Reports & Papers

India aims to become a leading producer of green hydrogen by the next decade as part of its broader industrial and decarbonization strategies. This brief provides an overview of India's current hydrogen strategy, as well as the challenges - land and water scarcity, infrastructure gaps, and financing gaps - that must be addressed in order for India to achieve its ambitious goals.

Decarbonizing existing buildings is a key component of greenhouse gas emission reduction strategies, but private investors have been slow to finance residential decarbonization projects because of a range of barriers. Authors Chang, Fornara, and Sanghvi argue that green banks could play a major role in unlocking public and private financing for projects that are currently financially unviable. 

Al-Juaied and Whitmore examine the costs and prospects for direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), and identify types of funding needed for early deployment for DACCS and building momentum for later widespread deployment. The challenges of implementing DACCS at very large scale further emphasize the need for urgent and widespread action to reduce emissions, which should continue to be the main priority for meeting climate goals.

In this paper, Nicola De Blasio and Derek Zheng provide a decision-making and analysis framework for public and private stakeholders to develop an effective, informed understanding of how global energy value chains and subsequent markets will develop and evolve throughout the energy transition.

This brief examines the national challenges related to deploying and scaling infrastructure to transport CO₂ from capture sites to storage or utilization sites at a scale consistent with achieving net-zero by 2050.

This study offers the first consistent attempt to identify how energy sector decarbonization policies have affected the energy mix over the past four decades across more than 100 developing countries. 

This report studies the role countries could play in future green hydrogen industrial markets, focusing on three key applications: ammonia, methanol, and steel production. To elucidate the impact of the transition to a low-carbon economy on energy value chains, Eicke and De Blasio propose an analytical framework to cluster countries into five groups based on the variables of resource endowment, existing industrial production, and economic relatedness.

The Model of International Green Hydrogen Trade (MIGHTY) is an optimization model to investigate renewable hydrogen production, consumption, and trade between countries. MIGHTY supports strategic analysis by policymakers and investors about the potential roles that countries and regions will play in future renewable hydrogen markets. This paper introduces the model and describes the model formulation.

This paper focuses on the market and geopolitical implications of renewable hydrogen adoption at scale in the European Union (EU). The authors analyze long-term strategies based on three reference scenarios in which the EU prioritizes a different strategic variable: energy independence, cost (optimization), or energy security. Developing competitive and secure hydrogen markets will require close coordination between policy, technology, capital, and society—and for EU countries to unite behind a shared long-term vision.

This paper provides an overview on the main impacts of biofuels production on water resources within the United States, with an emphasis on the corn-based ethanol market and the agricultural stage. The following issues are examined:

• the relationship between biofuel production and water availability;
• trends and policy options for future biofuel production and the tradeoffs for water scarcity;
• technological changes in transportation fleet, with consequential effects on biofuels demand and water resources;
• considerations for policy makers who seek to reduce the future impact of biofuels on water sustainability.