Extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfall, flooding and heatwaves, have been described as the “new normal” for China.
The country lost almost 12bn yuan ($1.65bn) due to heavy rainfall and floods in April – “the worst in 10 years”. In June, dozens of people were killed and some 33 rivers in China “exceeded warning levels”. The floods in Guilin, capital city of Guangxi province, were the largest in the area since 1998.
It has been less than a year since the Beijing meteorological service recorded 745mm of rain in just five days during July 2023 – roughly the same amount the city usually receives in the whole month.
The province surrounding Beijing, Hebei, also had heavy rainfall at the same time. In July 2023, the county of Lincheng recorded more than one metre of rain, twice its annual average.
In July 2021, Hebei’s neighbouring province Henan had a “one-in-a-thousand-year” rainstorm.
While China has issued more policies to improve its emergency response system and infrastructure, the increasing number of extreme weather events continues to pose challenges.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief looks at the reasons for China’s recent floods, how the country is adapting and whether it will need to re-examine and future-proof its flood defence systems.
- What are the reasons behind the recent floods?
- What role does human-caused climate change play?
- How is China adapting to increasingly frequent flooding?
- How effective are these measures?
- What can China learn from other cities?
What are the reasons behind the recent floods?
There are various factors behind the frequent heavy rain and flooding in recent years.
Dr Oliver Wing, honorary research fellow at the school of geographical sciences, University of Bristol, tells Carbon Brief that “on the whole, we expect a warming world to be a wetter world due to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship”.
This relationship dictates that the air can generally hold around 7% more moisture for every 1C of temperature rise, meaning rainfall is likely to be heavier in a warmer climate.
Wing notes that “for sub-daily rainfall, we are seeing even greater scaling than this relationship would suggest. This makes surface water flooding in cities [more likely] due to short-duration, intense, localised rainfall increase”.
In addition, he says, “warming is inducing a rise in sea levels in most places, meaning storm surges have a higher baseline from which to inflict damage”.
In China, “higher than normal temperatures” were behind frequent heavy rainfall in southern coastal provinces, such as Guangdong and Guangxi, since April, says Zheng Zhihai, chief forecaster at the National Climate Centre of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), and reported in China Daily.
Zheng adds that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation – a natural climate cycle that entered its warmer El Niño phase in mid-2023 – was partly to blame because it raised sea surface temperatures and directed vast amounts of water vapour from the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal towards southern China.
Dr Faith Chan, head of the school of geographical sciences at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, tells Carbon Brief that the rainfall pattern in Guangdong during this April was quite similar to the intensive rainstorm on 6-8 September in 2023 after Typhoon Haikui.
Specifically, the intense rainfalls were generated by the low-pressure moist current from the south-east and south Asian monsoon pattern crashing into another low-pressure rain belt from the Philippines and the west Pacific.
Typhoon Haikui had hit Hong Kong with the worst storm in 140 years and caused some of the heaviest rains in the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian.
While these intense rainstorms, in a meteorological sense, are not unusual, they are happening more closely to one another owing to the warming world, Chan says.
Large-scale heavy rainstorms typically occur three times on average in April – the onset of a monsoon season. But, this year, China has been battered by at least eight regional extreme rain events in the month alone, all happening in quick succession.
River floods are commonly seen in the affected regions, such as Chongqing and Hunan. Identifying the causes can be more complicated for river floods in general, says Wing:
“There are many modulating factors. Drier soils in a warming world may enable the land to absorb the increased rainfall, thereby mitigating any flood hazard increase. Many floods are not driven by intense rainfall, but are driven by snowmelt or low-intensity, long-duration rain falling on saturated soils. For this reason, it is not reasonable to extrapolate that increased rainfall in a warming world will lead to increased fluvial flooding.”
Chan says natural reasons “of course” enhanced the wetness, “but human-induced climate change led to the greenhouse effect and caused sea temperature to rise, which caused more storms and low-pressure rain belts. That is a fact”.
Wing agrees that “the thermodynamic impact” of human-led climate change increases the rainfall associated with storms. But, he adds:
“What we do not understand well is how anthropogenic climate change has altered the dynamics of the climate system, and where and how this either compounds or dampens the thermodynamic response.”
What role does human-caused climate change play?
Many studies have found that warmer sea surface temperatures are supercharging high-impact, back-to-back extreme rains.
The sixth assessment report (AR6) from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also says that human-induced climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions contributes to ocean warming and “is likely the main driver of the observed global-scale intensification of heavy precipitation over land regions”.
In east and central Asia, under 1.5C of global warming, extreme annual daily rainfall (Rx1) and five-day accumulated rainfall (Rx5) events are projected to increase by 28% and 15%, respectively, relative to 1971-2000, according to AR6.
Similarly, it says that in China’s urban agglomerations, “an increase in global warming from 1.5C to 2C is likely to increase the intensity of total precipitation of very wet days 1.8 times and double maximum five-day precipitation”.
Prof Yang Chen of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences at the CMA tells Carbon Brief that human-caused intensification of heavy rainfall over China had been even larger than expected. He explains:
“Human-caused intensification of heavy precipitation over monsoonal China is markedly larger than expected from increases in atmospheric moisture due to warming, because of stronger feedback between latent heat releases and ascending motion within wetter storms in a warmer climate.”
Such feedback, he adds, is particularly evident in eastern China compared to other regions of similar latitudes.
A recent study in Nature also anticipates storm activity over China to become more frequent and intense as a result of warming. By the end of the 21st century, the annual average frequency of tropical cyclones on the east coast of China is anticipated to increase by 16% compared to the present day, according to the study.
Apart from climate change that is caused by human activities, poorly designed and constructed cities, as well as subsidence – caused by groundwater extraction, the weight of buildings as result of urban growth, urban transportation systems and mining activities – could also amplify floods.
Dr Kevin Smiley, assistant professor from the department of sociology of Louisiana State University tells Carbon Brief:
“Climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather. Extra rainfall induced by climate change can be the difference between a building’s parking lot hosting puddles on a rainy day compared to floodwaters crossing the threshold of the building and causing thousands of dollars of damages.
“It’s always important to remember: climate change is anthropogenic, so this increased risk also has human-caused roots.”
How is China adapting to increasingly frequent flooding?
China has built a number of large water projects to prevent flooding, such as the south-north water transfer projects in the Yangtze river that was launched in 2002.
In the most recent “national water network construction planning outline” published by the State Council – China’s top administrative authority, the equivalent of central government – constructing “national water networks” by 2035 is among the “backbones” of future flood prevention.
The “backbones” in the document also include large hard-engineered structures on the main rivers, such as embankments, flood gates and channelised river networks, to mitigate flood risks.
Meanwhile, a study published in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management found that “nature-based solutions” have also become popular in China. The restoration and conservation of freshwater swamps, mangroves and wetlands along coastlines and river mouths are being used to provide a buffer for tidal and storm surges.
They include the Chongming Island wetland in Shanghai (Yangtze delta) and the Futian and Mai Po wetlands in Shenzhen Bay (Pearl River delta).
Another concept proposed in the planning document is to “accelerate smart development” by using the internet, data and technology to monitor and prevent floods.
The capital Beijing has incorporated data from high-definition cameras, as well as telescopes, radar maps and satellite cloud images to provide real-time hazard updates, which has improved emergency response times.
Ningbo, a port city on China’s east coast, has worked with mobile companies to analyse big data and disseminate information.
The Ministry of Emergency Management said these measures have reduced the number of deaths and missing people as a result of natural disasters by 54% over 2018-22, compared to 2013-17. The death toll continued to fall in 2023 but the number of destroyed buildings and direct economic losses rose by 97% and 13%, respectively, compared with 2018-22 levels.
In 2015, the sponge city programme (SCP) concept was written into a policy document of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. It was promoted across the country and 30 major cities, such as Wuhan (home to 11 million people) and Zhengzhou (home to 10 million people), were chosen to be the pilot cities.
Those sponge cities are designed to collect, purify and re-use at least 70% of the floodwaters through “green-blue facilities”, such as green roofs, permeable pavements and stormwater parks, in urban areas. The overall system was meant to resolve the issues of urban heating, freshwater scarcity and flooding all at once.
China has improved its recovery process too. In Ningbo, for example, flood victims were able to access financial compensation within an hour, using an improved online documentation process during Typhoon In-Fa in 2021.
How effective are these measures?
Chan tells Carbon Brief that China has “done very well in terms of preparation, response and recovery for flood and drought hazards” – the two most destructive types of natural disasters.
“As a global south country,” he says, referring to China as a developing country, “China has done quite well with the SCP [sponge cities programme] and the ecologically enhanced solutions for addressing climate change”.
However, Wing argues that nature-based solutions, such as SCP, can “get saturated quickly” and so “there’s a risk of their role being overstated”. He continues:
“These types of interventions are most effective for rainfall events which occur relatively regularly at low intensities. They will be quickly overwhelmed during the very intense, rare rainfall events (whose probabilities are changing rapidly in a warming world) that cause the most damage and suffering.”
In 2021, a “historically rare” rain and flood, that affected more than 14 million people and killed 398 in Zhengzhou, a showcase sponge city, highlighted the limitations of the SCP in the face of climate change.
SCP is designed to only withstand one-in-30-year rain events, says the Nature study. On top of that, it can create a false sense of security, which encourages more people to move to high-risk areas, leading to an increase in population and assets in exposed areas that require ever-increasing protection in a cycle referred to as a “levee effect”, says Chan.
The levee effect refers to the paradox whereby the construction of a flood-defence levee leads to a lowered perception of flood risks and a greater likelihood of property owners investing in their property, increasing the potential damages should the levee breach.
The effect, according to the Nature paper, is a key challenge in the densely populated Yellow River delta and Pearl River areas, which both face high risks of flooding.
Smiley says:
“Risk is realised when social vulnerabilities intersect with hazards. Vulnerabilities are social. Flood impacts are greater when social vulnerabilities are greater…Social vulnerabilities are uneven. A household with some wealth and good insurance can recover from a flooding event much faster and more successfully than a household living paycheck-to-paycheck.”
The Chinese government has allocated more than one trillion yuan ($138bn) – via a special government bond – to support the vulnerable citizens and reconstruction of areas hit by natural disasters in March this year. More than half of the funds are used for “the construction of water conservancy projects like flood control,” reported state media outlet the Global Times.
But the delivery of financial support has been questioned in the past. When Typhoon Doksuri hit China in 2023, only $2bn out of roughly $25bn in aggregate losses were underwritten, according to global reinsurer Munich Re.
In addition, the construction of those sponge cities has already cost China 1.5-1.8bn yuan ($210-250m) between 2015 and 2018. And maintenance will make this bill even larger.
The authors of the Nature paper suggest that the government should work on integrating fragmented “grey infrastructure” – built structures such as drains, pipework and pumping stations – into existing green-blue facilities, but should not rely on engineered infrastructure alone.
Dr Lele Shu, a researcher at the northwest institute of eco-environment and resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, tells the Intellectual magazine that “the [impact of] heavy rain at the current rate cannot be mitigated through traditional engineered approaches alone”.
“Everytime there is heavy rain, the damage it causes will make headlines primarily because there are too many people living in the city,” adds Shu.
The lack of coordination between regional governments and municipalities in flood prone areas also often led to fragmented approaches to disaster management.
In the case of the Yangtze and Pearl deltas, there is a lack of delta-wide plans that “systematically zone land and prioritise investments within one unified hydrological system”, the Nature study adds.
Dr Zheng Yan, a researcher at the Research Institute of Eco-civilisation, China Academy of Social Sciences, noted in the aftermath of the 2023 Beijing flood that government bodies often look after their own jurisdiction and aim only to move the problem and divert the floods quickly, which piled pressure on cities in downstream areas.
Smiley says:
“Floodwaters don’t care about human-created boundaries by municipality, district or province. Effective urban design in one locality may lessen flood risk there, but indirectly increase risk elsewhere. Thinking collectively while centering justice means providing spatially extensive and locally attuned solutions that help all recover effectively instead of exacerbating inequalities.”
What can China learn from other cities?
As flooding is a challenge faced by cities across the world, there is a plethora of ideas and technologies that China can draw on.
The Nature paper suggests that the Yangtze and Pearl deltas, for example, could learn from the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta and the Mekong delta to “improve their responses to regional challenges such as subsidence and erosion, by using and aligning with the underlying dynamics of the deltas that are rapidly changing in response to climate change and anthropogenic activities”.
Building a resilient society that is “proactive and forward-looking, with adequate capabilities to limit detrimental flooding impacts and timely return to the pre-disaster state” is also advocated by the paper.
Rotterdam, a Dutch delta city of 600,000 people that is surrounded by water on four sides, has built water storage facilities, such as an underground parking garage with a basin the size of four Olympic swimming pools. It has also installed green roofs and facades to absorb rainwater.
Japan has built an intricate network of concrete tunnels and vaults about 14 storeys beneath the Saitama prefecture in the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan’s capital city, that can hold more than 1,000 Olympic pools of rainwater.
Both cities’ underground flood diversion facilities are often used as a prime example of a viable flood defence system for urban cities on the frontline of climate change.
Hong Kong has a similar underground stormwater storage system beneath the sport pitches of the Happy Valley Racecourse, designed to withstand once-in-50-years flood events.
However, Chan says it is difficult to compare flood mitigation measures as each city is very different in terms of geography, demographic, densities and topography.
He tells Carbon Brief:
“But in my opinion, China’s megacities should think about using underground spaces to store the sudden extreme discharge from super intensive rainstorms…Tokyo and Rotterdam are quite wise (in that regard) for using their underground spaces.”
The post Q&A: How China is adapting to increasingly frequent flooding appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: How China is adapting to increasingly frequent flooding
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China has said that hydrogen is a key “future industry”, important to both its energy transition and its industrial policy.
Hydrogen frequently goes through hype cycles, most recently driven by rising oil and gas prices due to the conflict in the Middle East.
Yet, even in China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of the fuel, hydrogen remains expensive and inefficient to produce.
This is especially the case for “green” hydrogen derived from renewables.
Moreover, there is limited supporting infrastructure and there is little incentive to use hydrogen over other energy sources.
As a result, uptake in China of hydrogen as an alternative fuel remains low.
Nevertheless, these challenges echo the early circumstances of another key clean-energy technology – electric vehicles (EVs).
In China, EVs benefited from a policy environment that included consistent signals of support, financial aid and the development of supporting infrastructure.
Many similar policies are now being deployed – and in some cases improved upon – to support the development of China’s hydrogen industry.
This article examines China’s approach to developing hydrogen and how its evolving industrial policy could make the fuel viable.
How is China using hydrogen and where does it come from?
Electrification and rising installations of solar and wind power have been the biggest drivers of China’s decarbonisation story so far. However, how China will address the more energy-intensive, hard-to-electrify segments of its economy remains an open question.
Hydrogen is seen by some in China as a potential solution for reducing emissions in a range of “hard-to-abate” industries, from steel and chemicals to aviation and shipping.
The country is the world’s foremost producer and consumer of hydrogen. It produced 36.5m tonnes of the gas in 2024, with maximum production capacity standing at 50m tonnes that year.
It also consumed nearly a third of the world’s hydrogen in 2024, as shown below.
Most of China’s production capacity is in regions with potential for high demand, such as Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Shanxi and other provinces with significant heavy industry.
In 2024, the vast majority of China’s hydrogen – around 78% – was produced using fossil fuels, predominantly coal and gas, as shown in the figure below.
Another 21% was produced as an industrial by-product, while only 1% – just 320,000 tonnes – was derived from renewable-powered electrolysis of water.
One study found that, for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, 38.6kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted if the hydrogen is produced using coal-fired power. Hydrogen made through coal gasification results in 28.5kg of CO2 for every kilogram of hydrogen, while gas-based hydrogen creates 13kg of emissions.
By contrast, one kilogram of renewables-based hydrogen results in 0.5kg of CO2.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) calculates that hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels could help China avoid close to 16bn tonnes of CO2 cumulatively by 2060 – but only if it comes from low-carbon sources.
The biggest reductions, it adds, would come from heavy industry, particularly chemicals and steel, with the maritime and shipping sectors also seeing some benefit.
Currently, around half of the hydrogen produced in China is used in synthetic ammonia and methanol production.
Ammonia is primarily used to manufacture fertiliser and is seen as a possible fuel technology for shipping. Methanol is used as a fuel for the transport industry, as well as for heating.
Another quarter of China’s current hydrogen usage is consumed by the oil refining and coal-to-chemical sectors. The remaining amount is used in other industries, including transport, heating and metallurgy.
What are the barriers to scaling up hydrogen?
Although China is the largest producer and consumer of hydrogen globally, the industry faces several barriers to becoming a viable clean-energy technology.
Agora Energiewende, a thinktank focused on the energy sector, says that, in order to make hydrogen a practical clean-energy solution, China would need to expand the scale and range of its application, as well as improving the conversion efficiency of production and use.
Both BloombergNEF and the IEA highlight the importance of China creating demand for hydrogen, such as through quotas for industrial usage.
Hydrogen “suffers from a relatively large efficiency loss during various conversion processes”, adds Agora. For example, it notes that only around 22% of the energy put into hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) is converted into motion, compared to 73% for battery electric vehicles. Producing hydrogen with renewable energy is also less efficient than coal-to-hydrogen processes.
Cui Chuansheng, technical director at East China Engineering Science and Technology, tells state news agency Xinhua that the variability of wind and solar power often leads to low utilisation of electrolysers, resulting in “efficiency losses”.
Meanwhile, the cost of producing hydrogen – particularly green hydrogen – remains high.
One study placed the cost of hydrogen produced through alkaline water electrolysis (AWE), the most common method for producing green hydrogen in China, at $4-6 per kilogram, compared with $1.20-2.50/kg for steam methane reforming and $1.30-2 for coal gasification.
In some specific cases, such as blending hydrogen with gas, researchers find that hydrogen prices would need to fall to one-third of gas prices to incentivise uptake.
These constraints are all “interdependent”, Kevin Tu, managing director of Agora Energy China, tells Carbon Brief, with the need to ensure “bankable demand” while also reducing costs and developing infrastructure. He adds:
“Without credible offtake in the right sectors, costs will not fall; without lower costs and better logistics, downstream users will not commit.”
The IEA says that green hydrogen “could become cost-competitive by the end of this decade due to low technology costs and cost of capital”.
For now, however, the China Hydrogen Bulletin Substack reports that China’s four listed hydrogen equipment manufacturers all reported significant losses in 2025.
Meanwhile, a senior executive at a Chinese hydrogen company told economic news outlet Jiemian that he expected 40% of companies in the sector to have closed down by the end of 2026, with surviving companies only turning a profit in 2029 at the earliest.
The industry also lacks refueling and pipeline infrastructure. China’s development of a pipeline network for hydrogen remains in its early stages, with around 400km of pipelines currently in operation. By contrast, its long-distance gas network stands at 128,000km. Similarly, storage remains expensive and inefficient, creating a further obstacle to wider uptake.
How is China supporting hydrogen development?
China began considering the use of hydrogen as an energy source in earnest in the early 2000s, to address concerns around pollution and dependence on imported oil for the transport sector.
A clearer signal of its importance came in 2015, when the State Council included the technology in a 10-year national industrial strategy known as the “Made in China” initiative. This pitched hydrogen as a way to contribute to electrification of China’s road-transport system through the development of FCEVs.
Yuki Yu, founder of research firm Energy Iceberg, tells Carbon Brief that, from 2018-2021, hydrogen was treated as a “FCEV and manufacturing technology challenge”.
This has since evolved, she says, given that battery electric vehicles have emerged as the more popular technology.
Shen Xinyi, senior advisor at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), agrees, telling Carbon Brief that recent policy documents suggest the aim is now for hydrogen to be targeted at areas where direct electrification is harder, such as hydrogen-based chemicals, hydrogen metallurgy and some heavy-duty transport applications.
This is in line with the “hydrogen ladder”, an analysis of how likely different possibilities for applying hydrogen as a clean alternative are to become significant. The ladder sees significant future use of hydrogen in these hard-to-electrify areas as much more likely than for light vehicles.
Notable policy moves are being made in “three layers”, says Agora’s Tu, which are combining to improve the technology’s chances of scaling up. These are: the “legal and institutional” layer; “application-oriented” policies; and targeted measures to address “practical bottlenecks” at the local level.
One of the documents underpinning this pivot was the “medium- and long-term plan for the development of the hydrogen energy industry (2021-2035)”, issued in March 2022.
According to a report by the National Energy Administration (NEA), the plan is an attempt to develop an “industrial ecosystem” for hydrogen that features “diverse stakeholders, coordinated innovation and clustered development”.
The plan was the first government document to “lay out a long-term vision for China’s hydrogen economy”, unifying a previously disparate policy push into one document, according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, a UK-based thinktank.
Following on from the 2022 plan, the importance of hydrogen as a broad clean-energy solution has been emphasised in a number of policies. These include its classification being changed from a hazardous chemical to an energy carrier in China’s Energy Law, a 2024 action plan to “accelerate” the use of low-carbon hydrogen in industry and a new pilot scheme offering subsidies for projects that achieve specific targets.
The table below sets out the timeline and content of China’s hydrogen-related policies over the past 25 years.
| Policy | Year published | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| 10th five-year plan (2001–2005) | 2001 | Calls for “actively developing” low-emission vehicles, understood to include hydrogen vehicles |
| Made in China 2025 | 2015 | Pledges to “continue to support” development of fuel cell vehicles and “master core technologies” for low-carbon vehicles |
| Notice on implementation of demonstration projects for fuel cell vehicles | 2020 | Creates a dedicated subsidy programme for finding breakthroughs in FCEV core technologies and industrial applications |
| 14th five-year plan (2021-2025) | 2021 | Hydrogen listed as a future industry |
| Medium- and long-term plan for the development of the hydrogen energy industry (2021–2035) | 2022 | Aims to reach 100,000-200,000 tonnes of green hydrogen production [this target has been met]. Also aims to get 50,000 FCEVs on the road by 2025, leading to a “diversified” hydrogen industry by 2035 |
| Opinions on accelerating the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development | 2024 | Promotes further development of hydrogen production, transport, storage and applications |
| Implementation plan for accelerating the application of clean and low-carbon hydrogen in the industrial sector | 2025 | Outlines tasks to promote use of low-carbon hydrogen to reduce emissions in heavy industries, such as steel and chemicals |
| Energy law | 2025 | Sees hydrogen included in national legislation for the first time, re-classifies it from a hazardous chemical to an energy carrier |
| 15th five-year plan (2026-2030) | 2026 | Again lists as a future industry, and calls for the development of green fuels derived from green hydrogen |
| Notice on the implementation of pilot projects for the comprehensive application of hydrogen energy | 2026 | Provides subsidies to projects to reduce hydrogen costs to 15-25 yuan/kilogram ($2.20-3.67/kg) and help develop a fleet of 100,000 FCEVs |
Key policies in the development of China’s hydrogen sector.
In addition, the NEA said in 2025 that local governments across China had issued more than 560 hydrogen-related energy policies by the end of 2024.
Tu notes that these local policies cover everything from permitting reforms and pipeline planning to exempting FCEVs from paying road toll.
Different provinces across China adopt distinct strategies for developing hydrogen industries, based on local conditions, says the US-based Center on Global Energy Policy, such as energy mix, availability of coal and industrial needs.
However, these local policies and targets are frequently more ambitious than the “conservative” national-level targets, it adds.
Could a new pilot programme boost hydrogen’s prospects?
A new pilot programme, announced in March 2026, aims to commercialise the country’s hydrogen industry by funding projects to reduce the cost of the fuel to 15-25 yuan/kilogram ($2.20-3.67/kg) by 2030, as well as other targets.
Unlike the 2020 subsidies, which focused on FCEVs, the new programme reaffirms China’s interest in a broader series of sectoral applications for hydrogen, including in clean heating, production of low-carbon iron and steel, and production of “green fuels” and other chemicals.
This new pilot is the “strongest financial instrument ever released for China’s green hydrogen application” in terms of creating a comprehensive hydrogen policy that covers a broad swathe of the economy, supporting it with financial backing and targeting application scenarios, Yu says.
However, she argues that strict grant caps – 240m yuan ($35m) per project and 1.6bn yuan ($235m) per selected region across only five regions – limited the overall funding scale available to the industry.
Energy Iceberg has calculated that only around 60-70 projects nationally could receive funding under the current rules, out of more than 670 active green hydrogen proposals in China.
Shen agrees that the pilot programme is significant and that it will expand the use of hydrogen in China’s climate strategy, particularly green hydrogen.
She notes a provision that “explicitly states that coal-based ammonia and methanol projects cannot be labelled as ‘green’ ammonia or methanol”, suggesting that policymakers are increasingly paying attention to the “integrity” of definitions for hydrogen and hydrogen-derived fuel.
The “real value” of the pilot scheme, says Tu, is that it focuses on developing “integrated city-cluster ecosystems linking supply, transport, infrastructure and end-use demand”, rather than only supporting individual projects.
This “should help identify viable business models, accelerate cost discovery and concentrate support on applications with stronger scale potential”, as well as boost investor confidence, adds Tu.
However, he continues that the broader effect it will have on boosting production of hydrogen will “depend on how quickly the selected clusters can translate the programme into real offtake and lower delivered hydrogen prices”.
How does this compare to China’s EV policy push?
The debate around the viability of hydrogen is reminiscent of critiques of EVs.
Until recently, EVs were seen as too expensive for consumers, inefficient and challenging to use without supporting infrastructure. As a result, many western automakers chose to temper their focus on EVs, while continuing to develop internal combustion engines.
However, China has managed to develop a competitive EV industry with products that top global sales.
Part of the playbook that spurred China’s success on EVs included consistent policy signalling in favour of the technology, including mentions in high-level documents and committing resources to building charging infrastructure.
“The defining features of China’s industrial-policy success are its persistence and adaptability,” says Kyle Chan, fellow at the Brookings Institution, adding that “long before the technology and economics of EVs and batteries were proven, China was making long-term investments and policy bets [in the sectors]”.
More tangible measures included direct and indirect subsidies and policy support in the shape of favourable loan rates and low-cost land. One estimate by US-based thinktank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) pegs the amount of support allocated to the EV industry between 2009-2023 at $230.9bn.
This coupled with the success of private Chinese manufacturers in creating innovative, nimble companies that “forc[ed] policymakers to adapt”, as well as growing links between the automotive and information technology industries, according to a separate CSIS report.
But this progress on EVs also reportedly came with significant fraud. In 2016, one investigation found that 33 companies were involved in subsidy fraud totalling 9.2bn yuan ($1.3bn).
(It should also be noted that profitability in the industry lags far behind the average for downstream industrial sectors, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, which says that “only a handful” of nearly 50 EV makers have reported profits.)
Being the subject of an industrial policy push alone does not guarantee success, states CSIS. It says the strength of the EV industry “was neither inevitable nor the result of a single master plan” and that China’s aims to develop globally-competitive industries in areas such as commercial aviation remain unaccomplished.
China’s approach to hydrogen has been markedly different.
Instead of offering blanket subsidies, the fuel cell demonstration programme it established in 2020 focused on performance-based rewards.
To avoid the subsidy issues seen in the solar and EV industries, the ministry of finance deliberately chose this indirect funding model, says Yu.
However, Yu argues, the programme did not work as well as hoped, due to the funding ceiling and the siloed attempts made by different regional governments to develop hydrogen ecosystems .
But Chinese policy thinking is becoming more selective and pragmatic for hydrogen compared with EVs, says Shen. She says:
“Electrification remains the primary decarbonisation pathway [for road transport], while hydrogen is increasingly positioned for applications where direct electrification is more difficult.”
Tu echoes this, adding that China is “clearly moving toward a more supportive policy environment for hydrogen”.
But its approach is “unlikely to replicate the EV story one-for-one”, he adds.
China’s concerted hydrogen push is also unlikely to echo the EV story at a global level, according to the IEA.
In terms of green hydrogen, around 60% of global electrolyser manufacturing capacity is currently in China, prompting concerns from the EU about a repeat of China’s global dominance in the solar and EV sectors.
However, the IEA says, electrolysers made in China “might not supply other markets at scale in the short term”, due to difficulties transporting the bulky technology globally, expectations that costs will only fall gradually, uncertainty around global demand and questions over how well Chinese electrolysers perform against global alternatives.
China’s industrial focus on hydrogen is centred more on domestic use, Shen argues. “It is less about near-term export competitiveness and more about building domestic industrial ecosystems,” she says.
The post Q&A: Can China turn hydrogen into its next clean-energy industry? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Can China turn hydrogen into its next clean-energy industry?
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Q&A: Can China turn hydrogen into its next clean-energy industry?
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Greenhouse Gases10 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
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Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
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Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
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Renewable Energy7 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
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Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
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Greenhouse Gases11 months ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测