H2eart for Europe has published a new position paper calling for a harmonised European framework for hydrogen quality, highlighting its importance for the cost-efficient ramp-up of Europe’s hydrogen market.
Hydrogen quality is one of the key technical and regulatory questions facing the emerging hydrogen value chain. Standards on purity and impurity thresholds will directly affect investment decisions across production, imports, transmission, storage and end-use. While regulatory clarity is needed, we underline that overly stringent, uniform purity standards could impose disproportionate costs on the system and slow market development.
Balancing harmonisation and flexibility
Our position paper argues that hydrogen quality regulation should enable interoperability and cross-border trade while reflecting the different requirements of market participants and differentiating thresholds between critical and lower- or non-critical impurities.
Against this background, H2eart for Europe calls for a fit-for-purpose approach that:
- Defines a minimum hydrogen content and limits for critical impurities
- Allows flexibility for lower- and non-critical components within a defined bandwidth
- Aligns hydrogen quality with actual end-use requirements
- Manages purity across the entire hydrogen value chain
This approach would provide certainty to investors while avoiding prohibitively high system-wide purification costs.
Recognising the essential role of underground hydrogen storage
The paper highlights that underground hydrogen storage (UHS) will be essential to a functioning hydrogen market, as it can structure intermittent supply to match baseload demand from industrial users and other consumers.
At the same time, UHS can affect hydrogen quality, particularly where existing gas storage facilities are repurposed for hydrogen. Very high purity requirements could therefore create technical and economic constraints, including the need for costly purification technologies.
Future hydrogen quality rules must reflect these operational realities and ensure that impurity thresholds are feasible for storage system operators, particularly for repurposed facilities that will be needed to achieve scale in underground hydrogen storage.
Supporting Europe’s hydrogen market development
The position paper calls for a harmonised European framework that sets clear roles and responsibilities for quality management across the value chain. It also recommends incentivising purification at the most cost-efficient points in the system and ensuring that purification costs are allocated efficiently.
By combining harmonisation with flexibility, Europe can support cross-border hydrogen trade, unlock investment in critical infrastructure, avoid unnecessary costs for consumers and ultimately enable the decarbonisation of the European energy system.
The position paper is available here.