Hydrogen imports play a critical role in Austria's efforts to achieve climate neutrality. With limited domestic capacity to produce sufficient green hydrogen, imports are essential to meet the growing demand in industry, transportation, and energy supply.
On behalf of the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation, and Technology, the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and Frontier Economics conducted a study on hydrogen imports to Austria. The selection of countries and hydrogen carriers was based on wind and solar energy potentials.
The hydrogen production costs of the countries result from varying combinations of wind and photovoltaic generation and different electrolyzer sizes, depending on local conditions. The Levelized Cost of Hydrogen (LCOH) is projected to decrease by 16–19% between 2030 and 2040.
In the optimistic scenario for 2030, routes involving ship transport (Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carrier, Liquid Hydrogen, Ammonia) have total costs of approximately €7–9 per kilogram of hydrogen, while costs for European pipeline routes are around €4 per kilogram.
The range between the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios is significant. By 2040, a reduction in hydrogen import costs is expected across all routes and destinations.
The following figure shows the costs for hydrogen imports (in €/kg), broken down into the cost components for all transport routes, in the optimistic case for 2040. Due to expected cost degressions of the components and higher efficiencies, this scenario results in total costs of around 5.5 - 6.5 €/kg for the other countries under investigation.
Pipeline imports have lower emissions compared to ship transport due to:
- Efficiency losses during conversion steps required for ship transport.
- Energy consumption for reconversion steps.
- Use of fossil fuels to operate transport ships, especially during empty return trips.
Regulatory and market barriers were identified, and recommendations for action were developed. Each recommendation serves as a building block for implementing a hydrogen import system. However, these recommendations only achieve their intended impact when applied in combination.
