Our biggest takeaways from Wood Mackenzie's Hydrogen Conference 2026

Seven months after our last gathering, the mood in the room had shifted. Not euphoric - this is still a market where caution is earned - but noticeably more grounded. The sense that the hydrogen sector has been perpetually on the cusp of something is giving way, tentatively, to a sense that some of those somethings are actually beginning to happen.

Conflict in the Middle East has placed energy security back at the top of the policy agenda. The European Commission has moved - unexpectedly early - to revisit core elements of its hydrogen regulatory framework. And the competitive landscape for electrolyser technology is being redrawn in ways that will have lasting implications for project economics and returns.

Fill out the form on this page to download our four biggest takeaways from the event - and read on for just two of the themes that generated the most debate on the day:

1. Refining has led the way, but replicating its success will not be straightforward

The asymmetry in green hydrogen’s early commercial progress is striking. Refinery projects currently account for two-thirds of European post-FID green hydrogen capacity. Understanding why matters, because the conditions that made refining such fertile ground are not easily exported to other sectors.
The logic is compelling in retrospect. Refiners are negotiating offtake agreements largely with themselves, eliminating the counterparty risk that stalls so many third-party deals. Projects benefit from captive, co-located demand, limiting the need for midstream investment. Balance-sheet financing is available at scale. And critically, the penalty regime under RED III creates a credible cost of inaction. In many cases, the cost of non-compliance exceeds the cost of securing green hydrogen supply.

Strip away any one of those conditions and the FID calculus changes materially.
The honest takeaway from our panel discussions was that replicating refining’s momentum across industrial clusters, shipping, or aviation will require policy frameworks that function with similar logic: demand-side incentives strong enough to make the cost of inaction real. Penalty-backed mandates, lead markets, or long-term contracts underwritten by credible public mechanisms are the instruments most consistently cited by developers and financiers as prerequisites for progress.

The midstream gap compounds the problem. For projects that cannot rely on co-located offtake, the absence of pipeline access and storage leaves both producers and potential consumers isolated. As Centrica’s Chris Wright noted, the market has built in the wrong order, prioritising decentralised production without first laying the infrastructure that makes the market work.

For investors, the implication is clear: projects with captive or near-captive offtake structures remain the lower-risk near-term opportunity. The broader market unlock depends on policy action that is still in progress.

2. The EU has opened the door to RED III revision - and the industry is divided on whether to walk through it

In April 2026, the European Commission announced a targeted revision of RED III’s RFNBO rules, pulling forward a review of additionality, temporal and geographical correlation requirements by approximately 18 months. On paper, this is what the industry spent years demanding. In practice, it has opened a genuine fault line.

The central debate is over temporal correlation - specifically, whether shifting from hourly to monthly matching requirements would meaningfully improve project bankability. Proponents argue it is the single most impactful change available to policymakers; the one lever that would unlock a cohort of projects already close to FID.

Others push back hard, and their concern is not technical. It is about what the act of revision signals. Projects have not stalled because of hourly correlation. They have stalled because demand mandates are absent. Loosening production-side criteria without fixing demand-side gaps addresses the wrong problem, and risks undermining the regulatory predictability that early movers built their investment cases around.

Our view: the EU has long functioned as the global compass for hydrogen regulation. The risk here is not what the revision ultimately says. It is what the willingness to revise, under pressure, before its content is even known, communicates to investors worldwide.

What else investors should be watching

Our conference covered two further themes that carry significant implications for project economics and competitive dynamics, and which we explore in full in our complete takeaways report, which you can download in full by filling out the form at the top of the page.