By Anna Lóránt, Environmental Defense Fund Europe, and Marion Revest, Transport & Environment, first published on Hydrogen Insight: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/policy/opinion-evidence-first-why-the-e…
(On behalf of 11 organisations: Bellona Europa, CAN Europe, Deutsche Umwelthilfe, Environmental Defense Fund Europe, ET Fuels, Everfuel, Germanwatch, Norsk e-fuel, SkyNRG, Transport & Environment, Verso Energy.)
Last week in Antwerp, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen convened industry and policymakers to address a central question for the Union: how to safeguard Europe’s competitiveness in a rapidly shifting global landscape. As that spotlight fades, the debate continues in Brussels, where leaders are grappling with energy security, industrial resilience, and mounting geopolitical pressure.
Yesterday, we – six independent non-governmental organisations working across environmental science, economics, and policy, together with five e-fuels and sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) producers – wrote to President von der Leyen and the four Commissioners responsible for climate, energy and industrial strategy. Our message is straightforward: the 2028 review of the Delegated Act on Renewable Fuels of Non-Biological Origin (RFNBO) must remain evidence-based, sequenced as agreed, and designed to protect both early movers and projects delivering high environmental integrity.
The hydrogen sector sits squarely within the energy security and competitiveness debate. A slower-than-expected market rollout and projects struggling to reach final investment decisions have prompted legitimate concern that clean hydrogen may not scale in time to support targeted decarbonisation of heavy industry and hard to abate transport sectors. Industry’s alarm bells over cost pressures and global competition deserve to be taken seriously.
But the appropriate response to market headwinds cannot be the premature reopening of recently agreed rules without evidence. Regulatory stability, legal certainty and policy credibility are preconditions for it. Undermining them now would risk deepening investor hesitation precisely when Europe needs confidence and clarity to mobilise capital at scale. This has been repeatedly confirmed by companies and partner countries alike.
A Framework Years in the Making
The final key pieces of the EU hydrogen regulatory framework were put in place in 2025. After years of consultation, political negotiation and technical design, producers, offtakers and investors finally have a full rulebook.
From the outset, including in the 2020 European Hydrogen Strategy, renewable hydrogen was prioritised because it can deliver the highest climate benefit. The requirements set out in the RFNBO Delegated Act, including those on additionality, and temporal and geographical correlation, were designed to ensure that those climate benefits materialise.
Scientific evidence strongly supports the rationale behind the existing safeguards. A 2024 peer-reviewed study led by TU Berlin (Zeyen et al., 2024) examined case studies in Germany and the Netherlands for 2025 and 2030 scenarios. It compared hydrogen production without additional renewable procurement against scenarios with annual, monthly and hourly matching. The conclusion is unambiguous: local additionality is required to guarantee low emissions. In Germany in 2030, the absence of temporal matching could lead to 10-30 kgCO₂ per kgH₂ higher consequential emissions compared to hourly matching (this is up to 3 times the CO2 emissions of unabated ‘grey’ hydrogen). In 2025 scenarios, impacts are even more pronounced. Meanwhile, flexibilities such as exceptions for negative prices or curtailed electricity already exist in the RFNBO framework and guarantee that this electricity can readily be used for producing RFNBO hydrogen.
In addition, the RFNBO rules form part of a wider framework encompassing a range of financial and non-financial incentives, including, for example, targets for sectoral uptake and financial support from the Innovation Fund. This framework strikes the necessary balance between climate ambition and the flexibilities and incentives needed to scale up the nascent clean hydrogen industry.
Are the Rules the Main Cost Driver?
Recent commentary suggests that RFNBO requirements are overly restrictive and are the primary reason for slower-than-expected deployment. These claims warrant scrutiny.
Estimates of the additional costs of hydrogen due to RFNBO rules cited in recent debates vary widely. Some modelling suggests significant impacts; other analyses show more moderate effects. As the European Court of Auditors has highlighted, such estimates are highly sensitive to underlying assumptions and modelling choices.
At the same time, the renewable hydrogen sector faces multiple structural challenges unrelated to the RFNBO rules: high and volatile electricity prices, electrolyser capital expenditure, network tariffs, infrastructure bottlenecks, permitting delays and demand-side uncertainty also linked to delays in policy implementation. Focusing narrowly on the RFNBO rules overlooks these broader cost drivers and risks misdiagnosing the problem.
Public Funds Require Public Value
Renewable hydrogen benefits from substantial public support – through the Innovation Fund, the Connecting Europe Facility as well as State aid measures and other national sources.
Where public money is involved, environmental integrity is not optional. This is foundational and a matter of accountability. Ensuring that supported projects deliver real and measurable emissions reductions protects both taxpayers and the long-term legitimacy of the sector. And it is aligned with Europe’s climate, energy security, and competitiveness goals.
Weakening safeguards prematurely would undermine Europe’s credibility as a global standard-setter for sustainable hydrogen at a time when global credibility is a strategic asset.
The 2028 Review Clause Exists for a Reason
The RFNBO Delegated Act already contains a review clause. An ongoing study is collecting evidence to assess the effectiveness of the rules and identify potential barriers to renewable hydrogen scale-up.
This is precisely how good governance should function: allow the framework to operate, gather data, assess impacts, then adjust if robust, independent evidence demonstrates that changes would accelerate deployment without undermining environmental integrity.
Bringing forward the review in the absence of such evidence would send a troubling signal: that political pressure outweighs empirical assessment.
Stability Enables Scale
Europe’s ambition should not be simply to deploy hydrogen quickly, but to deploy hydrogen wisely. That means hydrogen that is genuinely clean, system-compatible and globally trusted.
Early movers have invested under the current framework. National support schemes and State aid decisions have been structured around it. Reopening the core methodology now risks disadvantaging compliant projects and distorting policy coherence across Member States.
In an increasingly competitive geopolitical environment, policy certainty and credibility is a strategic advantage. Investors need clarity that rules will not be rewritten each year. Partner countries need confidence that EU definitions are durable. Industry needs predictable guardrails within which to innovate and reduce the real cost drivers.
As stated in our letter to the Commission, any future amendments should be grounded in robust empirical evidence, preserve the core objective of ensuring genuine emissions reductions, and avoid penalising early movers who have acted in good faith under the existing rules and demonstrated that the rules are operationally feasible.
Europe’s hydrogen market will only scale sustainably if it rests on solid foundations: stable governance, legal certainty, and demonstrable climate value. Now is the moment to reinforce these foundations, not reset them.