In its August issue (08/2026), the German popular-science magazine Bild der Wissenschaft published a detailed German-language report by Hartmut Netz on the beginning of Germany’s hydrogen era — and on the obstacles that stand between ambition and reality. This article summarises the report in English for the Swiss Power-to-X community.
A flame goes out, an era begins
On 11 December last year, the orange flame of the gas flare in the industrial port of Lubmin on Germany’s Baltic coast went out. With it, the last natural gas had been burnt out of the 470-kilometre Opal pipeline — originally built to carry Russian gas from Nord Stream into the German transmission grid. The line is now filled with hydrogen, and a hydrogen flame burns in its place, visible only through a thermal-imaging camera: H₂ burns invisibly to the human eye. Converted by grid operator Gascade, the Opal pipeline becomes the seed of Germany’s so-called hydrogen core network.
A core network built largely from old gas pipelines
The core network is designed for green hydrogen made from renewable electricity. Around 9,000 kilometres of pipelines are planned — 40 per cent newly built, 60 per cent converted natural-gas lines — and by 2032 the network is meant to reach every German federal state, as set out in the National Hydrogen Strategy of 2020. The estimated cost of 19 billion euros is to be recovered over time through network fees paid by hydrogen customers. Gascade’s next step is to connect the chemical region of Bitterfeld; in the medium term the company wants to lay lines as far as Ludwigshafen, home of chemical giant BASF, a hoped-for anchor customer. We covered the preparations for this repurposing on this blog in 2025 — now it is actually happening.
Why Lubmin?
The 2,200-inhabitant seaside resort has ideal conditions for producing green hydrogen at industrial scale: water from the Baltic Sea, electricity from offshore wind farms whose cables come ashore there, and a robust grid connection inherited from East Germany’s largest nuclear power plant, shut down in 1990. The former plant site is now an industrial park, and hydrogen firms are moving in. Rostock-based H2APEX plans a 300-million-euro factory whose first stage — a 100-megawatt electrolyser from 2029 — is to feed up to 10,000 tonnes of green hydrogen per year into the core network, with a possible expansion to 600 megawatts; the project is recognised by the EU as an IPCEI. Deutsche Regas plans a plant producing 30,000 tonnes per year in a first stage and up to 80,000 tonnes in a second, and wants to convert Lubmin’s short-lived LNG terminal into an import hub where climate-neutrally produced ammonia — a hydrogen derivative that liquefies at just minus 33 degrees Celsius, against minus 253 for pure H₂ — is cracked back into hydrogen, adding another 30,000 tonnes per year of imports.
Imports, and a European alternative
Germany’s National Hydrogen Strategy puts the country’s 2030 demand for green hydrogen at 95 to 130 terawatt-hours — far more than domestic renewable capacity could supply. Fifty to seventy per cent is therefore to be imported, and cooperation agreements exist with fifteen non-EU countries, including Chile, Morocco, Egypt, Kenya, Namibia, Canada and Saudi Arabia. Yet a study by the German Energy Agency Dena and the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research finds that Europe could cover almost all of its future demand competitively from domestic production: wind-, water- and sun-rich countries such as Norway, Spain and France could supply deficit countries like Germany and the Netherlands by pipeline, largely through repurposed natural-gas lines — making expensive overseas shipping mostly unnecessary.
The sobering part: demand is missing
«What use is a core network if there are no offtakers for green hydrogen?» asks Michael Sterner, professor of energy storage and energy systems at OTH Regensburg and member of Germany’s National Hydrogen Council. The euphoria of 2020 has given way to disillusionment. Steelmaker ArcelorMittal shelved its plan to run its two German plants on green hydrogen and is repaying 1.3 billion euros in subsidies already received, arguing that CO₂-free steel production is currently not economically viable. On the supply side, EWE buried a 50-megawatt electrolyser project in Bremen, LEAG dropped its Boxberg electrolyser-plus-storage plans, RWE and Uniper postponed green-hydrogen investments, and Equinor cancelled a planned North Sea hydrogen pipeline to Germany.
Prices and rules as the real brakes
The core obstacle is cost. Green hydrogen is made by electrolysis, electricity is expensive in Germany, and modern electrolysers convert just over 60 per cent of that electricity — more than a third is lost. Sterner also criticises the strict EU production criteria, which among other things require the renewable electricity used to come from newly built plants: «The EU criteria double the price,» he says, pointing to a Hydrogen Council position paper calling for simpler, more flexible rules in the early ramp-up phase. To help things along, the German government recently passed a law placing so-called blue hydrogen — made from natural gas, with the resulting CO₂ separated and stored underground — on an equal footing with green hydrogen, even though the capture technology catches only part of the CO₂. Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research expect hydrogen and its derivatives to cover between 9 and 26 per cent of total energy consumption in 2050 — a wide range that reflects open questions about which industries will defossilise via electrification and which via hydrogen, particularly for high-temperature processes above the roughly 400 degrees Celsius that heat pumps can reach.
White hydrogen: a wild card
The report closes with naturally occurring «white» hydrogen. First discovered by accident in Mali in 1987 — where a well still powers a village today — natural hydrogen made headlines in 2023 when geoscientists found a reservoir in a disused coal mine in Lorraine estimated at 250 million tonnes, twice the world’s annual hydrogen production. Drilling is under way across Europe, with the greatest potential seen in the Central Alps, the western Pyrenees and Spain’s Sierra Nevada. PIK researcher Felix Schreyer remains cautious: the deposits may be too small or too hard to reach to make a meaningful contribution, and transport from remote sites could be expensive. «Ultimately, we still know too little about white hydrogen.»
The view from Switzerland
For the Swiss Power-to-X community, the report is a reality check with a constructive core: the infrastructure for defossilisation is being built, and repurposing existing gas pipelines works. What is missing is not technology but demand-side certainty and pragmatic framework conditions — precisely the levers SPIN keeps pointing to in the Swiss debate. When rules double the price of green hydrogen and offtakers see no reliable path, even a 19-billion-euro network risks running empty. Germany’s experience next door is worth watching closely.
Source: Hartmut Netz, «Mit Wasserstoff in die Zukunft», Bild der Wissenschaft 08/2026, pp. 52–57.
🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.
On 22 September 2026, 10–18h, the Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026 takes place at the Kursaal Bern under the theme «Reality Check with Net Zero». It is co-organised by energie-cluster.ch and SPIN, with Réseau H2 Suisse Romande as partner. Learn more and register.