If last week was about consolidation, this one was about divergence. One of the world’s flagship green hydrogen mega-projects quietly removed hydrogen from its business plan, while a small British company reported the kind of fuel-quality result the aviation industry has been waiting a decade for. And in the background, China kept building. Here is our review of the week of 24–31 August.
Australia’s biggest green hydrogen project drops hydrogen altogether
On 27 August it emerged that the Australian Renewable Energy Hub in the Pilbara — for years the poster child of export-scale Power-to-X — is being rescoped into a pure 15 GW renewable power project. Hydrogen and ammonia production have been removed from the plan following BP’s exit and continued funding uncertainty. The original design foresaw roughly 26 GW of wind and solar feeding electrolysers to produce green ammonia for export to Asia. Coming weeks after three Australian regional hydrogen hubs were wound up, this is less a single project failure than a verdict on a whole business model: export-scale green ammonia without binding offtake and a bankable price signal is not financeable in 2026. The renewable electricity, notably, is still being built — it is the molecules that lost their case. (Source: Fuel Cells Works)
Zero Petroleum: e-SAF that meets the Jet A-1 specification
The counterweight came from Oxfordshire. On 27 August, UK synthetic fuel company Zero Petroleum reported that independent testing confirms its e-SAF — made from green hydrogen and CO₂ captured from air, combined via its own Fischer-Tropsch process — meets the Jet A-1 specification, and could therefore in principle be used at 100% without today’s blending limits. The company now targets ASTM qualification and a commercial-scale plant, Plant Zero.2, following its demonstration facility Plant Zero.1 near Oxford. Blending caps are one of the least discussed brakes on e-SAF: even a fully certified synthetic kerosene is today limited to a share of the tank. A drop-in fuel that removes that ceiling changes the arithmetic of every airline decarbonisation roadmap — provided the volumes and the price follow. (Sources: Fuel Cells Works, GreenAir News)
Austria: hydrogen fires a cement kiln for the first time
At its Gmunden plant, building materials group Rohrdorfer ran the first hydrogen combustion trial in an Austrian cement works, covering part of the kiln’s heat demand with co-fired hydrogen over two days. Linde supplied the hydrogen by trailer via a mobile unloading station developed for the trial. The technical verdict was positive — hydrogen works in clinker production — but project manager Florian Wesenauer was equally clear on the economics: the cost of this hydrogen is currently still many times too high. That combination, technically proven and commercially out of reach, is the defining condition of industrial hydrogen in 2026. (Sources: World Cement, Fuel Cells Works)
China now holds more green hydrogen capacity than the rest of the world combined
While Europe and Australia cancel, China builds. According to BloombergNEF figures reported on 26 August, China has more than tripled its operational green hydrogen capacity since the end of 2024 to close to 250,000 tonnes a year — more than twice the rest of the world put together — with roughly 0.9 million tonnes under construction. Beijing’s latest five-year plan targets an eightfold increase to 2 million tonnes a year by 2030, which will require significantly more than the existing pipeline. Whatever one makes of the target, the direction of travel matters for European industry: electrolyser manufacturing scale, and eventually cost leadership, is being decided while Western projects are being cancelled. (Sources: Bloomberg, China Money Network)
Briefly noted
- H2APEX grows on services and its own molecules. The German developer reported half-year revenue of €7.0 million on 28 August, up 67.5% year on year, driven by its project management contract for the 100 MW IPCEI project «WAL — Hydrogen from Lubmin» and by selling 45 tonnes of its own green hydrogen. (Fuel Cells Works)
- The European Commission goes shopping for an electrolyser. On 24 August the Joint Research Centre at Ispra opened a €1.1 million tender for a PEM electrolyser system to turn solar power into green hydrogen; bids close on 1 October. (Fuel Cells Works)
- Predicting when hydrogen breaks metal. Fraunhofer IWM presented a simulation model that forecasts fatigue failure of metal components in hydrogen environments — relevant for turbines, welds and pipeline infrastructure, because it replaces expensive long-duration testing and allows thinner wall thicknesses. (Fuel Cells Works)
What it means for Power-to-X
Three lessons travel well to Switzerland. First, the projects surviving this shake-out are the ones anchored in identified demand — the Pilbara had gigawatts but no buyers, while smaller demand-led plants keep coming online. Second, the binding constraint is increasingly cost and regulation rather than technology: Rohrdorfer proved hydrogen fires a cement kiln, and Zero Petroleum may have solved a fuel-specification problem that policy alone could not. Third, capacity building does not pause while Europe deliberates. For a country still shaping its hydrogen framework, the useful question is not whether Power-to-X works, but who will be supplying the equipment and the molecules once it does.
🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.
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