Hydrogen could play an important role in decarbonising energy-intensive industries, but its wider adoption depends on more than technological readiness. In this interview, Francesca Cavezza (European Aluminium) discusses the key policy, economic and infrastructure challenges shaping the uptake of hydrogen in European industry.
Has your perspective on hydrogen changed over the course of the deliverable?
Yes, in one specific way. At the beginning, I thought the main question was technology: does the equipment work well enough? It does. What changed for me is that I now think the real problem is economic, not technical. We saw that more than one billion euros were awarded in the Hydrogen Bank auction, but a large part of that capacity was later given back because the companies could not find buyers willing to pay the price they had bid. This showed me that the question is not “can we build this” but “can we guarantee, for fifteen years, that someone will pay for it?”. This is a financing problem more than an engineering one, and it needs to be solved as one.
If you had to identify one priority for European policymakers, what would it be?
Support hydrogen for longer periods, not in short rounds. Industry told us this directly: they do not need another one-time grant competition. They need stable support for operating costs, over many years, so they can plan a long investment. The actual support makes it very difficult for a steel or aluminium company to commit to a furnace conversion that costs billions of euros. If I could change one thing, it would be this: make the support predictable and long-term, connected to real demand, not a single payment.
What surprised you most while analysing the current policy landscape?
It matters for both, but for different reasons. In steel, hydrogen can directly replace the coal used in the core chemical reaction, so it removes emissions right at the source. This is why it gets so much attention there. In aluminium , hydrogen mainly comes in as a substitute for a natural-gas-based processes, either where electrification is not a realistic option, or where geography makes it more sensible choice, for instance. There’s also a broader value beyond direct use: hydrogen can store energy from renewables, so it can carry that clean electricity into industrial processes even when it is not consumed directly as power.
Are European industries ready to adopt hydrogen today?
Technically, they are closer than most people think: the furnaces, burners, and monitoring systems already exist and are being tested. Economically, not yet. In our survey, every company named costs as the biggest barrier, and it is not a small gap: producing with hydrogen is still much more expensive than the fossil-based process it would replace. On top of this, infrastructure is uneven: some regions are getting pipeline access, others are not, and the companies that supply the equipment told us that manufacturing capacity in Europe is not yet enough. So the honest answer is: the technology can be tested today, but the economics and the supply chains around it are not ready for full-scale use.
What role do research and innovation projects like HyInHeat play in this transition?
They solve a problem that policy and the market alone can’t easily solve: nobody wants to be the first to take the full risk. In our survey, technology providers said these projects are valuable because they share technical knowledge that would otherwise stay closed inside one company, and because they give a safer space to test how hydrogen systems work at real industrial scale, before a company risks and entire production line on it. They also build connections between researchers, equipment suppliers, and industrial customers, which later can become real projects. What they can’t do and nobody in the survey claimed they could, is fix the underlying cost and infrastructure problems by themselves. That is still the job of policy.
If you could leave readers with one message from this work, that would it be?
Do not treat “hydrogen for industry” as one single story. Steel and aluminium are following genuinely different paths, and policy should stop treating them the same way. Beyond this, if I had to choose one thought to leave with readers: the question is no longer whether hydrogen works for heavy industry. The real question now is whether Europe’s financial and regulatory support will stay stable and predictable long enough for companies to actually invest their money in it.