Rotterdam’s Hydrogen Bet: Turning Europe’s Largest Port Into a Clean-Energy Hub

Rotterdam’s hydrogen strategy was designed as a replacement engine for a port whose core business, moving and refining fossil fuels, is in long-term decline, and its progress tells you how fast Europe’s industrial energy transition is really moving. The port handles 212 million tonnes of cargo in a half-year, about half of it liquid bulk, and hosts five refineries, dozens of chemical plants and a tank-storage cluster that Vopak built into a global business. The Port of Rotterdam Authority, owned by the city and the Dutch state, concluded a decade ago that this base would erode and that hydrogen, carbon capture and electrification were the way to keep the industrial cluster and the jobs that depend on it. This article examines the projects that are being built, the ones that have been cancelled or delayed, the money involved and what the gap between the 2020 plan and the 2026 reality says about industrial decarbonisation. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

Why did Rotterdam bet on hydrogen?

Rotterdam chose hydrogen because it already produces and consumes more of it than any other place in Europe, and because the port’s refineries, chemical plants and gas-fired power stations give it both the customers and the infrastructure that a hydrogen economy needs. Refineries use hydrogen to crack heavy molecules into diesel and jet fuel and to remove sulphur; today that hydrogen comes mostly from steam methane reformers fed with natural gas, with by-product hydrogen from refinery units and third-party supply from industrial gas companies such as Air Liquide and Air Products. Replacing that grey hydrogen with green or blue hydrogen is the fastest way to cut the cluster’s emissions without rebuilding the plants.

The Port Authority’s 2020 vision set a goal of 2–2.5 GW of electrolysis capacity by 2030 and a role as the import gateway for hydrogen and ammonia from outside Europe. It allocated 24 hectares on the Tweede Maasvlakte as a conversion park where several gigawatt-scale plants could share power connections, water supply and the pipeline to Pernis and beyond. Shell announced Holland Hydrogen 1 in 2020, then-Shell Netherlands chief executive Marjan van Loon framed it as an act of courage, and BP, Uniper, Air Liquide and Eneco followed with plans of their own. Gasunie’s subsidiary Hynetwork was to build the national backbone from Rotterdam to the other industrial clusters and to Germany and Belgium.

The second pillar was carbon capture. The Porthos project, a joint venture of the Port Authority, Gasunie and the state’s EBN, would collect CO2 from Shell, ExxonMobil, Air Liquide and Air Products by pipeline and inject it into the depleted P18 gas fields under the North Sea. The third pillar was the Delta Rhine Corridor, a bundle of hydrogen and CO2 pipelines from Rotterdam to the German border through Moerdijk and Boxtel, originally planned for 2028. For an account of the port’s traditional business, see the Port of Rotterdam story.

What is Holland Hydrogen 1 and where does it stand?

Holland Hydrogen 1 is Shell’s 200 MW alkaline electrolyser on the Tweede Maasvlakte, the largest renewable hydrogen plant in Europe when construction began in 2022, and in spring 2026 it was described by Shell’s head of hydrogen Andy Beard as nearly complete and poised to start, with hydrogen supply to the Pernis refinery expected later in 2026. The plant uses ten rows of 20 MW stacks from Thyssenkrupp Nucera and will produce about 60 tonnes of hydrogen a day, enough to meet 5–10% of Pernis’s hydrogen needs. Power comes from the 759 MW Hollandse Kust Noord offshore wind farm that Shell owns with Eneco through CrossWind and that has been producing since December 2023.

The link to the refinery is the 32 km pipeline built by Gasunie, whose weld at the electrolyser end was completed in March 2026 and whose refinery-end connection was still under way in April. Shell has a throughput and connection agreement with Gasunie, and the pipeline was opened ceremonially on 20 May 2026 in the presence of King Willem-Alexander and Gasunie chief executive Willemien Terpstra. Shell has space for a second 200 MW unit next to HH1 but says it will first learn to run the plant before deciding on expansion.

The project has had a difficult path. In March 2025 the Algemeen Dagblad reported that insiders feared the €1 billion plant might never start because of a 2024 government “corrective factor” that reduced the incentive for using green hydrogen in fossil-fuel refining, high Dutch power prices and the Delta Rhine Corridor delay. Shell’s project lead Lydia Boktor called the corrective factor a penalty that slashed revenue, and Port Authority chief executive Boudewijn Siemons said it needed to be scrapped. EU rules on additionality give HH1 a ten-year exemption from hourly matching of renewable power if it starts by the end of 2026, which makes the start-up deadline commercially important: Beard estimates that hourly matching from 2030 would cut utilisation by about 20% and add about €2/kg to production costs. Platts assessed EU-compliant alkaline green hydrogen in the Netherlands at €7.93/kg in late April 2026.

How is the Gasunie hydrogen backbone progressing?

The national hydrogen network that Gasunie’s Hynetwork is building will eventually exceed 1,200 km and connect Rotterdam, Zeeland, the North Sea Canal area, Chemelot in Limburg and the northern clusters around Eemshaven and Delfzijl with storage in salt caverns at Zuidwending and with Germany and Belgium, but its completion date has slipped from 2030 to 2033 at the latest. The Rotterdam section, the 32 km Maasvlakte–Pernis line opened in May 2026, is the first and the only one in operation. Gasunie’s December 2024 roll-out plan put the other coastal clusters at 2030, with the connections between clusters built in 2031–2033.

Gasunie attributes the delays to permit procedures that take far longer than estimated under the new Environment and Planning Act, which gives more weight to public participation; to the interdependence of permitting and engineering, which prevents parallel working; and to shortages of qualified staff across Gasunie, contractors, consultancies and government bodies. The company now publishes two completion dates per section, at 50% and 90% probability. On 20 May 2026 Gasunie also signed an agreement with Thyssengas and Open Grid Europe for a cross-border link to Germany, the route by which Rotterdam hopes to serve the Ruhr’s steel and chemical demand.

The Delta Rhine Corridor is the critical path. A mid-2024 decision to permit hydrogen and CO2 pipelines jointly pushed its completion from 2028 to at least 2032, and Gasunie’s integrated timeline suggested that bundling all modalities, including a direct-current cable and other products, would delay it to 2040. In December 2024 the government prioritised hydrogen and CO2, which are now expected in 2031–32 and 2032–33 respectively. The corridor’s slippage is why Zeevonk’s 1 GW electrolyser was halved and delayed, as the offshore wind auctions story explains, and why Uniper’s Iris Olivier has said there is no point producing hydrogen that cannot be moved.

What is Porthos and when will it store CO2?

Porthos is the first large-scale carbon capture and storage project in the Netherlands, a €1.3 billion system that will take 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 a year from Shell, ExxonMobil, Air Liquide and Air Products in the Rotterdam port and store it in depleted gas reservoirs about 20 km offshore, with injection now expected to begin in 2027 after a delay from late 2026. The project reached final investment decision in October 2023 after a Council of State ruling in August 2023 cleared a nitrogen-related challenge from the environmental group MOB. The offshore pipeline was laid in 2025, the conversion of the wells at the P18-A platform was completed in January 2026, and three onshore compressor stations at the Maasvlakte were under construction in mid-2026.

Porthos construction manager Reinier Lissenberg has attributed the delay to late engineering changes and a shortage of resources, describing the design as the hardest part and the setbacks as typical for a first-of-a-kind project. Buildings are due to be finished by the end of 2026 with testing in early 2027. The project will run for about 15 years and store roughly 37 million tonnes in total before the reservoirs are sealed. It received €102 million from the EU, and a Xodus study for the energy ministry estimated transport and storage costs at about €50 per tonne, below the EU emissions trading price for most of 2025–26, which is what makes the customers’ capture investments viable.

Porthos is deliberately small. The follow-on Aramis project, led by Gasunie and EBN after Shell and TotalEnergies stepped back in 2025, could store about 22 million tonnes a year from 2030, with a final investment decision planned for 2027. Aramis would turn Rotterdam into a CO2 import hub for Belgian, German and French emitters shipping liquefied CO2 by barge and tanker, which is the scale at which carbon storage becomes a business line rather than a compliance cost. The Port Authority’s H1 2026 investment of €126 million was 7% lower than a year earlier mainly because its capital injections into Porthos were lower than in 2025.

Which hydrogen projects have been cancelled or delayed?

Of the gigawatt-scale ambitions announced for the Maasvlakte conversion park between 2020 and 2022, only Shell’s and Air Liquide’s 200 MW plants are being built; BP has withdrawn from the 250 MW H2-Fifty project, Uniper’s 100 MW plant has no government support and its EU subsidy was returned, and Eneco’s 800 MW plan has not advanced. BP confirmed its exit from H2-Fifty, a joint venture with HyCC, on 22 May 2025, as part of a global retreat from low-carbon investment; BP Netherlands chief executive Corné Boot had earlier said the company simply could not make the project work under current Dutch conditions. The blue-hydrogen H-Vision project backed by BP also stalled.

Uniper’s case illustrates the infrastructure trap. Its site on the Maasvlakte is vacant, blueprints are ready and Plug Power had been engaged to design a 100 MW electrolyser package, but Uniper delayed the plant in April 2024 citing high grid fees and a lack of offtake certainty, and its Dutch representative Iris Olivier has said the company is ready to start but lacks government support. The Hanze University energy professor Martien Visser has argued that other European countries are moving faster and that the Netherlands has become an unreliable partner for investors.

Shell’s own retreat extends beyond hydrogen. In September 2025 it scrapped the 820,000-tonne-a-year Rotterdam biofuels plant, which had been paused since mid-2024, after concluding it would not be competitive, and in June 2026 it told unions it would restructure the Moerdijk chemicals complex. The Rotterdam gigawatt-scale plant the port expected from Shell is therefore a single 200 MW unit with an option on a second, and Shell’s departure to London means those options are weighed against Montney shale and Qatari LNG rather than against Dutch industrial policy.

How is the port’s industrial base changing underneath the transition?

While the transition projects advance slowly, the industrial base they are meant to decarbonise is contracting: between late 2024 and mid-2025 Gunvor closed its 75,000 b/d Europoort refinery, LyondellBasell and Covestro shut the PO11 plant on the Maasvlakte, Tronox stopped pigment production in the Botlek, Westlake closed its Pernis resin and chlorine plants and Indorama ended PET production, with combined job losses of well over 1,000. The Port Authority’s March 2025 statement on the LyondellBasell and Tronox closures blamed an investment climate in which Dutch companies carry energy taxes, a national CO2 levy, nitrogen rules, grid tariffs and grid congestion that their competitors do not, and urged the government to act in its spring budget.

Deltalinqs chairman Victor van der Chijs called the Westlake closure in June 2025 a new blow to Rotterdam’s industry and asked the government to level the playing field with neighbouring countries on grid tariffs and electricity prices. Gunvor cited a lack of viable feedstock, weak European refining margins, new capacity in Africa and the Middle East and the rise of electric vehicles, and it ended terminal operations at Europoort in July 2025 while continuing to develop a 350,000-tonne sustainable aviation fuel plant with VARO.

The port’s headline numbers mask the shift. Throughput of 212 million tonnes in the first half of 2026 was up 0.4%, with liquid bulk up 2.4% because European refineries increased crude imports after the Strait of Hormuz disruption, and the Port Authority’s revenue rose 3.2% to €477 million with a net result of €144.8 million. But containers were flat, transhipment fell 20% on capacity limits, and Siemons’ commentary stressed the need for robust supply chains and a strong European energy infrastructure. The Vopak story describes how the port’s largest storage company is repositioning for ammonia, CO2 and hydrogen carriers, and the TenneT article explains why grid costs have become a factor in every closure decision.

What role do Air Liquide, Air Products and the industrial gas companies play?

The industrial gas companies are emerging as the steadiest investors in Rotterdam’s hydrogen cluster because they already own the customers, the pipelines and the know-how, and because their business model does not depend on oil-company capital allocation. Air Liquide took the final investment decision for ELYgator on 23 July 2025: a 200 MW electrolyser at the Maasvlakte, next to Holland Hydrogen 1, costing more than €500 million, producing 23,000 tonnes of renewable hydrogen a year from the end of 2027 under a long-term contract with TotalEnergies’ industrial platform and serving other industrial and heavy-mobility customers. The decision rested on the Dutch OWE subsidy scheme for large-scale electrolysis, prior support from the EU Innovation Fund and the IPCEI programme. Air Liquide is also a Porthos customer and operates the existing hydrogen pipeline network in the port.

Air Products is the other anchor. It operates hydrogen production for the refineries, is a Porthos customer and has developed an ammonia import terminal concept at the Maasvlakte to bring in hydrogen carriers from the Middle East and elsewhere, an element of the port’s import-gateway ambition. Both companies benefit from a structural fact: as refineries like Pernis replace grey hydrogen, the supply contracts, pipelines and storage that connect producer and consumer become more valuable regardless of which electrolyser is running.

The result is that Rotterdam’s hydrogen economy in 2026 is being built by the companies that sell hydrogen as a product rather than by the companies that promised to make it as a mission. That is a less inspiring story than the 2020 announcements, but it is a more bankable one. The DSM-Firmenich story offers a parallel from Dutch chemicals, where a company that reframed its core business found more durable growth than those that pursued headline transformation.

What can founders and investors learn from Rotterdam’s hydrogen bet?

The first lesson is that announcements are not capacity. Rotterdam’s conversion park was meant to host 2–2.5 GW of electrolysis by 2030; it will have about 400 MW by the end of 2027. The gap is not a failure of engineering but of the economics, regulation and infrastructure that surround the engineering. Investors should discount sector-wide pipeline figures heavily and track final investment decisions instead.

Second, regulation can undo a business case after the capital is committed. The 2024 corrective factor that reduced the credit for using green hydrogen in refining was introduced after Shell had started building Holland Hydrogen 1, and the EU’s additionality and hourly-matching rules change the plant’s economics from 2030. Founders in regulated clean-tech should budget for policy drift and lobby early, as the Port Authority did when it called for the corrective factor to be scrapped.

Third, shared infrastructure must lead, not follow. The Dutch state’s decision to build the hydrogen backbone and Porthos as regulated or publicly backed assets, rather than wait for private demand, is the reason anything exists at all. Where the state hesitated, as with the Delta Rhine Corridor’s joint permitting, the delay cascaded through Zeevonk, Uniper and BP. Founders building anything that needs a pipe, a cable or a port should treat the infrastructure owner’s timetable as their own.

Finally, incumbents with existing customers win the early phase of a transition. Air Liquide and Air Products are building because they can sell the output today; the oil majors retreated because their boards compare Dutch hydrogen returns with upstream alternatives. For companies trying to sell into Rotterdam’s cluster, the de-risking story explains why many of those customers are reconsidering their European footprint, and the Germany Company Stories hub covers the industrial market that the Delta Rhine Corridor is meant to reach.

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