The hydrogen market is now transitioning from a speculative investment area to a sector with tangible commercial applications and real-world implementations.

While hydrogen is at the core of Europe’s plans to eventually wean itself off fossil fuels, there are currently few buyers for the gas as it’s expensive to produce and requires infrastructure investments to make its use more viable.

But there has been no organized market for hydrogen. That is the mission of the new consortium. It will be funded initially by the DOE, which has allocated $8 billion for hydrogen and pledged about $1 billion each to the seven hubs — some get a little more and some a little less. The remaining funding is available to the consortium for market creation.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) held a conference in Hanoi on February 22 to deploy Vietnam's hydrogen energy development strategy to 2030 with a vision until 2050.

But geologists now believe hydrogen is generated in large quantities when certain iron-rich minerals react with water, Alexis Templeton of the University of Colorado, Boulder, told the AAAS conference.

The aid provided by seven countries is expected to unlock an additional 5.4 billion euros in private investments, with 32 companies participating in 33 projects, the commission said.

To reduce CO2 emissions, world leaders call for heavy industry to switch from natural gas and coal to hydrogen fuel. When hydrogen burns, the only combustion product is water vapor.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $7 billion to launch seven Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) across the nation and accelerate the commercial-scale deployment of low-cost, clean hydrogen—a valuable energy product that can be produced with zero or near-zero carbon emissions and is crucial to meeting the President’s climate and energy security goals.

While a helpful decarbonization tool in theory, hydrogen blending offers numerous concerns and uncertainties.

The auction will award up to €800 million to renewable hydrogen producers in the European Economic Area (EEA). The support will take the form of a fixed premium in €/kg of renewable hydrogen produced over ten years of operation, therefore targeting the gap between the production costs and the demand’s willingness to pay.