The impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine on the German hydrogen discourse

The discourse on the market ramp-up of a German hydrogen economy has seen a rapid rise in the German media since 2019. Due to the major challenges of climate change, high hopes are placed in (green) hydrogen. It is considered one of the most promising technologies and a key element of the "green energy society of the future". However, with the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, the entire energy transition has been put to the test. Recent research on the impact of the Russian war on Ukraine in 2022 on the German Energiewende discourse shows that the goal of rapidly reducing fossil fuel imports from Russia has reshaped renewable energy controversies and brought the geopolitical dimension of the Energiewende into focus (Wiertz et al. 2022). As such, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected the green energy trade, which should also have had a significant impact on the role of (green) hydrogen. For the EU, after nine months of war, the European Commission noted that "Russia's war against Ukraine has given hydrogen, and in particular renewable hydrogen, an even more important place in the EU's accelerated transition to move away from Russian fossil fuels and diversify its energy supply, as existing hydrogen production is dependent on imported natural gas" (Commission, 20.11.2022). As for the impact of Russia's war against Ukraine on green energy trade and the specific implications for the policies and governance of hydrogen application, production and trade across global, European, national, and sub-national levels, analysis is still needed. We approach this research question by focusing on the German discourse on (green) hydrogen and the hydrogen economy. Following on from previous discourse analyses, we examine the development of the German hydrogen discourse from 2019 to 2022 based on 2,192 newspaper articles on hydrogen from six German-language newspapers using Structural Topic Modelling (STM), a Natural Language Processing method. Structural topic models are unsupervised topic models that include metadata as covariates and assume a relationship between external factors (covariates) and text content. For our analysis, we trace the temporal dynamics of newspaper coverage in two dimensions: a time-series analysis and an assessment of topic prevalence given the major event of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This allows us to identify the topics of the German hydrogen discourse during this period, as well as their development and relative importance over time, and to explore the question of whether, and if so to what extent, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has caused a shift in the German discourse on (green) hydrogen, both in terms of the application of hydrogen and in terms of the supply of (green) energy necessary for its production.