Clean Hydrogen at a Crossroads

# Hydrogen

# Energy & Sustainability

# Digital Manufacturing

# Digital Transformation

# PLM

# Smart Manufacturing

# Innovation

Engineering breakthroughs and market signals from the front lines of the energy transition

Industry Signals

Clean hydrogen remains one of the most consequential and contested bets in the energy transition. In November, we covered the early momentum of clean hydrogen: digital threads accelerating turbine development, a three-tier demand model, and an equity-centered case for hydrogen deployment in emerging markets. We are continuing the conversation here.

You may have heard that researchers at the University of Hong Kong recently developed a new stainless steel alloy, SS-H2, which forms a second protective layer at high electrical potentials, making it resistant to corrosion in seawater electrolysis at a fraction of the cost of the titanium components typically used in electrolyzers. According to ScienceDaily, the team estimates the new material could reduce structural component costs in a 10-megawatt PEM electrolysis tank system by about 40 times. The lead researcher called the manganese-based passivation mechanism "counter-intuitive" and noted it "cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science." A reminder that hydrogen's most important breakthroughs sometimes arrive from materials science done quietly at the lab bench, and not some grand strategy.

In this edition of Industry Signals, we examine:

Bird & Bird's International Green Hydrogen Report 2026, tracking global momentum as the sector matures;

Bloomberg's energy transition outlook, which frames the broader investment and policy environment hydrogen operates in, with additional hydrogen-specific context from its Switched On podcast;

Siemens Energy's integrated digital engineering approach to hydrogen-capable gas turbine development;

The World Economic Forum and Bain & Company's Fuelling the Future, which lays out the business, finance, and policy case for scaling clean fuels; and

The European Hydrogen Observatory's repository of reports tracking the EU's evolving hydrogen policy, market, and research landscape.

Bird & Bird on the Global Hydrogen Market in 2026

Source: Bird & Bird | International Green Hydrogen Report 2026 | Published: March 2026

Bird & Bird's annual survey of global hydrogen market developments covers the legal, regulatory, and commercial landscape across Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, and the Americas. The 2026 edition maps both the progress made and the distance still to travel, with a clear-eyed view of where implementation is lagging behind stated ambition.

Key ideas:

Bird & Bird's sector coverage spans hard-to-abate industries where hydrogen's case is strongest, including maritime, railway, aviation, mining and more.

More than 140 countries have developed or are developing national hydrogen strategies, a significant increase from previous years. The report identifies cost competitiveness, infrastructure development, and regulatory harmonization as persistent hurdles for those countries.

Installed electrolyser capacity reached just over 308 MW in 2024 for the EU, nearly twenty times below the 6 GW target and far from the 40 GW hoped for by 2030. Green hydrogen costs remain around four times the cost of hydrogen produced from natural gas, with electricity costs and grid tariffs adding further pressure.

The EU Hydrogen and Gas Package entered into force in 2024/5, establishing harmonized rules for hydrogen transmission, distribution, and storage across member states.

Bloomberg on Energy Transition Progress in a Fragmented World

Source: Bloomberg | Published: January 6, 2026

Bloomberg’s Albert Cheung opens this piece with the observation that major economies are no longer running the same race. The US has subordinated clean energy leadership to AI dominance and fossil fuel export strategy, China continues to treat clean energy and energy security as coinciding priorities, and Europe retains its role as a climate policy leader while wrestling with industrial competitiveness. This fragmentation matters for hydrogen because the technology's trajectory depends on which policy levers governments choose to pull and how long they hold them.

Key ideas:

Bloomberg estimates that global clean hydrogen production is on track to reach about 5 million tons per year by 2030, representing a roughly sixfold increase over the next five years but far below earlier projections. This reflects how much the policy environment has cooled expectations.

Hard-to-abate sectors remain the most credible near-term destination for hydrogen, and the EU's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which is now in force, represents the clearest policy lever yet to make low-carbon industrial production economically competitive with fossil alternatives.

Despite the fragmented policy picture, Bloomberg's base case has clean energy continuing to grow, driven by economics that are increasingly difficult for any government to override. The structural argument for hydrogen in hard-to-abate industries like shipping, aviation, industrial heat, steel remains intact even as expectations are recalibrated.

For a more specific hydrogen focus, Bloomberg's Switched On podcast episode "The Hydrogen Hurdle: Costs, Policy and Progress" examines why global deployment has fallen well short of earlier forecasts, the different trajectories of blue and green hydrogen, and hydrogen's gradual foothold in shipping and aviation. In addition to that podcast episode, the Energy Transition Investment Trends report provides supporting data on capital.

Siemens Energy on Unified Design, Simulation, and Manufacturing for Hydrogen

Source: Siemens | Published: April 27, 2026

When Siemens Energy set out to develop gas turbines capable of running on up to 100% hydrogen, the engineering team encountered a problem familiar to anyone who has tried to move fast on complex hardware: disconnected software tools that don't talk to each other. They faced file conversions between three separate systems, version control problems across globally distributed engineering teams, and bottlenecks that slowed every iteration cycle. Addressing this required new manufacturing methods and a fundamentally different digital architecture.

Key ideas:

Siemens Energy addressed the coordination problem by adopting an integrated digital thread spanning NX CAD, NX CAM, Simcenter STAR-CCM+, and Teamcenter for product lifecycle management. This reduced software interfaces from three systems to one, eliminated file conversion steps, and enabled real-time collaboration across distributed engineering teams. These changes mattered directly to how fast hydrogen combustion systems could be tested and refined.

Additive manufacturing played a central role in bringing hydrogen-capable burner designs to life. The technology enabled engineers to create geometries, such as embedded cooling channels, that would be impossible or uneconomical to produce conventionally, while also reducing material waste and accelerating iteration from design to production.

The team completed approximately 1,000 simulation-driven design iterations before manufacturing, developed 26 burner design variants (more than four times previous capability), and delivered a fully green hydrogen-capable gas turbine with potential CO₂ emissions reductions of up to 65,000 tons annually.

Faster design cycles and tighter software integration improved efficiency and they expanded the design space the engineering team could actually explore, enabling hydrogen combustion geometries that a fragmented workflow would have made too slow to reach.

Two recent Siemens Energy partnerships reinforce this direction. Simon Fraser University and Siemens Energy Canada signed an MOU in March 2026 to advance joint research at SFU's one-megawatt Clean Hydrogen Hub, with Siemens Energy contributing expertise in automation, smart microgrids, and energy management; and in May 2026, Aternium selected Siemens Energy to lead front-end engineering design on a planned clean hydrogen facility in the US Mid-Atlantic, with the project designed to serve hard-to-decarbonize industries while also extracting heavy water for advanced industrial applications.

Looking Ahead

The market is recalibrating and the technology is proven. Siemens Energy's 26-variant burner program and 65,000-ton annual CO₂ reduction figure are concrete evidence of that. The committed capital is also real. There are still gaps, but the stainless steel story from Hong Kong is worth keeping in mind. Not everything in hydrogen's future will be unlocked by policy frameworks and offtake agreements. Some of it will come from a lab team spending six years explaining why manganese behaves differently than the textbooks say it should.

That's a wrap for this edition of Industry Signals. Have a report, use case, or event you'd like to see featured in an upcoming issue? Send a note via PM. We're always looking to spotlight what's shaping the future of industry, and recommendations from the Xcelerator Community are especially valuable. Your insights and experiences continually shape Industry Signals