger-pointing at each other and say, you go first, you chicken, you go first, you egg. That's absolute nonsense and it's a waste of time. Julia mentioned it perfectly. The way forward is to bring us together at the same time. We need the chickens, the eggs, and the connecting infrastructure all at the same time. So let's start with the Hubsell. Let's build them larger rather than doing scattershot efforts, you know, and finger-pointing at each other. I think it's a new chapter for hydrogen and we need to think different. currently and put away the concepts that no longer serve us and think more smartly and more practically about how we roll out.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We can move further.

I think that, um, it is a nice talk, but we have to do it step by step. So the first step is a political will for us and committed off-takers to be sure that the demands are there, and regulatory stability, because as I said at first, the clear framework and easy for everybody will give— will really start starting for this hydrogen and Excuse me. I lost my idea. Committed off-takers and investments.

Thank you.

Thank you. Let's move further. Ms. Wang.

Maybe I will use some words to summarize. Affordable cost and resilient supply

Let's move further to Airbus.

Yeah, I think really the big unlock is policy. We need to demonstrate that in some ways at local level, coming back to what Ivana said. Then in terms of the full industrial rollout, at least as aviation is concerned, we need to be figuring out how to make that happen at global level.

Yes.

I also agree that policy is the issue. We need to propel the industry by more incentives. This will create the whole market.

Everyone moves together, not sequentially, and we take Germany as an example.

Okay. Maybe just one last— I just asked Maja for the opportunity to say one last thing. First and foremost, we should be more courageous about what it is that we're asking. The demand, we can constantly call on, you know, let's do this, let's do this. Until we treat hydrogen as a strategic opportunity and a strategic priority, it will not materialize. The point on policy, are our policymakers understanding? Do our governments understand the strategic opportunity? We were just with someone during the lunch break who was saying, well, my flight may be canceled because there's fuel shortage. Are we now talking about green premium, or are we talking about resilience insurance? I think we really have to switch our mindset and be courageous about the world we want to have, because if we want a truly resilient, secure, sustainable future, we need to own it. We need to build it. It won't descend on us somehow miraculously after 2050 because we made net-zero commitments. So I invite us all to be courageous and to build and to think differently because we are at a different stage of development for hydrogen and the world. Thank you very much for all of, all of you.

So I will just conclude that really producers, buyers, infrastructure developers, and policymakers, as you mentioned, we all must move in parallel. And that we really heard today that not only the technology challenge but a system challenge are in front of us, and let's move together. The partnerships are always the important, uh, the important message for us, and I hope, uh, next time we can already talk about more concrete hydrogen projects. Thank you to all the panelists, and we, with this, we finish this session. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for this very interesting panel. And I invite you to, when we have breaks, to really go into networking, to share contacts so that partnerships can actually be created today here at this conference, and that hydrogen is going to be the number one thing in a sustainable industry in the future. Future. We were talking about it today already in the morning, about data centers and artificial intelligence. And of course, as everyone knows, this is one of the fastest growing sources of energy demand right now. So we want to dive into this topic a little bit more now, and because hydrogen is starting to play a key role in this whole area. To take us deeper into that connection, I'm very pleased to welcome To the stage now, Markus Stromich-Jenevein. He's Director of Commercial Strategy at INNEO Jenbacher. Welcome to the stage.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, dear distinguished guests. It's a real pleasure to be here today and present INNEO, an Austrian company, by the way. But one of the main questions which we address today is how we solve this growth in AI with more scalable, reliable, and resilient energy systems. So I brought a little story today. Across the US and Europe, energy demand is growing tremendously, right, and is entering a new phase. At the same time, the grid infrastructure expansion has not kept at this pace. Interconnection timelines is, is not a question anymore about months, it's about years. And this is why power is no longer just a utility input, it's becoming a real strategic factor for certain industries to even grow. And one thing is clear, AI workloads are significantly more power intensive than traditional workloads, and they require not just more power, they require power in a high power quality. Today, one ChatGPT search consumes 10 to 50 times more power than a traditional Google search, just to keep that in mind. And that is why we need to rethink this whole power and energy system, right? We need to think about how can we make a better use of existing infrastructure, We need more decentralized power generation where the grid access is delayed or grid access is constrained, and we need the ability to integrate low-carbon fuel like hydrogen blends. So this is where INNEO is helping actually. So what is INNEO, right? What do we do? INNEO provides distributed energy solutions for critical infrastructures, and we have 3 core business models. It's data centers, it's power solutions, and it's compression. Overall, as per end of last year, we have installed 44 gigawatts in total of power generation solutions around the world, and we are presented in more than 100 countries worldwide. Today I will talk about our power solutions Where we support grids in doing grid balancing, in firming, in peaking, in CHP applications or microgrids. And I will talk about behind-the-meter solutions. Here we are supporting customers which— customers who need the power at the point of use, especially when the grid access is constrained or not even available. Such behind-the-meter use cases are particularly relevant now for data center industries in many regions, especially in the US. It's increasingly also in Europe, it becomes increasingly important. Large grid connections are really difficult to get secured. And as I previously mentioned, can take up to many years. And as a result, those data center operators, they really look for onsite architectures, power architectures which provide power in the speed and certainty and resilience Resiliency. I was very glad about the comment on the panel before. Resiliency is one of the keywords here, and our solutions are well suited to support this today. And we are offering here as well a pathway for the future with regards to decarbonization. But more on the next slides. Compared with coal or diesel-based alternatives, which are really common in this data center industry, Gas-based solutions can offer lower, much lower emissions, and they provide importantly really a technology for the next step, for the next decarbonization towards hydrogen blends or hydrogen, higher hydrogen shares. And this is why I don't want to talk too much about the strategy or behind it. I want to talk about examples. One very nice example here in Austria is with the company RRG. They turn renewable energy into hydrogen and store it in an underground cavern. And this project really converts renewable energy into hydrogen and stores it for later use. We talk here about seasonal storage, so using renewable energy from the summer and re-electrifying it in wintertime when it's needed. Hydrogen-ready backup on-site power generation like this example. It's also becoming increasingly relevant for digital infrastructure. Our dual fuel and hydrogen capable technology can support this transition and can support this reliability today and provide the option for a future full decarbonization of such a system. But since at the same time larger data center operators need more power and require different solutions. We combine here the fast deployment, the very strong performance, and the demanding site conditions, because those data centers are often very remote, very harsh environmental conditions, and a very reliable solution, right? And this includes applications in backup power as well as prime power. And the project sizes are growing. So we have talked about the 60-megawatt project. We are talking about 120 megawatt power projects. And lately, maybe some follow our press releases of INNEO, we even announced 2.3 gigawatts at the single location. And this is getting so huge that you need to come with a solution for future decarbonization. The same technical strength which matters on data centers is as important if you support grids in their stability, fast start capability, strong transient behavior, modularity, part load efficiency, a value in peaking, balancing, and firming. So all these parameters which are important for the data center industry are becoming important for the grids as well. And last but not least, I would like to name this example because As we heard before in the panel as well from the colleague of Verbund, Germany has a pathway towards hydrogen. And this project, for example, hydrogen was a technical requirement to even build this project in a peaking site. So hydrogen readiness becomes a contractual requirement in some of the projects we are dealing with. Before I close this quite short Industry Insight keynote, I want to highlight one very specific test, and this is with the Net-Zero Innovation Hub and in collaboration with Microsoft, Google, Vertiv, Data4, so one of the major players, many of the major players in the data center industry. At this test, we expect to prove that the engine shows the same technical performance and full capability with pure hydrogen operation for data center backup power. And this is very important. This is what the industry is asking for, to prove real hydrogen readiness and do this in conjunction with the end users. So let me conclude this from INEOS side. We think the growth in AI is creating a new power reality. And that requires new solutions and solutions which are reliable, flexible, modular, and deployable at the speed which is needed by this industry to grow. We are well positioned to do this pathway, and I want to thank you very much for having me to listen for this small keynote, and I hope it was interesting for you. So enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, and it was very interesting. I didn't know that there was such a huge difference in consuming energy if you use Google or ChatGPT. So when we talk about hydrogen, and we've done it a lot today, we always talk about energy, but there is of course another dimension in this whole topic, just as critical and far less visible— food. The fertilizer industry is already one of the largest consumers of hydrogen globally, so the shift to low-carbon production here is just— isn't just an industrial transition, it's directly linked to global food security. Let's take a closer look now in this next session that is led by Ralf de Haan from Marine50. Welcome to, to the stage now. And joining him are Wiebke Rasmussen from Yara International Areola Ijeoma-Eleri from the Energy Commission of Nigeria, Naoufal Makhtar from the OCP Group, Ahmed Saad from the Suez Canal Economic Zone of Egypt, and last but not least, Xiaolong Fu from the International Hydrogen Energy Center. Welcome to you all. Thank you.

Good afternoon. I would like to welcome everybody to this session where we talk a little bit more about fertilizers, but I have a question to the audience first. If you do me the favor, anyone who is in policy and regulation, please raise your hand. Because I want to get a feeling for how the— okay. Now?

Is it— what is it, 50%?

Okay, good, because that will tell us how much we go into detail or not. We know that old fertilizer systems and emissions are intensive, heavily exposed to fossil price volatility as we see it now. And geopolitical disruption. The new pathways are cleaner, but they're not automatically competitive or easy to scale. We come to the introductions a bit later, and then I will also explain why I mean this, but we will begin this session with a short presentation from Wiebke Rasmussen, Yara, and she will lighten us up and bring us into the world of fertiliser a little bit more.

The floor is yours. Thank you. I have the clicker. Very nice to be here, and I will then try and take you through sort of a narrative on on fertilizers in about 5, 6 hours, because that's what we would need to really go through all of, of this. But, um, I will try and do that in a much shorter time. Um, and it's really trying to see how the role of clean hydrogen and clean ammonia is decarbonizing the fertilizer industry. Modern fertilizer, or mineral fertilizers as we produce today, is now well over 100 years old. It was really sort of developed in the early 1900s. Before that, it was— fertilizers was really manure, a lot of bird dung, and from bats, which we called guano. And that was actually transported around the world and used as fertilizers. And then in the early 1900s or late 1800s, the race to nitrogen began where people were trying to make nitrogen in a plant-available way in scale through production and chemically bounding. In 1903, there was a Norwegian professor and an entrepreneur that developed this light or electric arch oven where they could actually fixate the nitrogen and oxygen from the air and then make nitric oxide. That became a popular fertilizer Um, but at the same time, we know that in Germany, uh, there were also professors and, and entrepreneurs looking at developing, um, an ammonia synthesis process, which we today know as Haber-Bosch. The fertilizer industry in Norway and these ovens, they were extremely energy, um, reliant, or they needed a lot of energy. And that's why they were built close to hydropower stations, because Norway at that time had a lot of hydropower and abundance of energy. But in, in essence, these light arch ovens were about 15 times as energy intensive as the Haber-Bosch technology. So when Haber-Bosch came online in, in the late 1920s, early 1930s, also the production in Norway changed to the Haber-Bosch, and that's where we also then started to use hydrogen electrolysis to make the hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch technology. Agriculture food system emissions is a large part of our GHG emissions. The whole food value chain or agrovalue chain is about a third of the emissions that is man-made globally. Out of this, the mineral nitrogen fertilizer supply chain is responsible for about 10%, but then a large portion of this is also emissions by use. So the fertilizer production is accountable then in totality for about 1% of the global CO2 emissions. Going through then the ammonia production pathways today, fertilizer, ammonia fertilizer or nitrate fertilizers are produced based on hydrogen, ammonia, and then fertilizers. This is normally integrated value chain. You produce the hydrogen, the ammonia, and the fertilizer on the same site. Some sites around the world would probably transport ammonia, but in essence it's an integrated value chain. And the feedstock for hydrogen today is predominantly natural gas. There is also some coal gasification And there are still a small portion of electrolysis in the world. So then that is— it's the hydrogen which is really the source of the CO2 or the GHG emission. There are some others down, but we will talk about the hydrogen CO2 emission here. And of course, we know that we can deal with this CO2 emission. By either capturing the CO2 in the process from the steam methane reforming and then sequester that hydrogen— no, that CO2— and then we have low carbon, or what we also term as blue hydrogen, blue ammonia, and then low carbon fertilizers. Or we could go back to renewable energy and electrolysis to produce the hydrogen, and then we would have the renewable or green hydrogen and ammonia that goes into fertilizers. There are then projects looking at both these pathways. Of course, today the existing steam methane reforming can take 60% of the CO2, A lot of this is also used when you produce urea, but if you don't produce urea and other nitrates, you can sequester this CO2 and then lower your intensity of the ammonia going into your fertilizer. The other one is, of course, was to say, the renewable. I will skip this one. Um, I would just say a bit about this being sort of back to the future. As I said, we, we in Norway and other places in the world also, we produced hydrogen by electrolysis all from, from the late '20s up till 1970 when we started to get gas, and that was a much cheaper energy source than the electricity from, from hydropower. The plant in, in Rukan in Norway was actually 167 megawatts, so quite a large plant in today's context. Glomfjord was 135, and that was actually operational all the way up till the early '90s. Today we have a 24-megawatt plant in Norway which is producing green ammonia and green fertilizers today. And then the question is, what is the premium that we can get on these fertilizers? I think what we see is that if you can distribute the cost throughout the value chain, the cost of the end product in some product value chains is not substantial. And this is from, from a project that is called LEAF, which is the Low Emission Ammonia Fertilizer Initiative, where we are working together with fast-moving consumer goods companies and looking at bread, low or low-carbon bread which is produced with wheat grown with low emission, low carbon fertilizers. We see that the emissions is reduced by about 10%, whereas the additional cost of the bread is only about 1%. And on the right-hand side— left-hand side for me, right for you— you see bread that is available in one of the retail shops in Norway where they actually have this bread which has a label which is called Careful Grown or Varsom Vekst. And this is now to be found in the shops in Norway. And currently it's actually at the same price as the normal bread without this label would be. We have also, as Yara, we have an agreement with PepsiCo. They are also committed to reduce their Scope 3 emissions, and they have done a deal where they will get low-carbon fertilizers that they will use to decarbonize the food value chain. And for farmers that grow different grains that they will use in, in the value chain, they will actually pay the premium then for them to use the low-carbon fertilisers. I think that was it. Perfect.

Thank you, Vibeke. So what you're saying, it's not only a, you know, a simple cleaner ammonia story, it's a full system transition also to utilise the fertilisers in the correct way. Right volumes for the right surfaces and right applications. Well understood. And the implication on price is actually at the end of the value chain rather low. Now, here, as we established, quite a few policymakers and regulators in the room. Is there anything you would ask them to do or to address in that context? And I have to say, this wasn't a question I prepared.

It's like a— Yes, so yeah, and, and I think we have, we have discussed that demand is needed, and of course we see that demand for low-carbon products is, is still not high, and therefore I think it's important to incentivize towards the end of the value chain. How can you incentivize the uptake of low-carbon products.

Okay, thank you. Now, with that, we will now seemingly— no, seemingly less— come to our panel, and I would like to ask the panelists to introduce themselves, starting with you, Ahmed.

Ahmed Saad, I'm the CEO for Suez Canal Economic Zone, and Suez Canal Economic Zone basically running the business of industrialization of area around Suez Canal. I think it's well known.

Good afternoon. Naoufal Mahdar. I'm the Senior Vice President for Decarbonization and Climate Action of OCP Group, which is the world leader for phosphate and phosphate-based fertilizers with the footprint on the 5 continents. You can have it on your seat.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Dr. Adeola Ijeoma Eleri, and I work for the Energy Commission of Nigeria. The Energy Commission of Nigeria is an organization of government that deals with strategic plans for energy in all its ramifications. And we are also a member of the National Committee working on our national hydrogen policy for Nigeria. And the Energy Commission is also the organization that is in charge of the National Child Project for Green Hydrogen that is being sponsored by UNIDO. So that's where I work in the renewable energy department, and we've been working on green hydrogen for some time now.

Thank you. Hello everyone, I come from International Hydrogen Energy Center, and IHEC is a nonprofit organization established in 2021. It's a very new organization. It's founded by Tsinghua Industrial R&D Institute and We are partnership with UNIDO. We are very— play a very important role in UNIDO, focus on gray hydrogen. Our organization is focused on build ecosystem for hydrogen technology commercialize because in this area a lot of new technology is very important for hydrogen production and especially from renewable energy to hydrogen. Our organization is focused on finding new technology and to prove of concept if this new technology can commercialize in the hydrogen sector. In China, we are cooperating a lot of companies to build some demo projects focused on renewable energy. And in Inner Mongolia of China, we cooperation with a lot of international company like Topsoil of Denmark and TOA of Germany and Schneider of France, build a demo project from renewable energy to green ammonia.

Okay, thank you so much for the introduction, team. And now last but not least, myself, Ralf De Haan, partner in a private equity fund focusing on the sustainable shipping industry or make shipping more sustainable. And ammonia obviously, well, we believe will play a substantial role doubling the required amount of ammonia needed in the future. In the past, I focused a lot on the chemical industry in my career. And the last of which I spent quite a substantial amount in Saudi Arabia. And NEOM will probably say to most of you something. I had the privilege to create the hydrogen economy, and one of the fruits was the NEOM Green Hydrogen Project, which— take away all the other news about NEOM, that is an independent project and will start to produce 1.2 million tonnes of green ammonia very soon. So I'm somewhat familiar with that product. Now a question to all of you, and you can freely pick who wants to take it. There's a risk that low-carbon fertilizers sounds like a fairly straightforward fix, but it's clearly not. Why does it matter now as a resilience and food security issue, not just as a decarbonization topic anymore. We see, particularly in the last couple of months, the narrative is shifting. You want to take this?

Well, in my view, of course, over the past few weeks, fertilizers in particular, everybody has seen how the importance of politics and geography when it comes to the economics and particularly when it comes to the supply chain for food and for fertilizers in particular, with the chokepoints around Hormuz. Indeed, this along with— excuse me— with also the history over the couple past few years where we have seen more and more demand for energy in particular, in general, for AI, I see more and more demand will be coming for all kinds of energy and for not just for mutual exclusive ideas that the green hydrogen or low-carbon fertilizer will be replacing conventional. I think that the expansion will be across the board. Diversification is needed, and it is clear nowadays more and more with all the geopolitical and the supply chain and all the global events that we have seen over the past few years, starting with the pandemic, that value chain and supply chain is an issue that we need to address with more resilience, more diversification, more nearshoring, more making sure that availability is important as well as the prices. When it comes to the area of low-carbon fertilizers nowadays, I think we need to take it serious and we need to look for how we can guarantee demand. I would echo what Rebecca just said now is that it is very important to focus on the demand side to make sure that these projects would conclude, would come to conclusion.

Now, coincidentally that you took the question, because you are also then giving me the right segue into the next question, which incidentally lands with you, because how is Egypt looking at this now? Because up until 6 months ago, I would have said this was a clear export game for you, and has this shifted now? Is it seen as 2 different topics, or do you see more projects now Are you becoming more pressurized and looking at internal demand in Egypt?

Egypt has a very long history when it comes to ammonia production and ammonia exports, and we have a well-established industry for exports. Of course, over not just the past few weeks, Egypt security, food security, and supply chain security has been priority on the agenda for policymakers. And this is why it has been very high on our agenda to diversify our resources, capitalizing on the renewable resources that the country has. But of course, this would come, you know, it's not mutually exclusive either to focus on exports or the local market. You need to reach to the scale and to, in order, as I mentioned before, demand is very important. Of course, demand at this stage is very important to secure not just locally but globally with our global partners, the usual suspects. Of course, Europe is definitely our main target, but as well as we are looking to become one of the prime suppliers for fertilizers, but also for food products as well as other industrial products. The local market is definitely high on the agenda and definitely the vulnerability not only Egypt has seen, but every other market around the globe has seen that we are all in need for more focused policies to diversify and to secure our supply chain and Particularly around the area of energy and fertilizers.

Okay, so that may expedite the development a little bit. Adeola, Nigeria was heard about— we heard about Nigeria multiple times today already, in a good way, of course. There's good potential for you to become a major producer of green molecules. But what's from your point of view in Nigeria's interest? Is it climate first, or is it mostly about development, sovereignty, and food security? It's a bit latching on to the last question.

Yeah. When Nigeria started looking at green hydrogen and PTX that comes with it, it was like from a climate point of view, and the potential for foreign exchange earnings from exports. But with the developments that have been happening, it's obvious that it is important that we develop even for our own security, our food security, and our economic stability. Nigeria has been proactive in that. In 2016, we had established the Presidential fertilizer initiative, which was done to ensure that farmers got fertilizer when they needed it, and he focused on stocking, buying and stocking fertilizer. But in the last one year, last year, he moved to the third phase where they are looking at sovereignty and ensure warehousing of fertilizers. So even now that that this issue is happening and there's some form of— it hasn't hit as badly as it would have before. And this has given us now the impetus where we are working on the policy to start talking about green fertilizers seriously, because we're looking at the green hydrogen from the point of view of decarbonization and economic energy security, and economic development. So we had been looking at those 3 pillars. So now we were also focused on industrial, using green hydrogen for decarbonizing industries. So this, what is going on right now, has really brought that to bear. So we all know that this is more than decarbonization, it's also about food security. It's also about ensuring that fertilizer, we have it produced in-house in Nigeria. Thank you. Nice.

Good to hear. Brings me to now, Fao, OCP. You sit very close to the market. Do you feel that the current disruption, geopolitically speaking, changed how customers and policymakers think? I mean, we had one example just right there. Do you see the same happening on the customer side?

Thank you for having me in this very interesting discussion and to give you a little bit the market-side view. In fact, the crisis that we are living now is just accelerating the food security crisis. That we have been calling for and we have been talking about since a long time. I mean, now it's just showing that the way we have been operating so far is no longer possible because it's too much— it's relying too much on fossil fuel, very much fossil fuel dependent, and it's very much risky when we look at supply chains, security and efficiency and resilience. So decarbonization is not a trade-off with food security. Decarbonization, it's a lever for food security. It's giving local answer to a global issue. And for that, CPG, we are talking to CPGs, And we need market signal for the decarbonization of the food systems and agriculture in particular. The way CPGs are also organized is that they look only at price, price, price, but the way they are organized, generally supply is decorrelated from insurance, so they don't take in their supply the overall cost today of the whole disruptions and other related risks to climate change and physical risks and all what is related to climate change, but also to conflicts. That's why OCP, we have developed since a long time partnerships with farmers to adopt, to empower them to adopt sustainable agriculture practices. Because we think that one of the very important solutions is to correlate nutrients between themselves. Today, the market of fertilizer is very much commoditized and it does not give to the soil what it needs as a nutrient. And we have been calling for the 4 Rs, which is very much known by scientists, which is the right nutrient at the right time, right place, and the right rate. With that, we have been doing since 10 years now more than 50 million hectares of soil mapping in Africa. We have accompanied more than 6 million farmers for giving to the soil what it needs, and that removes pressure from the supply on the nutrients, improves the soil health. And we have seen tremendous improvements in yields. We— with all these efforts, we have seen less pressure on the cropland expansion by 2.4 million hectares in Africa. And also we have avoided emissions of around 30 million tonnes of CO2 related to agriculture. Only in Africa.

Very interesting statement. And small side note, we see the same happening in shipping. You see that efficiency measures all of a sudden on ships move higher on the agenda, just as a side note. Now, but let us get to the hardest questions. Wiebke was already talking about it. The end impact on the price of our loaf is very tiny, very small, but it's still there. And somebody needs to absorb the first mover cost investment risk, even though we heard today already prices for ammonia are in the area of what is it now, $650, $700, $750, which is actually well within even purely green hydrogen territory. And I'm not even talking about the low-carbon versions, blue ammonia. So where should the burden sit? And I look at you, Xiaolong. Your work in Inner Mongolia is often cited as a practical example of how large-scale projects can help. And from that experience, what should policymakers understand how scale infrastructure And policy support can reduce the green premium and make low-emissions fertilizers more competitive?

Yeah, we think now green ammonia is very important for a lot of areas like fuel and fertilizer, but the cost of green ammonia is very, very expensive because green ammonia is very complete system to produce from renewable energy and electrolyzer and to ammonia synthetic and to transport. So in this chain, maybe like mentioned by Yara, a lot of technology has not mature enough to scaling up. So in this area, we think So we built a demo project in Inner Mongolia. This project has launched more than 3 years because it's truly a difficult project. But we think if this project can realize, we can find a real way to shut down the cost of ammonia. First, we think we The one thing is how to change renewable energy to hydrogen, because renewable is variable, so we can— it is very difficult to control it. But now we think recent year, supported by AI, we can build a very complete control system to catch renewable energy very efficiently. Another thing is hydrogen because the reason here, we all know that electrolyze water to hydrogen, this equipment is very cheaply, especially in China. We can build a lot of facility in very low cost. Another thing is ammonia because traditional synthetic ammonia is must stable. But now we can synthetic ammonia from 10% to 100%. We think because renewable is changed, so we can change the payload of synthetic ammonia. After this, we think we can build a truly, uh, system that we can change from renewable like wind power and solar to ammonia. And ammonia is very cheaply. So, uh, recently here, uh, we think in this system a lot of technology is mature enough for green ammonia. If this cost of green ammonia is low enough so we can put ammonia to fill and to fertilize in a lot of food chain. Another thing I think is, like you mentioned, is green— how we can put this green value to a whole chain of food, because I think this is a very complex chain from energy and to another chain. But we think if we can together long-term value and short-term value together, maybe we can find a new way. Recently here, we in China, we test a lot of different projects, especially in agriculture, like food, not only ammonia or hydrogen, and compare with a lot of different technologies like CO2 fermentation to protein. And in this technology, we combined CO2 fermentation and green hydrogen to protein. And in this area, if a lot of green protein we can use to high-value fish and animal and so on, so in this value we can build a different value chain. In this value chain, we can improve additional value for green and for ammonia and hydrogen. So if— so we think with the technology input, we can build a totally ecosystem and support by technology, so we can solve a lot of problems.

Thank you so much. So we see a big push happening in China, and I actually hope that this will also then improve the speed of how we implement projects all around the world. Maybe this is a hint for Europe how it can be done and what needs to be done, just looking at the audience. just learn and then we need to act. But let me ask another question here to, to Wiebke. You were talking about Pepsi, and that's not the end customer, but they are willing to do something. So they think their customers will absorb the little amount of extra money it will cost to implement decarbonization efforts. And as far as I remember, you were telling me it's not only substituting the fertilizer with lower carbon versions, but also look at the entire value chain.

Yes, and I think that was also mentioned on the panel here, that of course nutrient use efficiency, soil enhancement, All this goes into emissions from fertilizer or the agri-food value chain. Of course, as fertilizer companies, we also have this competence, and we work with the farmers, of course, to spread this knowledge and ensure that we have the 4 Rs. It's the right fertilizer at the right time at the right volumes, You know, so, so we really need to ensure that we do that as well. But, but that is not— that's why I say it's such a complex discussion when you talk about decarbonizing fertilizers. And, and clean hydrogen and clean ammonia only plays a role on the production of the fertilizers, um, because the molecule of ammonia and the fertilizer will be exactly the same as it is today. So it's no change for the farmer in how they use it, how they spread it. That is knowledge that we still need to do for all fertilizers.

Doesn't have any implication for the price. Ahmed, Egypt sits strategically in a very important corridor corridor for global trade and energy? And does the current geopolitical situation actually strengthen the case to build regional production centres for low-carbon ammonia fertiliser hubs, you may say, or do you still not see any move towards a more decentralised approach? Topic resilience again.

Yes.

Well, in fact, it's very important to first start with centralized approach because you need to build the ecosystem. The ecosystem, in order to have it, you need to have the right bits and pieces for attracting the investment. You need to have the right infrastructure. You need to have the right proximity locations. You have to have a full range of setups that has to be there. In my view, it is very also important for countries to understand where it's coming from. A country like Egypt with a history in grey ammonia, it is important to move first to blue ammonia, I mean with capturing CO2, but also we have also to make use of our own renewable resources. This is why at Suez Canal Economic Zone we have been very keen to develop a cluster for industrial or downstream industrial activities for green hydrogen and ammonia production, for the use of fertilizers and other ammonia use, whether it has to do with shipping, particularly, of course, using the location that we have around the Suez Canal corridor. Also, it was very important to be able to do this from a focal point like Suez Canal Economic Zone, which is with its separate budget from the government, with the fact that it is an entity that is managing 6 seaports around the entrance, the 2 entrances of the Suez Canal, the northern and the eastern, making sure that you have a recurring income in foreign currency to be able to invest in infrastructure, to be able to have the confidence with investors to also build the right team, the right team of investment banking background, people who know the language of investors, people who can provide comfortable discussion and comfortable agreements with investors in order to create the environment and make sure that this is a stable environment for investment, because the whole idea is to reduce shocks around the market. When you want to diversify, you want to increase the supply chain, and you need to reduce— the whole idea is to reduce the shocks and to be able to have a more predictable— because when you are talking about fertilizer and food in general, you need to have a more predictable and secure future.

Thank you for for your statement, and I would like to add some flavour to it, even though I'm not on the panel. But right now, 20% of the fertilisers, ammonia-based, comes out of the Strait of Hormuz. And I think in the future, if 20% of any product which is essential for the world can be blocked, that is a problem. That already shows that you do have to decentralise. Add the fact that blue ammonia will play a role in the, in the transition period, but at the end we will have to produce large amounts of green molecules, not only for ammonia but also the other derivatives. These factories, just look at the NEOM one, have a huge footprint. So talking about centralizing this is a difficulty by itself already. I mean, the NEOM project has 350 square kilometers. only of solar panel, 1 million sticks in the ground to hold these panels. Huge footprint. Now, I would love to have given the other panelists to, well, give them a bit more time, but that is exactly what we run out of here. Maybe we introduce still like 1, 2 minutes for Q&A. Bombard. I know that was the wrong term in that climate. Please don't. Yes, please.

Rainer Fitzhugh from the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam. And I have a question for— sorry, I don't know if I'm going to say the name right— Nafal Madad. about the OCB strategy, which is very ambitious and very impressive. And I was wondering if you could say a little bit of— give an update about the investments that were announced with also funding from KfW. Are those investments going to go forward? And where do you see the offtake market for the green fertilizers that you will be delivering relatively soon if you go forward with those plans?

Thank you.

I'll try to be brief. We think that sustainability is the way to do business in the future, and that's why we committed for carbon neutrality on the 3 scopes by 2040. We are the first SBCI fertilizer company having its SBCI target approved, and we have more than 80% of our electricity coming from clean sources. We are self-sufficient from non-conventional water, and we are even providing potable water as the part of the resilience program of Morocco for water stress. We are providing water, potable water to 4 cities, and all from cogenerations or from water, from clean energy. What we think is that Morocco, why we can deliver green energy in the future and green hydrogen. We think that we are lucky to be in Morocco and we have few endowments. We have land, big surfaces. We have one of the best mix of solar and wind energy. We have political stability and we are close to offtake markets. We are also— we have the offtake capacity. OCP, it's the world leader for phosphate-based fertilizer, but at the same time, we are the first buyer of ammonia in the world. We buy almost 2 million tons of ammonia today. We think that we can introduce— we have offtake capacity for that. We think we can bring the costs down until the—

Thank you.

We get breakeven in the next 10 years. We need for that, in fact, to develop green and low-carbon fertilizers, you may need 4 things, I think. Innovation, and we are investing in innovation. We have our own university and we have partnership with a lot of innovation centers, including Jülich. We have the pilot for grain hydrogen with the Jülich Institute in Germany. We need partnerships across the whole value chain, and that's what we are calling for. We need— we need also regulations. We are looking at CBAM, and we think that to bridge the gap, we need some regulations on carbon for that. We need finance and we start to see the finance institutions giving better financing terms for sustainability loans, sustainability bonds, et cetera, than the standard ones. We're optimistic for the future and maybe those conflicts that we are having now are accelerating the willingness for transition.

Okay.

Have your question been answered to your satisfaction?

Good.

Otherwise, more than welcome to speak afterwards. So I'm proud actually that we didn't use the words bankability and chicken and egg in this panel.

God forbid.

We heard demand quite a bit, but that is fine. Absolutely. I think one of the keywords is level playing field. To be clear, that is important. And with that, I would like to hand over to the next team for the fireside chat. But give a warm applause to the panelists, please. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. I wanted to say the moderator makes the moderator obsolete, but thank God no. And it's not artificial intelligence. But because we're talking a lot about artificial intelligence substituting people, so thank God we're not there yet. The fireside chat is next. Thank you very much for this very interesting panel. Thank you. And it showed us how tightly energy and food systems are actually linked and how directly they affect everyday life, and that it's actually really urgent that we need to act. We will drag this topic further in the next fireside chats. And Vibeke Rasmussen, she is staying here with us. And I would like to introduce Giorgos Chatzimarkakis, CEO of Hydrogen Europe, a key partner of this event, together with Markus Exenberger. He is Executive Director of the H2 Global Foundation. Here they go. Welcome on stage for your fireside chat. Thank you. Thank you.

Many thanks. Many thanks for this wonderful presentation. Wiebke is already here. Markus takes place. Ladies and gentlemen, is this the right moment to redefine the role of hydrogen? I mean, let's be honest, we have talked about hydrogen many, many years now. There have been many ups and downs. This is, by the way, the first UN conference on hydrogen. which is great. Congrats to Petra Schwager, who worked hard, and the whole team, Smita, Maria, and the whole team for that. Thanks for that. But this is an interesting moment. We have just heard we don't want shocks for the markets. We might get a shock for the food situation in the world. We human beings are always thinking of current crisis. There was COVID, then there was Ukraine, now it's Iran.

What about hunger?

We heard about the shortcomings in urea. 50% of urea are blocked in Hormuz. Price has gone up in March 50%, which is a big part of the fertilizer production. We heard about ammonia. So will there be a hunger crisis quite soon? Because now it's the sowing season. Now the fertilizer needs to get into the ground in order to have food security. This is what we want to discuss here, and we want to discuss how to overcome this situation. My name is Yorgos Chatzimarkakis. I'm the CEO of Hydrogen Europe, which is the European hydrogen association. But of course, hydrogen just as an enabler, not as a silver bullet. We have heard that before, and I'm happy that Wiebeke, the expert within our association on fertilizers, stays here. You have been presented already. That's why I turn to Markus Exenberger, who is the CEO of H2Global. This is one of the basically global instruments to do what? To bring the prices down, to create more expectability. Maybe I start with Markus first to introduce himself a little bit and what you, H2Global, could do in order to overcome these shock situations for prices, but also for the supply.

First of all, I hope Ralf Terhahn is still here because I would like to introduce H2Global by saying We are overcoming this chicken and egg situation and want to make projects bankable. I think it is still relevant. So what we have seen in the last few years is that, you know, there are a few OTC contracts, but there is no real market. And if you want to create a market, you need certainties, you need price signals, you need clarity, and you need, let's say, a very Good and working environment for that. This is what H2Global is offering now. So we are offering 10-year contracts for a producer, and we are selling these products then time divergent into the market. We are making use of support given by governments. H2Global received right now $9 billion, roughly $9 billion of support from different governments. So So that means H2Global, I would say, is one of the biggest trading platforms currently worldwide. And, you know, we are doing that by reducing the risk for the producer and for the off-takers in the best possible manner right now. The instrument we are using is the so-called double auction. So we are auctioning the product from the cheapest producer and we are selling it to the best price off-taker. what we are doing currently, and the support given by the government is just used for bridging this price gap in between the low-cost or the high-cost producer and most probably the lower interest we are receiving from the, from the off-taker. It's international, but Germany plays a main role there. Germany is providing right now more than 80% of the funds provided to H2Global, but beside that, I saw Rodrigo is here as well from the Netherlands. He is one of the main supporters we had in the last years. The Netherlands are using H2Global as well. Australia and Canada is doing the same. We are currently talking to a few other member state governments here in Europe and a few other governments outside Europe. H2Global, like the name is already saying, is a real global initiative right now.

So we heard before, Wiebke, that in the fertilizer production you can replace natural gas, which was the feedstock for traditionally for the last decades, by ammonia produced in a green or in a blue way, but by ammonia, clean ammonia. What do you need to get there? Because you are basically the biggest producer in the world, fertilizer producer in the world. And can you tell us what exactly needs to be done out of your perspective in order to do that shift, to redefine also the role of hydrogen in the fertilizer world?

And I think it's not an easy answer to that. As I said, it's— today most fertilizer plants are are integrated plants, so they have the steam methane reformer on site producing the hydrogen to feed the ammonia and the fertilizer production. But, and I think what to start utilizing green hydrogen or green ammonia, you need to then either produce it with electrolysis on site, so you scrap your SMR and you build a green electrolyzer plant to produce green ammonia that can feed— no, green hydrogen that can feed the ammonia synthesis. Or you also scrap your SMR and your ammonia Haber-Bosch synthesis and you import your green ammonia. So it's a big structural change. So it's— and that's what I think the discussions we have, we can start with a small percentage. It's also difficult to do that because you have your production assets, and even then taking partly new and building that and tie-in of new feedstock, and then keeping your existing asset to operate on a low yield. doesn't make sense. So I think it's, it's, it's a, it's a big structural change for existing assets, um, and that requires, of course, investments, high investments. And it's energy and costs, because you are, you are exchanging one energy with another energy, because you're not using natural gas as your energy source, but you need then electricity and renewable electricity for your green production. So I say it's not a quick fix.

Yes, but on the other hand, we have seen— I can now speak as a European for Europe— that between 2022 and 2025, 30% of the fertilizer capacities, so the assets, have not been used. So the production of fertilizer in Europe has gone down. Now, let's talk about a very, very concrete example that brings Global South and Global North together, where you are involved, where you possibly also are involved, and that's a project that you run together with an Indian company, ACME, in Oman, which is basically yet another country, but for markets in Germany. Can you describe shortly what led you to start this project before we will come to the role of H2Global in that context. And by the way, the colleagues from India, from ACME, have to, well, excuse themselves. They would have loved to be here, but at the moment also the plant has been attacked in Oman, so they have to take care of the supply chain basically. But can you describe that concrete project and why you decided to make an 18-year, 1-8-year offtake agreement with ACME for the Oman plant?

Yes. And as I said also in my introduction, there are sites, of course, that doesn't have the front end. They don't produce their own hydrogen and their own ammonia, so they import or they don't produce enough of their own ammonia to, to feed their fertilizer plant. And already today, we as a company actually import quite a large part of the ammonia that we use in our different plants in Europe. So this is part of our plan to decarbonize. I mean, we will look at— we have, as we said, the green production, although a very small demo plant in Norway. We are changing our asset in, in the Netherlands, in Sluiskeel, now to be with CCS carbon capture that would start sequestering that to the Northern Lights later this year. And then we look at offtakes from third-party producers of, of clean ammonia. And ACME was one of that part of, of getting clean ammonia into our assets in, in Europe.

So this shows already that the structural change takes place, even if that part that you signed 18 years for is, I think, 1/10 of their production capacity, which is a start. It's a good start, but if there are off-takers in the room, feel free. I think there is an ongoing production, and this is important to support this now, which makes this transition, transformation possible and visible. Markus, you are about to open an office in Muscat, which is Oman. You, as H2Global, have started MOUs with Oman, with India, with many other countries in the world. How do you see this, and where can you support this concrete project?

First of all, like, thank you very much, Fjordur. H2Global, like a global initiative, we are becoming even more global. We have an office in Tokyo, we have an office in Latin America now in Brazil, and the Middle East is, of course, very promising and very important for us as an institution.

Don't forget Brussels.

Brussels as well, of course, no doubt about that. There are many, many challenges we are facing right now, and we are always talking about realism and what we need to face. What we are facing right now and currently is climate change. It is still there. We have multiple crises worldwide right now. So all that we have to take into consideration by saying we have to become faster if we want to reach our climate goals. 2030, it is already, you know, Everybody knows that these 1.5-degree goal, we will not match. It is not possible, but nevertheless, we have to be as fast as possible. That means we need scale. We need scale, and what we really need is certainty. What we need to have is certainty in regulation. So if right now we have the discussions within Europe that whatever these delegated acts, these RED III is now coming, How to interpret it, how to put it into practice, and so on. What we are facing right now is as well a financial crisis because it was mentioned here before, we have to have certainty in that particular manner that the financial industry is able to understand hydrogen projects. Otherwise, they will not finance hydrogen projects. So what we really need is certainty in that particular manner where H2Global can come into play. And I would say this is another very important thing, and this is what we have seen as well in these multiple crises right now. What we need to have is international cooperation, and H2Global in that particular manner is a platform where countries can really cooperate with each other. We are organizing right now auctions on behalf of one government. We are organizing and executing auctions on behalf of several governments who are using H2Global jointly for their initiatives, for their support given to the market. This is what we want to do, and this is the reason why we are intensively coordinating our work now with the government of Oman, for example, or with the United Arab Emirates, with India, who is a very, very strong and very active player in this particular manner. Another country we are cooperating very closely with, is Brazil, for example. We have signed joint cooperation agreements with UNIDO, with the World Bank, to support the Brazilian government now to become even faster and bigger and better in the hydrogen sector. So all these things, I think, are very important, and we have to do it now in parallel. We couldn't wait now for, you know, just finalizing one step and then doing another step. So we have to do as much as possible in the same time to speed up.

So H2Global could be used also as a supplier for the contract for difference, something— well, I cut it, explain it very simple. So the gap between the fossil price, which was very low in the past, and the renewable price, which was higher, we have heard from the previous panel that the current grey price, so fossil price, is around $650, that's in the region of the renewable price, so possibly you're not needed anymore. But I want to allude to something else, because you mentioned the climate goals, and nobody in this room doubts that climate action is paramount and doesn't need to be stopped. However, my question is, is the reasoning, given such a situation where you see that the price goes up, that there's a shortage, Could the reasoning not change but be expanded to independence? Because this hydrogen production locally helps you to do a product that you imported previously yourself. You get more independent. And those who import it anyway, take Germany mainly, they can diversify because there are many, many players You mentioned some countries. Are we about to see this shift from climate action only to climate action plus independence, plus resilience? I start with you and then I come to Wiebke.

Just to give you an example, and what makes me a little bit, let's say, nervous right now, what we have seen right now is a supply shock in the fossil market, and we are trying to answer it now in, you know, in providing even or supporting the demand sector to create even more demand. That sounds a little bit strange for me. What you have mentioned as well, we need to talk about resilience, we need to talk about these strategies, and we have to talk about independence. Countries need to be a little bit more independent. We have to think about diversification of imports and all that, And in the end, it will always relate to cooperation between countries. And I think that's right now, that's really key, and that's something we should do. For me, the Chinese government is always a good example. What we have seen in the last few years is a strategy for the hydrogen sector. They're executing this strategy. When you see the prices for electrolyzers, when you see the capacities they have built in the last few years, it is enormous. It is really a success story, but it is based on a strategy. What we have to have is now, I would say, a very consolidated, a joint strategy between countries, and then we have to execute them. Then in the end, I would say we can see promising results even in a few years of time or in a shorter period of time.

You mentioned countries, but it's also companies. So, like, Yara and Wiebke, how do you see this not change of narrative, but expansion of a narrative?

Yes, and I think the geopolitical landscape and the crises we've had has brought us to the fact that we need to be more resilient and autonomous in different regions. But at the same time, I think these commodity prices and commodities around the world will continue also after the crisis. I think that's the challenge also with being less dependent and more resilient, but at the same time, if you do that and you structurally build out a lot and the crisis is over, will you have stranded assets if that wasn't you know, the place where you would have abundance of the right energy or the right feedstock. So this is complex, and I think therefore it's a question of trying to do both. You know, you need to continue working on a global scene at the same time as you have to think about your own resilience. So it will be almost like Winnie the Pooh. Yes, we need both. Yeah.

You talk about commodities, that brings us to an end because as commodities at the moment are used as a weapon, I mean, if you can block things, you can use it as a weapon. It's not a traditional commodity anymore. Let's create a new commodity. This hydrogen as a molecule that helps to initiate derivatives, other products like green ammonia here, Haber-Bosch principle, creates new strategic commodities, and that's what this all is about. It's the right moment. Congratulations again to the team, to the Unido team led by Petra here, that basically you find— found exactly the right moment to redefine hydrogen. It will become a new commodity. Thank you very much. Thanks, Markus. Thanks, Wiebke.

Thank you very much for this fireside chat, which was very interesting and showed in-depth experiences in the industry of hydrogen when it comes to fertilizers. Um, we're heading towards the end of this conference, but we of course have some more highlights for you. There will be another panel discussion coming after the break, and of course then we will take action today. We will formalize new partnerships, and we will have the Austrian Federal Minister of Economy, Energy, and Tourism, Wolfgang Hartmannsdorfer, with us later this afternoon, and Gerd Müller. He is Director General of UNIDO. They will also sum up the whole conference and give us some insights on their perspectives on the topic. Now I'd like to invite you to have another coffee break for about 15 minutes, and please be on time because we are a little overdue. And it's a quick moment for me to say now thank you to the Global Environment Facility, GEF, for making this conference possible, and to our partners INEO for supporting today's coffee breaks, the Hydrogen Council for hosting lunch, IHFCA and IHEC for this evening's reception that you will also be invited to later on, and a special thanks to Hydrogen Europe for their vital role in organizing this event. Have a good and short coffee break and see you in 15 minutes. When the lady in red is entering the stage, it means we're going to continue. And I'm very delighted to say for the last time today at this UNIDO's first conference on hydrogen in industry, welcome back. It's good to have you online as well with us. It's been a very long day with a lot of impulses, with a lot of information. So thank you for staying with us. Thank you for staying with us is a good keyword. We have did the translation for 15 more minutes, and then we will all switch to English, so you can also train your English skills today, not only your skills concerning hydrogen. We have been covering a lot today, from cooperation to finance supply chains, AI, and fertilizers. And now we turn perhaps to the most symbolic shift of all, which is steel. Steel literally builds our world, but steel also, as you know, is one of the world's largest industrial CO2 emitters. And so decarbonizing it with hydrogen is important, and it's one of the biggest challenges, but also one of the biggest opportunities of this decade. And let's dive right into this very, very important topic. I'm pleased to welcome to the stage our moderator, Harley Higgins Watson from the Breakthrough Agenda, our presenter Ridzwan Yandjua from the World Steel Association, and our panelists Matthias Pastl from Voestalpine, Maria João Duarte from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Piedad García Álvarez from IKEA, and last but not least, Karina Souza from Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy. Welcome all of you on stage. The panel is yours. Thank you.

Thank you so much, and thank you everybody for coming back from that well-earned coffee break, um, for what I believe is our final panel discussion of the day. And aptly, we'll be exploring perspectives from the end of the value chain as we look at the transition of the steel sector. I'm Harley Haines Watson, and I'm the hydrogen facilitator for the Breakthrough Agenda. And we're an international framework that coordinates the multilateral landscape to make clean technologies the default solution for the heaviest emitting sectors by 2030, steel being one of them. And I think that's where today's conversation gets really, really interesting, being one of the largest sources of industrial emissions, but for a long time, dare I say, not really a credible clean pathway forward. Hopefully hydrogen is the opportunity that changes that, and I feel really privileged to be joined by such a knowledgeable set of panelists to explore that opportunity. But before we do, I'd like to invite Rizwan Rizwan Janjua, who is Head of Technology for the World Steel Association and probably best placed to frame our discussion today and kick us off. Please, Rizwan, over to you.

Hello, everybody. It's an honor to be among this distinguished audience. I'm going to talk about how the steel industry is on the way to transformation. So looking at the steel industry, we can see 3 distinct stages of transformation. The first one is the optimization. Using the current technology, there is quite a lot of room for improvement. And then we are talking about the second stage, which is the transition, using the current technology but a bit of modification. And then the third stage, which is the green, that is based on the development and deployment of breakthrough technologies. So what are those features? Of those 3 different stages. So the first one, as I highlighted there, that there is quite a room still available using the existing technologies by, for example, using high-quality iron ore, by beneficiating it, also energy optimization and lots of other things that can reduce any steelmaking site's CO2 intensity by 5 to 10%. We have not explored all of those possibilities yet. There is room, and we have tested that methodology and those possibilities around the world in over 25 sites. The transition is based on using current technologies, but using the bolt-on methodologies, for example, carbon capture and storage by fuel switching, using hydrogen even in the existing equipment like blast furnaces, and also the green sources of energy. The breakthrough technologies require us to have access to very large amounts of green energy, and it's a very energy-intensive industry, so we would need very huge amounts. I am going to highlight what sort of requirements we are looking at. But at the same time, the raw material becomes very important when it comes to the green transition as well. When we look at the timeline, the stages 1 and 2 are going to last for quite a while in those new economies and the maturing economies like India and China. For the green one, we can already start seeing some of the forerunners, for example, in the north of Europe, and they are working with green energy, which is plentiful. Take the example of Sweden, and we have got some examples even in Austria, but all of those are looking at very high-quality iron ore, which is not much to go around. So we will have to start working on the technologies which can utilize the other iron ore qualities as well. So the pinching points or the pressure points are energy and raw material. So my subsequent slides are going to talk about these 2 key constituents. So let's have a look what the steel industry looks like by 2050. There are all sorts of predictions and forecasts and models available there. So right now we can see that there are 2 main ways by which steel is produced. One of them is using iron ore, and the other one is, is using the recycled material, which is the old obsolete scrap. So roughly right now, it is— the ratio is 2/3 and 1/3 by the primary sources and the secondary sources. By 2050, and this estimation is coming from the modeling work that International Energy Agency did a few years back, says that that ratio is going to change. So the secondary or the EF is going to become roughly 60%, and the BOF route, which is the primary source, is going to come down to roughly 40%. But that does not mean that we will have our hands on plentiful of scrap. Most of that is going to be taken up still by the ore, which is the primary source, And yes, we will have some more scrap when the economies mature. For example, China and India, when more and more scrap starts showing up which can be utilized. But that also leads to another possibility where we see a third route of ironmaking, and that is the direct reduction right now, which stands at roughly 5%. It's not much, but it is going to become fourfold. It's going to increase to 20%. So which is quite a significant number there. But not all of that is going to come from hydrogen. And that's a statement that needs to be underlined there, that it's a very energy-intensive industry. And if we look at the numbers, the amount of hydrogen that will be required to make a complete transformation, we simply do not have that enough. So we are looking at roughly 8% of that coming from green hydrogen. So let's look at the key aspects. As I said, there are raw materials and energy. Looking at the raw materials, we can divide the global supply of iron units into 3 brackets. The biggest one is the low grade, and then we have got the medium grade, and then the high grade. The high grade, we consider anything that is above 57% of iron in the ore, and that is roughly 250 million tons. You can expand that number even a bit higher there But not enough to make all of that or use all of that into, into green energy, green steel. So we will have to start working on technologies which can utilize the medium-grade iron ore as well. And just to highlight there that the low-grade is suited only for the blast furnaces. Energy. What changes in the future? You cannot beat the laws of physics. The energy required will stay the same, which is roughly 18 to 20 gigajoules of energy per ton of crude steel. If we would like to transform the industry, what we are looking at is a complete transformation of the energy system as well. So it means that if we were to replace carbon, which is the current source, or by far the largest source of our energy, and replacing it with hydrogen, what we need to start looking at is that all of that work is done by the ancient capture of energy, which was turned into coal and gas. What we need to start doing now, if we were to have a green future, is that We capture it and find ways of storing that green energy as well. The energy demand, if you look at for a very small to medium-sized site which makes roughly 2 million tonnes of crude steel, would need over 700 megawatts of electrolyzer capacity. And we are looking at roughly 22 tonnes of hydrogen every hour. being consumed at that site. So let that number sink in. So it's not a small challenge that we are looking at. And as I said there earlier, that capture and turning electrons into molecules, that's where most of the energy goes. So if you look at the pie chart here, most of the energy is used in an electrolyzer, and only 10 to 15% of that is used in making iron. And even a smaller portion, which is roughly 5 to 10%, will be used for making steel. So what we can aim for and hope for is that the steel industry is making leaps and bounds in terms of developing technology. We see those examples already, the forerunners in several countries. What needs to happen is that there has to be a dialogue across the value chain as well as the policy which is permissible and helps make that transformation possible. So I will finish with that. Thank you very much for your attention.