You can be forgiven, when trying to unpack what’s happening in the hydrogen sector, for suffering from a degree of confusion. After all, signals can often be mixed and the details behind headlines important.

Take the business of electrolyser manufacturing as an example.

Plug Power are no doubt cracking open the champagne following “a contract for the delivery of 3 GW of electrolyser capacity for a large-scale green hydrogen and ammonia facility in the Northern Territory of Australia developed by Allied Green Ammonia (AGA)”.

As well as supplying hardware, Plug will also “develop a basic engineering and design package (BEDP) for the project”.

You may well be thinking that a project which aims to “deploy 4.5 GW of solar capacity to power Plug’s electrolysers, enabling the production of around 2,700 metric tonnes per day (TPD) of green ammonia”, and is “estimated to require an investment of USD 6.5 billion (EUR 6.34bn)” needs more than just a ‘basic’ design.

Which is where we get into a first source of potential confusion: despite the eye-catching electrolyser contract headline, this isn’t a project which is even certain to happen – having yet to take a final investment decision (FID). The latter is “expected by the second quarter of 2025” and, if positive, the start of “production and delivery of proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysers” will be “in the first quarter of 2027”.

This ‘basic engineering and design package’ is thus designed to “provide crucial technical details and engineering specifications to attract investors and finalise financing”.

In Norway, Nel employees can be forgiven for looking rather more sombre, not least because many will soon be out of work.

That’s because the company “will cut jobs and temporarily halt production of its alkaline hydrogen production technology” at its 1GW Herøya plant.

The main reason is simply a lack of demand for product, given that “order intake in 2023 and 2024 fell short of expectation, with several customer projects delayed or at risk of being cancelled”. This was exacerbated by the fact that one particularly unhelpful customer has even “failed to pay for delivered equipment, with payment now being more than a year overdue”.

On the other hand, the US subsidiary of this very same company has now gained “about USD 29 million in additional investment tax credits for its planned manufacturing expansion in Michigan” (a planned 4GW factory).

This brings Nel an accumulated total of “close to USD 200 million in support in both tax credits and other grants from the state of Michigan and Department of Energy”.

However, even with all that in place, FID for the new facility “is not yet taken, and the build out of the site depends on demand”.

What electrolyser manufacturers need, therefore, is a pipeline of big green hydrogen projects needing to buy their equipment.

With Germany (election uncertainties aside) still seen as a crucial market for early hydrogen demand growth, another as-yet-unanswered question is: how much of this hydrogen supply will be domestic, and how much imported?

On the domestic front, Denmark’s Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and German Friesen Elektra Green Energy have initiated ‘Project Anker’, a “new 800 MW green hydrogen project launched in Northern Germany”.