Recently, the MIIT, the Ministry of Finance, and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) jointly issued a notice approving five major city clusters to carry out pilot work on comprehensive hydrogen energy application, with a pilot period set at four years. The five approved city clusters are the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Greater Bay Area, Northeast China (including eastern Inner Mongolia)–Yangtze River Delta, Xinjiang–Chengdu-Chongqing Dual-City Economic Circle, and the Yellow River Bend–Central China region.
This pilot program has set clear development targets: by 2030, the pilot city clusters should achieve large-scale application of hydrogen energy in multiple fields, with the average price of hydrogen for end-users falling to within 25 yuan/kg, and advantaged regions striving to reduce it to 15 yuan/kg; the national ownership of fuel cell vehicles should double compared to 2025, with efforts to exceed 100,000 units.
The document requires each pilot city cluster to leverage its own resource endowments and prioritize the deployment of mature tracks such as fuel cell vehicles, green hydrogen-ammonia-methanol, hydrogen-based chemical raw material substitution, hydrogen metallurgy, and hydrogen-blended combustion, while also exploring more innovative application directions, thereby building a multi-level hydrogen energy application ecosystem comprising "one general scenario for fuel cell vehicles + N industrial application scenarios + X innovative application scenarios."
For the fuel cell vehicle track, the policy proposes using hydrogen highways and hydrogen corridors as the main construction lines, focusing on promoting the large-scale adoption of medium- and heavy-duty, medium- and long-distance transportation, and cold-chain logistics commercial vehicles, while also encouraging the expansion of demonstration applications of urban vehicles such as public buses, city logistics, sanitation, and muck trucks.
Compared to previous demonstrations of fuel cell vehicles, this pilot program expands the application boundary from a single transport field to diversified industrial energy tracks, shifting the policy center from early-stage technical verification to large-scale application. This marks the official entry of China's hydrogen industry into a new stage of comprehensive and scaled development. Leveraging the policy dividends of pilot projects in the Greater Bay Area, HTWO Guangzhou is accelerating its local layout of full-scenario hydrogen energy projects, seizing the development opportunities brought by the pilot program.
