Press Release  

Brussels, 3 Octobre, 2025  

The European Hydrogen Week concluded today as stakeholders called for an updated Hydrogen Strategy responding to current realities and emphasising the refocus on resilience.

Over 1200 people attended this new, agile conference-only EU Hydrogen Week to focus on key trends and discussions on how to navigate the next few years in European decarbonisation. From high level policy conferences to the B2B and Innovation forums, lawmakers, entrepreneurs, and representatives across the hydrogen value chain presented solutions to common challenges: slow implementation, high costs, cumbersome regulations.

To address these issues, a renewed Hydrogen Strategy to deliver Europe’s resilience and enable its energy sovereignty is urgently needed. For the European hydrogen sector to strive and provide the continent the resilience it is aiming for, a number of priorities must be addressed as part of an updated Hydrogen Strategy:

• Enforcement: Incomplete transposition and uneven implementation of key legislations like the Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) or the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation slow down the clean energy transition. New enforcement tools should be deployed.
• Infrastructure:Europe must urgently roll out and scale up the required infrastructure to connect producer and end-user Member States and enable the production, storage, and transport of hydrogen and its derivatives throughout the continent.
• Public funding: Creating an Industrial Decarbonisation Bank, prolonging the Hydrogen Bank and expanding the reach of the European Investment Bank will be key.  The national revenues from the auctioning of ETS allowances should be used to deploy hydrogen and derivatives. Governments should commit funding to an eSAF pilot tender using a double-sided auction mechanism.
• Lead markets and resilience: Lead markets should provide predictable demand for clean technologies and basic products such as green steel or green fertilizers, notably through procurement rules. Doing so will create the demand needed to increase the supply of renewable and low-carbon hydrogen to such quantities as to contribute to Europe’s energy resilience.
• Simplification and early adoption protection mechanisms: While overly strict and needlessly complex rules should be simplified, first movers must be protected from these changes through new and existing mechanisms in order to ensure their projects do not suffer.

Renewable and low-carbon hydrogen will be essential to providing the flexibility and long-term storage capabilities Europe needs to reach its climate goals without sacrificing our energy autonomy.

“We’d like to thank everyone who made this 2025 European Hydrogen Week a success: our sponsors, partners, panellists, and attendees. What is clear from this week is that the sector is united around the fact that urgent action is needed from the European Union to ensure all our hard work and investment is rewarded, and that early movers are protected while we simplify legislation. The unlocking of the European hydrogen sector is essential to European resilience and energy autonomy. The Commission must take heed,” said Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, CEO of Hydrogen Europe.

For more info:

• SaveTheDate: European Hydrogen Week 2026
• Hydrogen Europe paper: Hydrogen for an energy resilient Europe
• Hydrogen Europe paper: The case for Green Lead Markets: ensuring competitiveness, energy security and decarbonisation
• The Hydrogen Europe Quarterly magazine: the geopolitics of hydrogen
• Clean Hydrogen Monitor
• Hydrogen Europe brief: Hydrogen-powered data centres: securing reliable and sustainable energy