Hydrogen in REPowerEU: The Genealogy of a New Energy Regime

The European Commission introduced the REPowerEU policy package in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to facilitate the EU’s shift away from the EU’s reliance on Russian fossil fuels. Renewables and electrification are at the heart and centre of the proposal, but hydrogen also received ample attention which both draws on the general enthusiasm the Commission and a number of Member States have carried towards the energy carrier as well as the need to substitute Russian natural gas. The EU is paving the way for a hydrogen energy regime. REPowerEU builds the framework for a hydrogen market, as it translates the 2020 strategy – and preceding initiatives – into a policy framework. The specific materialisation of hydrogen markets reflects a complex genealogy of energy markets. Hydrogen’s green variant is closely tied to electricity markets (its prime energy input) and renewables while its material qualities and blue variant link it to natural gas. It is emerging in a context where the EU is still generally seeking to uphold a single free market, but the energy transition and the need to ensure energy security have led it to become more supportive of targeted industrial policy. Hydrogen sits at the intersection of these market-shaping forces, where the market’s structure may seem to be “without history” but are deeply intertwined and shaped by power-knowledge in a Foucauldian sense. This paper begins to piece together the genealogy of the European Union’s hydrogen market, with a particular attention to how REPowerEU furthers this discursive and, increasingly, material construction.