Barriers to Creating a Market for Hydrogen: Insights from Global Roadmaps and Stakeholders in the United States

We analyze barriers to setting up a hydrogen market by using a PESTEL framework that examines political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal barriers. This framework is advantageous for analyzing macro-environmental factors to understand potential challenges and opportunities in creating such a market. Internationally, the framework was applied to analyzing barriers in 56 national hydrogen roadmaps, and domestically in the U.S. to semi-structured interviews with 43 stakeholders involved with hydrogen projects across the U.S. today. In the country-level international analysis, infrastructure development was the most identified barrier, with 43 countries including this factor. Infrastructure development included infrastructure for hydrogen storage, transportation, and distribution, and frequently alluded not only to the need for the infrastructure, but also the costs associated. The second most identified barrier was related to the need for market development - including but not limited to capital costs, economic competition, supply and demand matching, and first-mover reticence. For the domestic analysis, results from qualitative content analysis confirmed considerable variability across regions and stakeholder backgrounds. Particularly notable were divergent views about the importance of public understanding of and support for hydrogen projects, with industry respondents arguing this was not important and government and academic respondents considering it very important. The barriers seen as having the largest impact on deployment of hydrogen projects was a lack of regulatory clarity and lack of decision makers’ knowledge and awareness. Domestically, the most often introduced barriers were the need for the support of market demand, and the need to develop a hydrogen workforce.