Opportunity losses of green hydrogen production globally, benchmarked against the global green hydrogen project pipeline

Green hydrogen has been proposed by some as a solution for hard-to-abate emissions. Assessment its enabled emission reductions typically use fossil-fuels as the counterfactual scenario, overlooking trade-offs from using renewable electricity (RE) that could otherwise have greater effects elsewhere. Here, we quantify the opportunity loss (tCO2/MWh) of using RE for green hydrogen globally using a global geospatial model to assess i) the available renewable electricity, ii) the annual green hydrogen production and iii) emissions effects from a range of end-uses, including direct use of RE, industrial electrification, supporting electric vehicles, powering heat pumps and a range of green hydrogen end-uses.

Results are assessed globally using i) the International Financial Institution Technical Working Group's mitigation factors for grid-connected renewables, ii) mitigation potentials for green hydrogen end-uses taken from Terlouw, T., Moretti, C., Harpprecht, C. et al. Global greenhouse gas emissions mitigation potential of existing and planned hydrogen projects. Nat Energy 10, 1503–1515 (2025) and ii) bespoke models for electrified end-use emissions savings. 

Global estimates of the renewable electricity availability and green hydrogen production potential under the cost-optimal electrolyser ratio and wind:solar hybridisation are included in Global_Results_H2_PEM.csv., with details of the optimal electrolyser sizing and wind:solar hybridisation for a 1 MW project at each gridcell.

Estimates of the mitigation effects and opportunity losses are benchmarked to the global planned green hydrogen project pipeline in IEA_Project_Benchmarking_Full.csv, with data taken from the International Energy Agency's Hydrogen Project Tracker.