Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor Launches Call for Intentions, Empowering Cross-Border Green Hydrogen Infrastructure Layout in Europe

Recently, the Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor (NBHC) project officially launched a "Market Interest Solicitation" initiative, inviting energy stakeholders from six countries—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany—to widely gather market feedback for optimizing the corridor design and laying a solid market foundation for the project's infrastructure construction. As a key component of the European hydrogen backbone, the advancement of this corridor will further strengthen the linkage between green hydrogen production and consumption in Northern and Central Europe, supporting Europe's energy transition and carbon neutrality goals.

It is reported that this Market Interest Solicitation is jointly led by six European natural gas transmission system operators: Finland's Gasgrid Finland, Estonia's Elering, Latvia's Conexus Baltic Grid, Lithuania's Amber Grid, Poland's GAZ-SYSTEM, and Germany's ONTRASsuperscript:2. The solicitation targets hydrogen producers, consumers, and storage providers within the six countries, with the core objective of collecting non-binding market data, focusing on key information such as green hydrogen production potential, distribution demand scale, and cross-border flow pathways. This aims to accurately capture market signals and provide a scientific basis for critical aspects like route planning and capacity allocation of the hydrogen corridor infrastructure.

This Market Interest Solicitation survey will remain open until March 31, 2026. After data collection is completed, the NBHC project working group will conduct in-depth discussions with participating respondents, potentially leading to the signing of non-binding Letters of Intent (LoI). It is important to clarify that such Letters of Intent do not involve capacity reservations nor create any commercial performance obligations; they serve solely as important vehicles for aggregating market signals to further refine the project development roadmap and ensure the project's construction closely aligns with actual market demand.

As a cross-border energy project receiving key support from the European Union, the NBHC project has secured solid policy and financial backing. In April 2023, the project was granted "Project of Common Interest (PCI)" status by the European Commission, qualifying it for EU funding support and expedited approval processessuperscript:4. Additionally, the project received €6.8 million in funding from the Connecting Europe Facility, providing strong support for the smooth progress of preliminary research work. Regarding project progress, the NBHC project completed a pre-feasibility study in June 2024 and formally entered the feasibility study stage in 2025. According to the plan, specialized studies at the national and cross-border levels are expected to be fully completed by early 2027superscript:2. Notably, the project has been included in the latest version of the European interactive hydrogen infrastructure map released earlier this month, becoming one of the core nodes in the layout of Europe's cross-border hydrogen network.

Based on preliminary pre-feasibility study results, the Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor is planned to have a total length of approximately 2,500 kilometers. Once completed, it is expected to enable cross-border transportation of 2.7 million mt of hydrogen fuel annually and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 37 million mt per year by 2050superscript:1superscript:4. The corridor will fully leverage the abundant hydropower and wind power resources in the Nordic region to achieve local production of green hydrogen, which will then be transported via dedicated pipelines to high-demand areas in Central Europe, such as Germany. This will effectively address the geographical imbalance between green hydrogen production and consumption in Europe, while enhancing energy supply diversity and security levels in the Baltic region and across Europesuperscript:1.

Lithuania's Minister of Energy, Kreivys Dainius, has publicly stated that hydrogen is central to the green energy transition, and without hydrogen energy, deep decarbonization in the industrial and transport sectors would be difficult to achieve. The Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor is a key support for Lithuania to become a leading producer and exporter of green hydrogen in the Baltic regionsuperscript:1. With the launch of this expression of interest process, the NBHC project will further consolidate market consensus, accelerate feasibility studies and subsequent construction processes, and inject significant momentum into Europe's efforts to build an integrated green hydrogen supply chain and achieve its energy decarbonization goals.