Germany’s hydrogen industry promoted nearly 6 GW in paid reservations on the country’s emerging hydrogen core network as evidence of growing momentum in the hydrogen economy. However, examination of these figures reveals significant complexity in how the reservation data was compiled and presented to stakeholders.
The 6 GW headline represents a combination of roughly 2.7 GW in entry reservations, approximately 2.3 GW in exit reservations, and approximately 0.5 to 0.6 GW in inter-cluster transport capacity. When entry and exit capacities are added together in this manner, the accounting method creates a distorted picture of actual hydrogen demand. Hydrogen that enters the network at one location and exits at another appears twice in the calculation, once as entry capacity and once as exit capacity. This means the widely cited figure does not represent an actual commitment by German companies to produce, purchase, or consume 6 GW of hydrogen.
The reservations also represent relatively modest commitments compared to the infrastructure being developed. Against the planned Hydrogen Core Network’s design figures of approximately 101 GW of entry capacity and 87 GW of exit capacity by the early 2030s, the peak reservations account for roughly 3.3 percent of planned entry capacity and 2.6 percent of planned exit capacity. The reservations themselves are not traditional long-term pipeline contracts but rather optional commitments that allow customers to preserve access to future capacity while deferring decisions about actual usage. ONTRAS charges only 2.5 percent of the applicable annual capacity tariff to maintain these reservations, with some payments potentially credited toward actual future bookings.
The identifiable customers show that demand is concentrated in existing industrial applications, particularly refineries and facilities requiring hydrogen as feedstock or process input. TotalEnergies alone accounts for roughly 22 percent of Germany’s approximately 2.3 GW of exit capacity reserved. This concentration suggests that the practical hydrogen demand being demonstrated reflects existing industrial markets rather than the broader hydrogen economy that justified the extensive infrastructure investment. Germany already possesses hydrogen pipelines scaled appropriately for its core industrial sector, covering hundreds of kilometers.
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