The Regulatory Perspectives to China’s Emerging Hydrogen Economy: Characteristics, Challenges, and Solutions

Culminating two decades of industrial planning, China is now officially moving full steam ahead towards realizing a hydrogen economy under the country’s first ever Medium and Long-term Plan of the Hydrogen Industry (2021–2035). Among the relevant benchmarks established is the goal of developing a regulatory framework by 2025. This raises the question of how best to achieve a regulatory framework for China’s emerging hydrogen economy. To answer this question, the discussions of this paper are further broken-down and organized across four independent, but correlated, academic questions. One, relying on the fragmented authoritarianism model, what are the impacts of China’s current model of industrial development on an emerging regulated industry? Two, through a scientific and technological review, what are the characteristics of the hydrogen supply-chain most likely to present a regulatory challenge for China? Three, by analogy to the comparable experiences of China’s other regulated industries, what are the possible regulatory solutions? Four, and most importantly, how best to reconcile the findings to the above questions as they relate to the regulatory challenge of developing China’s emerging hydrogen economy. The results of the discussions reveal, that not all policy solutions and recommendations to the regulatory framework of the hydrogen economy should be treated equally. Rather, an integrated view of the core academic question revealed a procedural relationship among the regulatory solutions identified from the analysis above. Therefore, recognizing that each solution should synergize and correspond to different phases of regulatory development, a three-step regulatory pathway towards the hydrogen economy is proposed.