After years dominated by gigawatt-scale announcements, 2026 brought much more concrete signs: Moeve brought the first 300 MW of Onuba to FID, Repsol approved another 100 MW in Petronor and bp and Iberdrola are moving forward with 25 MW in Castellón , while other projects abandoned aid processes even after passing European competitive filters.
The photograph shows activity, but also a much tougher selection between the advertised volume and the capacity that actually manages to approach construction.
For Marcos Rupérez , a consultant specializing in hydrogen and linked to the sector since 2009, it is not just a question of the maturity of the projects.
“There was a bubble of expectation. When it started, around 2020, many people didn't really know what hydrogen was and expected much more than it could deliver. All of that has deflated significantly.”
The correction he describes has one central variable: the economics of the projects are not yet fully closed .
Over the past few years, Spain and the European Union have implemented various support schemes aimed at reducing this gap. These include the IPCEI program, hydrogen valleys, and, more recently, premiums per kilogram produced associated with the European Hydrogen Bank.
However, Rupérez believes that even these mechanisms have difficulty completely resolving the gap between costs and willingness to pay.
“Hydrogen is still not profitable. There is a gap between the cost of production and the price the market can pay, and in general, subsidies do not fully cover that difference.”
The warning finds a particularly visible example in recent auctions.
Spain ended up awarding €274.2 million to ATLAS, QUIXOTGEN, P-HYNET and ZARAGOZAH2V , four projects totaling 102.27 MW and will receive support based on the renewable hydrogen actually produced.
But reaching the point of awarding the contract does not guarantee investment either.
Before the final resolution, NOON II and ODIN withdrew from the procedure , despite having initially been included within the Spanish mechanism associated with the third round of the European Hydrogen Bank.
The episode brought to the table an issue that the European market is beginning to accept: a premium can improve the numbers, but afterwards buyers, financing, guarantees and contracts capable of sustaining the project for years are still needed.
Refineries start with an advantage
In this context, Rupérez identifies a type of project with a clearly more favorable position: one that does not need to create its demand from scratch .
Refineries already consume fossil-based hydrogen in their processes and therefore have the possibility of progressively replacing that volume with renewable production.
This existing demand is compounded by European obligations that are beginning to introduce quotas for renewable fuels and NBOF in certain uses.
"In Spain, my impression is that the projects that will really move forward will mainly be those linked to oil companies, replacing the gray hydrogen they already consume with green hydrogen."
The composition of the projects that have progressed the most during the last few months reinforces that interpretation.
Petronor's 100 MW will be primarily used to replace consumption within the refinery itself and to supply nearby industrial activities.
In Castellón, the 25 MW project driven by bp and Iberdrola is also being built next to a refinery and will partially replace the grey hydrogen currently used in its processes.
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And Onuba, although on a larger scale and with a broader strategy associated with the Andalusian Green Hydrogen Valley, is part of the Moeve industrial ecosystem in Huelva.
For Rupérez, the difference with respect to other models is precisely that there is an identifiable industrial utility from the beginning.
The scenario becomes much more complex when the project depends on simultaneously building production and a market that does not yet exist.
Renewable ammonia, heavy mobility, synthetic fuels and other applications may find specific niches, but their development is conditioned by the consumer's ability to assume a considerable premium compared to conventional alternatives.
From gigawatts to the size the market really needs
The consultant also questions the scale on which hydrogen was evaluated during the early years of the boom.
Moeve continues to maintain a target of up to 2 GW for the entire Andalusian Green Hydrogen Valley, but its first investment decision focuses on 300 MW, which can be expanded later by another 105 MW.
Rupérez uses this difference not to anticipate the cancellation of the following phases, but to point out how much the time horizon and the effective size of the decisions that companies make today have been reduced.
“What remains now is work on smaller, more scattered projects. There is detailed engineering and specific projects, but on a much smaller scale than was imagined during the boom.”
Even several hundred megawatts may seem modest when compared to the enormous energy flows that pass through a refinery daily or to the volume of fossil fuels that hydrogen originally aimed to replace.
Therein lies another difference from the initial account.
Hydrogen ceased to be seen solely as a tool to absorb large amounts of renewables and began to be evaluated application by application, identifying where the additional cost can be justified and where direct electrification is more efficient.
Rupérez cites heavy mobility as an example.
“You can consider selling hydrogen to vans or trucks, but you have to compete with electric vehicles that, in many cases, cost less and consume much less energy. There may be certain niches, but until it's competitive, there's not much more to it.”
This technological selection may also end up considerably reducing the universe of projects compared to the announced pipeline.
Could the “hydrogen sector” disappear?
Rupérez's most disruptive thesis is not that Spain will run out of electrolyzers.
It is precisely the opposite: there can be facilities operating without the independent industry that was envisioned around hydrogen ever appearing .
If the rollout ends up focusing on refineries, fertilizers, and some specific industrial uses, the electrolyzer could be integrated into existing plants in the same way as any other process component.
"There may be projects installed and operating at Repsol, Moeve and other companies, but the electrolyzer could end up being just another piece of equipment inside a refinery."
That would not necessarily mean the failure of the technology.
Yes, it would imply a radical transformation of the expectations that have dominated the market since 2020: fewer companies exclusively dedicated to hydrogen, fewer speculative projects, and a demand much more linked to consumers capable of justifying the extra cost.
In that scenario, the real filter for Spain would no longer be how many gigawatts it maintains in its roadmaps.