08/19/2026
🌍 Bird & Bird's International Green Hydrogen Report 2026 offers a cross-country view of how regulation, funding, infrastructure and applications are evolving.
It also shows a pattern: over 140 countries have national hydrogen strategies, yet the gap between ambition and deployment is widening, not closing.
The message: the challenge is shifting from setting hydrogen ambitions to making the whole system work.
⚖️ More countries now have strategies, targets, certification schemes and dedicated regulatory frameworks. That policy groundwork matters.
🇳🇱 The Netherlands is a useful case. From January 2026, hydrogen activities are formally regulated under the new Energy Act, and the national Hydrogen Backbone is being built largely by repurposing existing gas infrastructure rather than building new. That's a pragmatic, system-level choice.
📜 Certification is also decisive. Without mutually recognized Guarantees of Origin across borders, cross-border hydrogen trade stays fragmented.
⚖️ The bottleneck is regulatory harmonization, certification, and infrastructure sequencing.
📉 Deployment tells a different story. In Europe, renewable hydrogen remains significantly more expensive than fossil-based hydrogen, while installed electrolyzer capacity is far below earlier targets.
⚡Hydrogen policy cannot be designed independently from renewable generation, grids and electricity pricing.
🏗️ Infrastructure matters just as much as production: pipelines, storage, ports, refueling, permitting and credible offtake need to develop together.
🎯 And not every application creates the same system value. The strongest case remains where direct electrification is difficult, or hydrogen is already an essential feedstock.
🌍 The country profiles also reinforce an important point: there is no single hydrogen pathway. Resource availability, industrial structure, infrastructure and regulation shape very different national strategies.
🔎 What remains open: whether regulatory alignment across jurisdictions can move fast enough to match the pace of physical infrastructure rollout. Ex*****on speed on the legal and market-design side, not electrolyzer cost curves, looks like the real constraint.
The question for the next phase may therefore be less “How much hydrogen can we produce?” and more “Where does hydrogen create the highest value within the energy system?”
