Hydrogen, often touted as a cornerstone for a sustainable energy future, holds a transformative potential for global greenhouse gas emissions reduction. However, a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of its actual impact remains essential as the world accelerates toward ambitious climate goals. New insights derived from an extensive analysis of planned hydrogen projects worldwide illuminate the complex reality of hydrogen’s emissions mitigation capacity. The study, recently published, meticulously dissects country-specific potentials and applications, revealing that the promise of hydrogen to decarbonize industries is significant but not without substantial caveats.
In projecting hydrogen’s role in reducing emissions by 2043, the findings underscore a critical distinction between theoretical potentials and practical outcomes. The assessment highlights Australia, the United States, and Mauritania as lead contributors under a business-as-usual scenario, collectively accounting for nearly one-third of the global emissions reduction potential from hydrogen projects. Their contributions predominantly arise from ammonia production and broadly categorized hydrogen applications, highlighting these sectors as pivotal leverage points in the ongoing energy transition.
However, the analysis cautions against over-optimism. Many announced hydrogen projects remain speculative, with uncertain materialization rates that cast shadows over projected benefits. Furthermore, the decoupling of hydrogen production and its applications complicates the emissions picture. International trade of hydrogen and its derivatives could geographically displace greenhouse gas emissions, shifting environmental impacts between countries and challenging simplistic attributions of emissions mitigation to production locales.
Delving deeper into sector-specific insights, ammonia production emerges as a formidable domain where hydrogen can achieve notable emission reductions. This is primarily due to ammonia’s role as a key intermediate in fertilizers and as an emerging energy carrier itself. The considerable emissions savings projected illuminate ammonia’s potential to serve as a strategic focal point for hydrogen deployment policies at national and international levels, especially in countries with substantial ammonia manufacturing capacities.
In parallel, the United States and the United Kingdom demonstrate diversified hydrogen applications—spanning refining, high-temperature heat provision, mobility, and hydrogen use not specified by sector—signaling an ecosystem-wide approach to hydrogen integration. This diversified portfolio reflects both the technological versatility of hydrogen and the varying industrial profiles of these nations, suggesting that tailored strategies rather than one-size-fits-all solutions will optimize emissions mitigation.
Yet, a more restrained low-carbon scenario, which incorporates alternatives such as direct electrification, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and biomass feedstocks, paints a less dramatic picture. Here, the global net emission reduction potential attributable to hydrogen shrinks significantly to below 0.2 gigatons of CO2 annually. This downscaled estimate acknowledges the competitiveness and attractiveness of low-carbon alternatives that may eclipse hydrogen in both efficiency and cost-effectiveness in several end-use sectors by mid-century.
Under the low-carbon paradigm, hydrogen’s emissions reduction focus narrows primarily to applications in ammonia, biofuels, refining, and steel-making. This realignment underscores the sectors where hydrogen’s unique characteristics truly confer climate benefits beyond what alternative technologies can achieve. However, some applications even see negative net impacts, where hydrogen projects could inadvertently increase emissions relative to counterfactual scenarios, emphasizing the critical need for rigorous evaluation and optimization of project designs and deployment scales.
Mauritania’s ascendancy in the low-carbon emissions reduction landscape is particularly compelling, evidencing how emerging economies with strategic hydrogen project commitments can play influential roles in the evolving global energy matrix. Panama, largely benefiting from biofuel applications, and the United Kingdom, with a diversified hydrogen portfolio, also stand out, illustrating how geography, resource endowment, and policy directions intertwine to shape hydrogen’s climate impact footprints.
These findings deliver two pivotal insights for policymakers and industry stakeholders. Primarily, hydrogen boasts the greatest climate effectiveness in sectors like ammonia synthesis, biofuel production, and steel manufacturing, guiding prioritization of investments and supportive regulations for maximal emissions dividends. Secondly, the prospective overall contribution of hydrogen must be tempered by the anticipated displacement of fossil-fuel-based operations with other low-carbon or carbon-neutral technologies under stringent climate policies, which might reduce hydrogen’s comparative advantage.
Importantly, this analysis invites a more nuanced dialogue about hydrogen’s role in achieving net-zero targets. It acknowledges the tremendous enthusiasm often surrounding hydrogen yet balances this by articulating realistic boundaries set by technological feasibility, economic competitiveness, and systemic interactions across energy systems. These results suggest a strategic, selective deployment of hydrogen rather than an indiscriminate scale-up will be essential to harness its genuine climate mitigation potential.
The study also underscores the dynamic interplay between hydrogen production locations and consumption destinations, which necessitates coordinated international governance frameworks. Together with robust trade mechanisms, these frameworks can ensure that emission reductions are real, measurable, and equitably distributed, rather than being merely geographically shifted through global value chains.
Emerging from the complexity of modeling scenarios, this work highlights the critical need for integrated policy approaches coordinating hydrogen production incentives, infrastructure investments, and sectoral decarbonization strategies. An orchestrated effort aligning hydrogen’s deployment with complementary technologies and pathways is vital to avoid suboptimal outcomes and to maximize emissions mitigation in a cost-effective, sustainable manner.
Ultimately, the research illuminates hydrogen’s multifaceted promise and challenges, reframing the narrative from hydrogen as a silver bullet to hydrogen as one of several strategically important tools in the decarbonization toolkit. It advocates for heightened scrutiny, data-driven decision-making, and adaptive policy frameworks that evolve with emerging evidence and innovations.
These nuanced conclusions extend an invitation to the global community—governments, industries, researchers, and civil society—to collaboratively steer hydrogen development toward applications with the highest climate returns. Doing so will require transparency in project reporting, rigorous lifecycle emissions accounting, and continuous evaluation to refine deployment pathways in alignment with global climate ambitions.
While hydrogen’s ambitions remain high, the pathway illuminated by this comprehensive study encourages informed optimism—recognizing hydrogen’s potent role in climate mitigation while candidly accepting its inherent limitations and the competition from other advancing decarbonization technologies. This balanced perspective will be crucial to ensuring that hydrogen’s integration into the global energy landscape fosters meaningful and enduring environmental benefits.
In the end, hydrogen’s future depends on unraveling the technical, economic, and geopolitical complexities revealed in this analysis, transforming potential into realized impact. Strategic prioritization, international collaboration, and adaptive governance will unlock hydrogen’s place in a resilient, low-carbon global energy future, helping avoid emissions pitfalls and unlocking synergies across diverse sectors and regions.
Subject of Research:
Global greenhouse gas emissions reduction potential of existing and planned hydrogen projects.
Article Title:
Global greenhouse gas emissions mitigation potential of existing and planned hydrogen projects.
Article References:
Terlouw, T., Moretti, C., Harpprecht, C. et al. Global greenhouse gas emissions mitigation potential of existing and planned hydrogen projects. Nat Energy (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-025-01892-9
Image Credits:
AI Generated
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-025-01892-9
Keywords:
Hydrogen, greenhouse gas emissions, climate mitigation, ammonia production, biofuels, steel-making, low-carbon technologies, carbon capture and storage, international trade, emission reduction potential, decarbonization pathways, energy transition, climate policy
