Signed at the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2019 Ministerial side event on hydrogen, this partnership will be delivered through the InnovFin Advisory programme – a programme supported by the European Commission to advise companies to structure their R&I projects in order to improve their access to finance.
EIB will provide strategic financial advice and support to companies preparing to deploy large-scale hydrogen projects, making such solutions more readily available to consumers around the world.
Pierre-Etienne Franc, Hydrogen Council Co-Secretary and Vice-President of the Hydrogen Energy World Business Line at Air Liquide, commented, “This collaboration agreement signals to the market that a major shift is about to take place.”
“As confidence in hydrogen continues to grow, investors are coming to the table to back innovations and turn them into a reality.”
“Hydrogen Council members recognise the strong business case for hydrogen and, as we work alongside the EIB, our goal is to find new and innovative ways to fund these solutions.”
“Only when we scale deployment will we help realise the full potential of hydrogen to drastically decrease energy-related CO2 emissions.”
Hydrogen technologies are poised to play a major role in accelerating the energy transition but need to be scaled up. Today’s collaboration between the Hydrogen Council and the EIB is a step toward this objective.
As such, the Hydrogen Council is engaging the global investment community, with the understanding that transitioning towards a low-carbon economy will require significant financial commitments.
The hydrogen economy will require annual investments of $20-25bn until 2030. Though a significant investment, the amount is a fraction of what the world invests in oil and gas and renewable electricity per year, highlights the Hydrogen Council’s Scaling Up 2017 report.
The EIB and the Hydrogen Council’s cooperation will help to accelerate and facilitate access to funding for a number of hydrogen projects which will benefit from the EIB’s InnovFin Advisory support.
The agreement will also contribute to identify and source hydrogen investment projects which could be financed by the EIB, and in so doing address energy transition and carbon reduction challenges.
The Hydrogen Council and EIB, through InnovFin Advisory, will work together on identifying relevant hydrogen projects.
EIB will provide to the Council and its members extensive knowledge sharing and support to navigate the financing schemes that exist within and beyond the EIB, in order to bring hydrogen projects to life.
In addition, this collaboration will help to identify potential funding gaps related to hydrogen projects, and to explore the need for potential new financial instruments to address such gaps.
EIB Vice-President Ambroise Fayolle said, “We share common goals with the Hydrogen Council.
“The European Investment Bank is the European Union’s Climate Bank and financing new technologies and innovative projects that help to fight climate change is at the very heart of what we do.”
“This is why I am particularly delighted that through our InnovFin Advisory partnership with the European Commission, we are supporting the development of the hydrogen market in Europe, which will have a positive impact globally.”
IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol commented, “Hydrogen has great potential to play a key role in achieving a clean, secure and affordable energy future, as the IEA highlighted earlier this year in our groundbreaking report on the subject for the G20.”
“The world now needs to take tangible action by scaling up hydrogen deployment through projects that can make a difference.”
In a recent report, The Future of Hydrogen, the IEA made clear that hydrogen is experiencing unprecedented momentum around the world due to its potential to tackle various critical energy challenges.
Similarly, the Hydrogen Council has found that hydrogen can address 18% of global energy demand and abate one fifth of emissions, as it reported in its 2017 Scaling Up report.
