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Heavy Lifting: China's Paltry Hydrogen Pipelines

The infrastructure bottleneck in China's hydrogen dreams

20229 min read
Archive Notice: This article was originally published on macropolo.org on 2022. MacroPolo was the Paulson Institute's in-house think tank (2018–2024). This archived version preserves the original research for continued citation and reference.

China has ambitious plans for hydrogen energy, but its pipeline infrastructure is woefully inadequate. Without massive investment in hydrogen transport, production gains won't translate to widespread use.

The Pipeline Gap

China has only about 100 kilometers of dedicated hydrogen pipelines compared to thousands of kilometers for natural gas. Trucking hydrogen is expensive and inefficient at scale.