 Welcome everyone to today's webinar on the IA's Global Hygiene Review, 2023 edition. My name is Timo Gül, I'm the Chief Energy Technology Officer of the International Energy Agency and I'm truly delighted to welcome you all to today's webinar, which is in fact the second webinar of the day on our Global Hygiene Review. I'm joined here by the authors of this report, who will be presenting to you just in a moment the key findings of this year's edition of the Global Hygiene Review. Before we do that, allow me to give you some context that might be useful for the rest of the webinar. Hydrogen, and I'm sure this is all why you are also joining here today, is enjoying a lot of attention, public attention today. But as for many, many other clean energy technologies, from solar PV to electric cars, batteries, etc., the roots of hydrogen go back decades for RD&D and for policy. The IA has actually been working on hydrogen topics for a very, very long time. In fact, in 1977, just three years after the IA was founded, the member governments established the so-called hydrogen, or what is today called hydrogen technology collaboration program, to foster international RD&D on hydrogen. We here as the IA Secretariat, we have significantly stepped up our efforts over the last couple of years, particularly since the release of our landmark report, The Future of Hydrogen, which was published in 2019 at the request of the Japanese G20 presidency, and then in 2021, just two years ago, released for the very first time a new annual report to inform policymakers and industry about the developments in the hydrogen sector. That's the Global Hygiene Review that we are discussing here today. It is, in fact, our main publication when it comes to tracking progress in hydrogen production and use worldwide, as well as progress in critical areas such as infrastructure development, trade, policy, regulation, investment, and, of course, innovation. The report, just for the record, here is an output of the Clean Energy Ministerial Hydrogen Initiative, which is supported by more than 20 governments, and to which the IA is the coordinator. The report benefits enormously from its membership of this Clean Energy Ministerial Hydrogen Initiative, and so we are immensely grateful for the support we are receiving by the members. Now, before the colleagues present to you in detail the findings of this year's edition, let me highlight three main insights that I find particularly important from this year's edition. The first one is the very impressive pipeline of announced projects for the production of low emission hydrogen. It is increasing very, very quickly, particularly in the case of electrolysis projects that have increased in number, in size, and in terms of geographical diversity. There are plans to build electrolyzers in more than 100 countries around the world today. If all these announced projects were realized, then low emission hydrogen production could reach 38 million tons by the year 2030 from electrolyzers, but also from fossil fuels with CCS combined up from practically nothing today. Whether or not these projects will go ahead, and this is my second key insight from this year's edition of the Global Hydrogen Review is of course very, very uncertain. Only 4% of the announced production capacity has reached the stage of taking a final investment decision, and cost pressures, particularly the cost of finance, are making it more and more difficult to realize these projects, putting at risk the achievement of government goals in this sector. The third key insight that I wanted to highlight is the fact that we of course note and are very impressed by the huge scale of ambition to produce low emission hydrogen, in particular from electrolysis, but it's also in what our report also shows is that there is quite limited action taken to create the demand for this low emission hydrogen. Action to create demand, be it in existing applications like in refining or the chemical industry or in new applications such as steel or in other areas is currently lagging behind ambitions to produce low emission hydrogen. Now the hydrogen sector is extremely dynamic to track progress. We are not only producing our report the Global Hydrogen Review, but we are maintaining at the database of all low emission hydrogen production projects around the world. We started this effort back in 2019 with the release of our landmark report The Future of Hydrogen. At the time there was just a very modest number of projects that we could be tracking today. We released an updated version of this database on our website and it comprises now almost 2,000 individual projects worldwide. Given the importance of infrastructure for the scale up of hydrogen, we are also releasing for the very first time a database on infrastructure projects including hydrogen pipelines, storage facilities, as well as import and export terminals. In addition to the two databases we will also present on our website in about two weeks if everything goes well. Two new interactive tools, one tool to explore the database of low emission hydrogen production projects. The other one to visualize global hydrogen production costs for renewable hydrogen in particular so in order to allow you as users of our website to explore the sensitivity of key parameters on production costs for renewable hydrogen. Before I pass on the word to my colleagues just a practical note here after the presentation of the report there will be a Q&A session. Please use the question function in zoom to post your questions so that we can address them as they come in later in the Q&A. The slides of the presentation will of course also be made available on our website so you don't have to note down every single thing that is on the slide. You will have them available on our website. With that I hand over the word to my colleague Dr. Uwe Remer who is the head of the hydrogen alternative fuels unit and one of the authors of this report. Over to you Uwe. Thank you very much Timur and also welcome from my side. So let me start by providing also some context so if we're looking at low emission hydrogen political momentum has remained strong driven by the or boosted by climate ambition also aims to enhance energy security and more lately also industrial strategies to by major economies including also hydrogen technologies which can play an important part in these industrial strategies but if still this momentum is not turning into deployment. And if you look at the production side hydrogen is still being produced almost completely by innovated fossil fuels. This of course can change if low emission hydrogen overcomes the cost barrier that it's currently facing actually a huge number of low emission hydrogen production project is currently under development and if all these announced projects are being realized actually global hydrogen production by 2030 could reach 38 million tons. Governments have also started to provide funding to first large scale projects however the lengthy time like between the announcement of these programs and the moment in time when these funding becomes available for product developers is actually delaying investment decisions and the third point I would like to mention is that the cost challenge that we still see for low emission hydrogen has been exacerbated by inflation meaning we've seen particularly in the last year increases in costs of equipment like electrolyzers but also increase in the cost of financing. The situation is actually more worrying if you look at the demand side government action so far has very much focused on the production side and measures to stimulate demand for low emission hydrogen has actually just very recently attracted policy attention so this has led to a gap in ambition between the demand and the supply side. On the private sector side we see that companies have started to sign first off-take agreements but efforts remain still at a very small scale and these agreements are often also non-binding and preliminary and the third point I would like to mention is that we see that governments and other private sector have started to establish international cooperation initiatives for low emission technologies including also the aim to aggregate demand for hydrogen but the demand signals we're seeing from the initiatives is at the moment still unclear. So overall one can say that the adoption of low emission hydrogen as a clean industry feedstock and also as a clean energy vector is still at a very early stage and in this year's global hydrogen review we try to identify what are the key priorities on which governments and the private sector should focus on to turn the momentum into deployment and also to allow hydrogen to play the role in the clean energy transition in the future. So with that I hand over to my colleague Stravala. Thank you. Let's start with some positive news which come from the deployment of the electrolyzer. The installed electrolyzer capacity has been growing the last few years but starting from a very low base. In 2022 the global install electrolyzers capacity reached almost a level of 700 megabits which is a 20% increase compared to the previous year. The year 2023 shows a continuation of this growth with a huge jump in the developments based on the projects that have at least reached a final investment decision or they are under construction. The global installed electrolyzers capacity could more than triple comparing to the year of 2022 reaching the level of 2 gigabit by the end of 2023. Actually more than 400 megabits have already entered into operation since the beginning of this year. The leader on the electrolyzers developments is China. In 2020 the country accounted for less than 10% of the global installed capacity and this number is expected to reach the level of 1.2 gigabits by the end of 2023 which is half of the global electrolyzers capacity. The outlook for 2030 according to the announced projects looks much more impressive. Based on the announcements the global installed electrolyzers capacity could reach the level of 420 gigabits by 2030 which is an increase of 75% compared to the announcements that they were reported in the global hydrogen review of 2022. Regarding the size of the projects we observe that there is a trend on the development of larger electrolyzer projects. Today there are only two facilities in the world with installed capacities over 100 megabit. However in 2030 the gigabit scale represents more than 75% of the announced capacity. We should not forget that there are still a lot of obstacles and problems that we have to overcome. When we are looking at the maturity of the projects we can see that we are still far from realizing the full potential of the project pipeline. Today electrolysis projects that have at least taken a final investment decision account for only 3% of the total capacity of the announced projects. In addition more than half of the total capacity is still at the very early stages of development. The geographical diversity increases in parallel with the growth of the electrolyzers development. Overall a total capacity of around 14 gigabits is already committed which means that these projects are in operation under construction or they have at least reached the final investment decision. China and Europe are the leaders on these developments. China has committed today 14 projects with the size of above 100 megawatts which could be operative by the end of next year of 2024. Europe has a much larger number of projects committed but with considerably smaller sizes. Of course there are some exceptions like the Swedish projects called hybrid and H2 green steel projects and the Holland hydrogen projects which is based in Netherlands. In the middle east we are observing a much smaller number of projects committed but among them it is the neon green hydrogen projects in Saudi Arabia which is the world's largest projects project that has already taken a final investment decision. If we are going to take into account also the projects that they are undergoing feasibility studies or they are at the very early stages of development the pipeline of the announced projects spans to a much wider geographical coverage. Europe still accounts for around a third of the total project pipeline but projects are also developing various other parts of the world with good renewable resources. For example Australia and Latin America account each for around a fifth of the electrolyzer project pipeline and they are followed by Africa which accounts for around 10 percent of the electrolyzers projects. Now I'm going to give the floor to the next speaker my colleague Francisco. Thank you Sabruda. As we have just seen electrolyzers are attracting massive interest but they are not the only technology route to produce low emission hydrogen. The use of fossil fuels with carbon capture utilization and storage CCUS can also play a significant role in scaling up the production of low emission hydrogen. Taking into account both these production routes the annual production of low emission hydrogen could reach 38 million tons by 2030 and this is 50 percent larger than it was at the time when we released the global hydrogen review last year. Of these 38 million tons 27 million tons are based on electrolysis and 10 million tons are based on projects using fossil fuels with CCUS. When we look at the geographical distribution of projects we can observe some striking differences. Electrolysis projects have a bigger geographical diversity with Europe, Australia, Latin America leading in terms of announcements. In the case of projects aiming to use fossil fuels with carbon capture utilization and storage they are much more concentrated with North America alone accounting for half of the announcements and Europe following with about 40 percent. In terms of maturity we can see that a larger share of electrolysis projects are at early stages of development but despite this the amount of low emission hydrogen that could be produced from projects that are at least undergoing a feasibility study is 60 percent larger than in the case of projects based on fossil fuels with CCUS. When we look at committed projects both technology pathways are in a similar situation. In fact in total projects that have at least reached the final investment decision account for only four percent of the potential production by 2030. This may look small but in absolute term it has doubled since last year reaching about two million tons. The slow progress in project implementation is a consequence of barriers that could be expected in a sector that needs to build up complex value chains and these are said uncertainties about demand, lack of clarity in regulation and also a lack of infrastructure to deliver to the final users and all of them have been exacerbated by inflation and by the sluggish policy implementation. Focusing on the cost challenge inflation has in fact contributed to make this a barrier which is much more difficult to overcome. Inflation has gripped the global economy since 2022 significantly increasing the prices of both equipment and also the interest rates on loans. This had an impact on the economics of hydrogen projects with some projects that conducted feasibility studies before mid 2022 that had to rework their cost estimates and reevaluate their financial plans in order to accommodate for such cost increases and in some cases this was up to 50% in terms of cost increase with several factors at play here. The first one is that the installed cost of electrolyzer has increased significantly in the past few years due to increase in both materials but also in lower cost. The capital cost of the capex for an installed electrolyzer ranged between $1,700 per kilowatt and $2,000 per kilowatt with an year-on-year increase estimated at about 9% compared to the capital cost observed in 2021. Second, the cost inflation had an impact on renewable electricity projects which is the main electricity source for most electrolyzer projects. These two combined so the higher electrolyzer capex and the renewable electricity cost increase lead to a cost increase of about 20% for a renewable hydrogen project. However, the largest cost increases come from the rise in the cost of capital. Renewable hydrogen projects are in fact capital intensive projects therefore they are very sensitive to changes in financing cost. A 3 percentage point increase in the cost of capital raises today's levelized cost of hydrogen production by nearly one third. Cost inflation increases the gap between the available public support and the production cost and as a consequence public funds cannot be shared across as many projects because financing needs for individual projects become larger. However, with cost rising more slowly now the main impact may be delays to reaching the final investment decisions rather than cancellations of the projects and with that I end over to my colleague Christo. Thank you Francesco. On this slide you can see a global map of the anticipated production cost for low emission hydrogen in 2030 based on solar and wind power or a combination thereof and first we can state that low emission hydrogen can be produced economically on all inhabited continents. However, the achievable minimum production cost and especially the production volumes at low cost do differ. We do not see a global average for either solar or wind power when it comes to the hydrogen production cost given the right region and the right technology both technologies can produce equally cheap hydrogen. In some region it might be advisable to combine wind and solar power to hybrid power plants. In these cases the increased load factor of the electrolysis offsets the need for higher investments. This is very project specific though and also depends strongly on the cost of capital. On the expenditure side we of course expect decrease in costs due to the economy of scale and the maturity of the technologies but we also see regional differences. One example here might be China or the Indian subcontinent where a favorable combination of low investment cost with abundant renewable resources leads to very low hydrogen production cost. Globally we expect low emission hydrogen production cost based on solar and wind to drop down to as low as 1.5 US dollar per kilogram of hydrogen by the year 2030. The next slide focuses on trade of low emission hydrogen and we have brought you two figures based on our newly released or updated hydrogen project database. On the left hand side you can see the exporters. The projects have been chosen only with a specific export element and the countries have been aggregated to continents and we see that Australia is leading the pack here with 50% of the announced trade volume in hydrogen in the year 2030. On the importing side Europe is the biggest player with nearly 5 megatons of imports from all continents. However more than half of the projects have not defined any target country yet and this pattern becomes even more obvious when we have a look at the specific offtakers for the projects shown here on the very right hand side. More than two thirds of the projects did not disclose or find an offtaker yet which again underlines the discrepancy between the supply and the demand side that has been highlighted by my colleagues before. Looking at the forum in which hydrogen will be traded we can see that ammonia is responsible for the waste majority of shipped hydrogen. The amount of ammonia traded by the year 2030 according to our project pipeline accounts for three times the amount of ammonia that is being traded today and this focus on ammonia is down to two reasons. The first would be that ammonia has a certain demand today already which makes it easier to find offtakers and on the other hand the existing trade of ammonia means that port infrastructure structures and vessel fleets are already in place. However we also see some projects aiming at the export of liquefied or compressed hydrogen and also synthetic hydrocarbons. Overall the current pipeline suggests a global trade of low emission hydrogen by the year 2030 of up to 16 megatons which is an increase of more than 25 percent compared to our last assessment but still the progress of the existing projects is rather slow with only three projects having reached final investment decision stage so there is still a noteworthy uncertainty and with that i hand over to my colleague Megumi. Thank you Christoph. For hydrogen to become a tradeable commodity there is a need for harmonized certification regulation and standards. IPHE has finalized a methodology for determining the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production conversion and transport of hydrogen as a first step towards the development of an international standard by the ISO. In terms of certifications there are currently only voluntary guarantee of origin certification schemes that are operational in Australia, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. These guarantee of origin generally label hydrogen produced from renewable sources or renewable electricity. The European Union and the United Kingdom have already established a regulatory framework on the carbon threshold on hydrogen. France, India, Japan and Korea are developing similar legal frameworks to differentiate hydrogen production by emission intensities. France defines hydrogen as low carbon for hydrogen with emission intensities under 3.38 CO2 equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen which is more stringent than that of the EU which is 3.4 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen. Japan's threshold is the same as the EU. India will differentiate hydrogen at 2 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen. As hydrogen markets have begun to reach a certain level of maturity, Canada and the United States have adopted a progressive scale that would still support the much needed hydrogen technologies and infrastructure with a gradual transition towards less emission intensive modes of production. In Canada, the clean hydrogen investment tax credit will cover 15 to 40 percent of eligible project costs with higher funding for low carbon hydrogen. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act included tax credits for clean energy technologies including hydrogen production. Renewable based hydrogen would enjoy double benefits from the clean hydrogen production tax credit 45 fee along with relevant tax-intensive incentives. Low carbon hydrogen will still gain advantage from either the 45 fee or the CCUS 45 Q. The divergence is in scope of the supply chain considered for accounting emissions. The threshold for low carbon and renewable hydrogen together with the eligibility criteria pose additional transaction costs for project developers. The need for mutual recognition of certification schemes was acknowledged in the G7 and G20 this year. Employing emission intensity for hydrogen production based on an agreed methodology could enable certain interoperability and minimize market fragmentation. Now I will hand the floor to our colleague Amalia. So we have been discussing about production, about trade and now I would like to share with you some insights about the transport infrastructure that will enable that this production actually reach the demand and also about the storage infrastructure that will make sure that even in the event of supply disruptions we can guarantee hydrogen supply and also that will allow us to handle fluctuations from renewable energy. So based on the announced projects on hydrogen transmission pipelines we could actually have around 30,000 kilometers pipeline already by 2030 and this will actually be in line with the needs of the IA's net city emissions scenario. Most of these projects have been announced in Europe but we have also seen relevant announcements in other countries such as China and Oman. And despite the fact that today we don't have any offshore hydrogen pipeline we actually see some announcements that are looking into offshore hydrogen pipelines especially around the North Sea, in the Baltic Sea, in the Mediterranean Sea and even potentially connecting North Africa with Europe. By 2050 the amount of hydrogen transmission pipeline that will be needed could reach up to 200,000 kilometers and this is equivalent approximately to 20% of the pipeline transmission length of natural gas today. So despite the good news of these announcements only 100 kilometers of pipelines have reached a final investment decision. This lack of final investment decision might be due to different reasons such as uncertainty in production and uncertainty in demand, a limited regulatory framework regarding hydrogen transmission that is being developed by some countries but also by the fact that hydrogen pipelines and in general gas pipelines have very significant economy of scales. They usually have capacity of around a few gigawatts. Nevertheless, as a good signal since the publication of the last global hydrogen review we have seen that countries have performed several calls of interest for example, Belgium, France, Hungary and one ongoing in Spain that are trying to first assess in a non-binding phase what's the interest for hydrogen transmission infrastructure to perform visibility studies and if successful this will be potentially followed by a binding phase to contract transmission capacities that will lead to final investment decisions. Regarding hydrogen underground storage infrastructure even if the red dot seems that there has been no announcement there has been some announcements by 2030 we could actually have around five terabyte hours of storage and this will increase to 30 terabyte hours of storage by 2050 but this falls well behind what is required or what will be required in the next emission scenario and to put it into perspective the current amount of a underground natural gas storage is 5000 terabyte hours so we are talking about very tiny amounts. The technologies that have been announced to provide this underground storage capacity will mostly be in the short term cell coverings due to their flexibility and in the longer term we also see investments in depleted gas fields which can play a very important role to guarantee security of supply nevertheless the technology is still not proof at a scale it has a low trailer level so it should first be proof at a scale in order to be realized. We have seen some projects for underground hydrogen storage none of them have reached a final investment decision nevertheless as with the case of hydrogen transmission pipelines during 2023 we have seen three calls of interest in France and the Netherlands to confirm the interest and to conduct some studies to assess the sizing of potential facilities. We should highlight that despite these announcements any infrastructure projects any gas infrastructure projects have lonely times so actually if we don't have accelerated action on an early planet we actually risk not to be on track for the next emission scenario. So this increase in low emission hydrogen production will actually require an increase on the amount of capital flowing to realizing these projects. In 2022 the amount of spending in low emission production projects and related infrastructure for conversion was one billion US dollar but in 2030 just eight years later in the next emission scenario this investment should be 120 billion US dollar just for the production and conversion of low emission hydrogen. This is a huge growth that actually implies a 70% annual growth in annual spending. My colleagues share with you what are the announced projects on electrolytic hydrogen amounting to around 28 million tons of hydrogen by 2030 of this amount around 20 million 10 million tons of hydrogen is planned in emerging economies this is around a third of the projects are planned in emerging economies so this means the significant amounts of capital should go to emerging economies in order to realize these projects but emerging economies have traditionally projects problems in attracting finance but already since 2022 we have seen several international finance activities that are trying to address this gap. More specifically we see that from 2022 for the first time there were some multilateral finance towards hydrogen production projects in emerging economies. We should highlight the finance provided by the World Bank but the European investment bank namely to countries such as India, Chile and Brazil and this money actually just during the first half of 2023 growth for four compared to the previous year reaching almost five billion US dollar. This money has mostly been made available to countries as loans for governments that they can spend to conduct feasibility studies to support capacity building or for project development. We see that less than 1% of this money has been available to countries as technical assistance grants or directly project equity and we have also seen some bilateral finance initiatives one of the largest one is from the German development bank that for example is creating a credit fund of 100 million US dollar for Chile. We have seen the pressing financing needs especially from emerging economies but we have more needs in order to realize the low emission hydrogen potential and these are pressing innovation needs. The degree of technology maturity varies widely between the different value chains of hydrogen. So for example for hydrogen production technologies they have relatively high technology maturity levels and they are commercially available and we are still having major innovation breakthroughs that are trying to look at decreasing costs improving efficiencies or reducing the reliance of critical materials such as for example ideal. But we can't say the same for end-use technologies especially for end-use technologies that are planning to use hydrogen and where there are very limited alternatives to achieve decarbonization so they actually have very low TRL levels. We use patents as a proxy for innovation more specifically international patent family that are patents that have been filled in at least two of patent offices. We can see that global hydrogen patenting is increasing and we have similar levels for production and end-use nevertheless as I mentioned before their TRL levels is very different. So actually for production technologies most of this patent growth is driven by electrolysis technologies account for around 70% of the patents in hydrogen production technologies but for end-use around 60% of the patents are due to the automotive sector which is growing very rapidly nevertheless the patenting in key sectors where we have limited alternatives is still very low such as aviation, shipping or steel. So while we could think that using patents as a proxy for innovation we have the innovation is having a fast pace this is mostly due to the fact of innovation in electrolysis and automotive sector and innovation is remarkably low in key end-use technologies and now my colleague Jose will continue providing additional insights. Thank you very much Amalia continuing on this last point about end-uses I will speak about the demand creation which has been one of the special focus of the of the report this year. As we have mentioned earlier in the presentation based on announced projects low emission hydrogen production could reach 38 million tons by 2030 which is quite in line with the sum of all the targets for low emission hydrogen production that governments around the world have been adopting in the last few years as you can see in the slide which account for up to 35 million tons. Now the question is who is going to absorb all this supply of low emission hydrogen without robust demand the producers for low emission hydrogen will not be able to secure off-takers and then will not be able to underpin the large-scale investments that they need to make their producer reality which jeopardizes the viability of the entire low emission hydrogen industry. We have assessed the demand that could be created by meeting government plans and we have realized that this is not sufficient to match their ambitions on the low emission hydrogen production side. Around 7 million tons of hydrogen demand could be created by 2030 with the policies that have been already implemented or enforced in the different countries. This could grow up to 14 million tons of demand if government targets are met but the vast majority of these targets still are not backed up by concrete policies and in addition only half of this demand is focused on existing hydrogen uses such as refining or chemical industry which are a better place to adopt low emission hydrogen in the near term. Governments have been cooperating with the private sector launching several international cooperation initiatives with the objective of accelerating the deployment of clean energy technologies in recent years and some of these initiatives have a significant activity on hydrogen. These initiatives can help in aggregating demand for low emission hydrogen but based on their current commitments within that they could create just between one and three million tons of low emission hydrogen demand by 2030. Moreover the real impact of these pledges still remains to be seen and the demand signals are quite unclear as you can see by this range between one and three million tons of potential demand. An important observation is that known of this initiative is focused on on existing hydrogen uses and the vast majority of them target new obligations for hydrogen. The private sector has already taken the first steps in the adoption of low emission hydrogen through off-take agreements. Although the activities are still at very small scale they could reach just around two million tons of low emission hydrogen by 2030 or this is what has been signed by the moment that we published the report at the end of September and actually more than half of these agreements are just preliminary with non-binding conditions between the two actors. On this topic of demand creation we would like to put the spotlight on the critical role that existing hydrogen uses can play in scaling up low emission hydrogen use. Switching to low emission hydrogen in existing applications such as refining on the chemical sector presents a much lower technology risk compared to new applications in heavy industry in transport or in power generation. This can be observed when we take a look to the production projects that have at least taken a final investment decision more than half of which are linked to existing hydrogen uses particularly ammonia production. The adoption of quotas or mandates for low emission hydrogen use in refining in ammonia production and in methanol production can unlock large amounts of demand and create the required economies of scale that can bring down the cost for low emission hydrogen production and then help the industry to reach prosperity with non-low emission production options. However we cannot forget about these new applications particularly those that we think that will be critical for a net zero future such as steel production, aviation or shipping. Adoption in existing applications should be the first priority but getting on track with our climate ambitions requires additional action on these new applications. In this case the demand pool policies like the quotas or mandates that I have just mentioned should be complemented with innovation and demonstration efforts since as my colleague Amalia has just explained in many cases the technologies that are needed to use hydrogen in these applications are still under development and with that I hand over to Uber for finishing the presentation. Thank you very much Yossi. Let me just finish by providing a brief explanation of some of the key recommendations that we published this year in the report. So to start with we've as I mentioned earlier we've seen that several support schemes for funding first large-scale projects have been announced but many of these support schemes have not been implemented or the funding has not been made available which is hindering investment decisions. When we look at demand government must take the lead and implement policies to stimulate action in the private sector combining support schemes incentives also regulations like quota mandates that require the use of hydrogen existing applications like the refining sector or the chemical sector. The private sector can also contribute by establishing international cooperation initiatives which are particularly focusing on aggregating demand in these existing applications that I just mentioned. Third point I would like to highlight is that governments should move continuing forward with the implementation of regulation and certification schemes based on the environmental attributes of hydrogen. Governments should also work together to ensure mutual recognition of certificates which could to a certain level also then enable interoperability of different certification schemes and referring to the referring to the emission intensity in this regulation certification systems is a kind of key enable or facilitates the opportunities for mutual recognition between different systems. When it comes to licensing and permitting of hydrogen projects governments should work to make these processes as efficient as possible also encourage coordination between different stakeholders to minimize the product lead times which can be quite long particularly if you think about or look at hydrogen infrastructure projects like pipelines or terminals and the last point I would like to mention is that government can also can take action to support product developers that are currently struggling under the impact of the inflation meaning increased equipment costs also increasing cost of capital financing costs so governments can provide for or can support developers for example through longer guarantees also public equity investments in projects. So with that said I would just like to highlight as I already mentioned at the beginning by my colleague Timogul that we've released today two hydrogen products databases the first one is our hydrogen production product database which tracks lower emission project low emission hydrogen production projects and we started this database actually in 2019 and the database now comprises almost 2000 projects which are differentiated by country by technology by project status and in addition we released also today the first time a hydrogen infrastructure database which provides information on infrastructure projects like pipelines blending hydrogen into existing gas pipelines also information on import and export terminals so that's kind of second database that we've released today and in around two weeks time we will also provide on our website two new interactive tools which allow to explore some of the data that we've presented you today so there's one tool particularly looking at the hydrogen product database where one can on a global map particular look into individual projects and the second tool which is focusing on the hydrogen production costs from renewables which also allow to to vary some of the key input parameters for low emission hydrogen production or renewable hydrogen production costs like technology costs also the cost of capital. With that said I will reach the end of the presentation we will just break for two minutes just to collect some of the questions that you've raised in the Q&A function and we'll get back to you with then we'll see discussion on these questions thank you very much. Okay thank you very much we will start I mean you can keep us adding questions we will try to address as many as many as possible we'd like to start with a couple of questions about the demand creation mentioning which is the the largest reason for the lack of demand for hydrogen and the policies that are how this can be stimulated something that we would like to clarify at the beginning is that there is not lack of demand for hydrogen we already have 95 million tons of hydrogen demand every year where we see lack of demand creation is of low emission hydrogen and here we have to differentiate in two options first of all is low emission hydrogen to replace existing hydrogen demand and second of all is low emission hydrogen to be used in new applications in the case of low emission hydrogen to replace existing demand the main barrier is the cost differential so today we need policies that can help users of hydrogen to access to that hydrogen at a lower cost so either providing subsidies on the demand on the production side or in the demand side policies like contract for difference, carbon pricing for increase the cost of non-low emission hydrogen and then in the case of new applications in addition of the cost differential with the technologies or the incumbent fossil fuels in addition to that there's also a technology barrier so as my colleague Amalai mentioned the technologies are still not completely developed or not commercially developed for the application then the next question which we have not addressed yet in the presentation is about the potential for white hydrogen potential in your outlook and whether it's still considered an academic research subject at this stage so okay where do you yeah thank you very much yeah we actually included a short section on white hydrogen or natural hydrogen in this year's GHR and I mean it looks of course if one looks at the status today of natural hydrogen I would say it's still at a kind of at an exploration phase trying to understand what are the resources in different parts I mean just this year or earlier this year in France and Laurent also some natural hydrogen was discovered some of the cost estimates by experts are quite encouraging I mean production costs in the range of one dollar per kilogram of hydrogen or even lower but of course one also has to be careful that we've not seen any practical production yet not yet any pilot project really extracting the natural hydrogen so for that reason we are a bit cautious in terms of relying say in our current assessments or scenarios on natural hydrogen but of course it's it's an important area to continue looking into and with technology innovation also with developing technologies to extract natural hydrogen of course the situation can change in the future thank you Ben for taking one of the questions about infrastructure do you have a view on hydrogen blading is to existing systems Amalia? So actually as part of the hydrogen infrastructure database that we are releasing we are also keeping track of the blending projects but we need to say that our view is that it has a very limited role and so far we have tracked almost 40 blending projects in in the distribution grids and these are really very small projects that could be considered to be a demonstration phase it could have potentially a larger role in some distribution grids which are currently using tone gas such as for example in Singapore, Hong Kong or Hawaii there low emission hydrogen can play a role but in other parts it's very very limited Amalia some other questions that we are seeing let me just those that have not been answered yet so which role IA projects for the production of low emission hydrogen from waste biomass yeah I mean we see some projects also being developed to use or produce hydrogen from from biomass also from from waste through classification there's of course we also see in Brazil recently also suggestions or approaches to produce hydrogen from bio ethanol so there we see some development being being explored to use to produce hydrogen from biomass it of course depends on the availability of biomass and also the cost of biomass and alternative uses for biomass so it's of course a question similar to hydrogen biomass it's a quite versatile energy carrier so it can be used in different parts of the energy system so the question is whether it should be used for for hydrogen production whether it should be used for liquid biofuel production whether it should be directly being co-fired in for example in the power sector to provide flexibility to the electricity system and I guess the the choice or the use of biomass very much and depends on the local circumstances what are the alternative opportunities in these different sectors or areas to to decarbonize to which extent one could use biomass and for hydrogen production so it's I don't have a very clear answer I guess as I said it very much depends on the on the local circumstances where it can be an interesting option to to pursue thank you we have a question about how to mitigate future increases in the cost of capital for hydrogen production for example government funding green from green bonds CFDs thank you for the question the cost of capital for hydrogen production can be decreased largely through government funding there are most of the projects and are largely initially funded by through government programs um the what else um the inflation may increase the the costs of capital so um to secure the hydrogen production supply chain by manufacturing domestically could potentially be a secure way provide a secure way to keep the initial costs as well as multi-lateral international banks have started to fund hydrogen projects in developing economies as well so that is another method that is being employed today thanks Megumi just a quick qualification for one of the questions so the data explorers should be available in the next couple of weeks that's the target but they will be announced on the IA web page same as our social networks and um maybe a last question because we only have a couple of minutes in developing countries do you think that it is better to start with domestic market on and then develop export market or on the contrary start with exports to lower prices and encourage the growth of the domestic markets amalia please so I want to share with you that actually next week the IA will release a special report especially the some of the world energy outlook especially looking into latin america where we will discuss the potential role that low emission hydrogen could play in the latin american and the caribbean region I have I can share with you some insights that will be available in this report and actually is we need both to go hand by hand first of all and the priority should be that low emission hydrogen especially is used to satisfy a domestic demand and it should be considered that for example in the case of latin america they are importing billions of us dollar per year on ammonia and anuria and this is creating a lot of market volatility and energy insecurity issues so low emission hydrogen have a very important role to play in the economy but at the same time low emission hydrogen offers a huge range of possibilities to export but also to export not only as low emission hydrogen but to create a added value exporting fertilizers exporting for example low emission steel and we think that emerging economies should explore both options but without forgetting that low emission hydrogen also has a role to play in increasing energy security in their countries thank you very much amalia and with that we finished the q&a session and i hand over to before finishing the the app with just one final qualification you can always reach us if you have no questions no answer or more doubts about the report at the email address hydrogen at ia.org thank you um yeah thank you very much you see and also of course thank you very much um for for joining our webinar today um yes you see just said more information is available on our website when it comes to the report but of course also i mentioned the the hydrogen product databases also the new tools being available in two weeks time so um yeah this concludes the webinar and i said i just would like to thank you for joining us um today and wish you very nice the rest of the day wherever you are thank you very much