Hydrogen Cybersecurity | Hybrid and Cyber Risks
The hydrogen subsector is scaling from pilot projects to critical energy infrastructure at the precise moment when adversaries are converging cyber intrusion, physical disruption, legal pressure, market manipulation, and information warfare into hybrid campaigns.
Hydrogen is not yet a mature segment of the energy system, and this immaturity creates a distinctive exposure. Hybrid adversaries do not need to cause spectacular accidents to achieve strategic objectives. Corrupting custody-of-data for guarantees of origin, degrading electrolyser performance through remote setpoint tampering, or seeding doubt about safety at refueling stations can be enough to halt financing, revoke permits, or fracture public consent.
Production architectures illustrate the challenge. Green hydrogen plants couple large electrolysers to variable renewable generation, orchestrated by energy management systems that balance grid imports, storage, and offtake commitments against dynamic prices and network constraints. Blue hydrogen facilities combine reformers or autothermal units with capture, compression, dehydration, and transport of CO₂ to storage or utilization sites, a configuration that multiplies control points and vendors.
In each case, adversaries can target the operational backbone programmable logic controllers, distributed control systems, safety instrumented functions, analyzers for purity and moisture, and historian servers that feed performance and emissions reporting. Low-and-slow manipulation of setpoints for pressure, temperature, and deionized water quality can erode stack health, shorten membrane life, and increase oxygen carryover without triggering static alarms, creating latent safety hazards and undermining availability guarantees embedded in financing covenants.
Hydrogen’s immaturity as an energy subsector makes it uniquely exposed to hybrid threats because adversaries can exploit weak governance, fragmented standards, experimental technology, and a regulatory environment that is still forming. This creates a fertile environment for hybrid operations that blend cyber intrusion, legal pressure, financial destabilization, disinformation, and supply-chain interference to slow deployment, undermine confidence, or compromise strategic advantage.
Adversaries see hydrogen infrastructure as an attractive psychological and geopolitical attack surface. Public unfamiliarity with hydrogen creates an opportunity for disinformation campaigns that amplify perceived safety risks around storage, pipelines, or refueling stations. Claims of leaks, near-explosions, or toxic exposure, even when fabricated, can provoke political intervention, or mobilize local opposition groups. When timed with cyber interference that causes shutdowns in monitoring or safety systems, disinformation becomes a force multiplier that damages investor confidence and disrupts supply infrastructure without requiring a major physical attack.
State actors may use hybrid operations to shape future energy dependencies by targeting hydrogen projects linked to strategic industrial policy. They can slow the scaling of hydrogen capacity in rival economies.
Adversaries, using limited resources, can create systemic consequences across industrial operations, energy markets, financial systems, and political stability. The objective of hybrid campaigns is to manufacture national vulnerability, create strategic exhaustion, and reshape political decision-making and coalitions. What looks as a contained disruption can be only part of a systemic hybrid campaign targeting operational, economic, and societal domains.
From the commitment to reach carbon neutrality to the war in Ukraine
February 2022 was an important month for hydrogen production, distribution, storage, use, research and development. After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the European Union decided to phase out Russian energy imports as quickly as possible. The political commitments and decisions to replace fossil fuels were well accepted by all advocates of a clean energy future that ask for the decarbonization of many major industries. Hydrogen plays a key role in this clean energy future.
Technologies for the production, storage, transportation and use of hydrogen as an energy source are available today, but investments are necessary for the broader application that requires scaling up solutions.
Hydrogen may be produced through a variety of processes. Some are clean, some are not so clean:
1. ‘Electricity-based hydrogen’ refers to hydrogen produced through the electrolysis of water (in an electrolyser, powered by electricity), regardless of the electricity source. The full life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of the production of electricity-based hydrogen depends on how the electricity is produced.
2. ‘Renewable hydrogen’ or ‘Clean hydrogen’ is hydrogen produced through the electrolysis of water (in an electrolyser, powered by electricity), and with the electricity stemming from renewable sources. The full life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of the production of renewable hydrogen are close to zero. Renewable hydrogen may also be produced through the reforming of biogas (instead of natural gas) or biochemical conversion of biomass, if in compliance with sustainability requirements.
3. ‘Fossil-based hydrogen’ refers to hydrogen produced through a variety of processes using fossil fuels as feedstock, mainly the reforming of natural gas or the gasification of coal. This represents the bulk of hydrogen produced today. The life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of the production of fossil-based hydrogen are high.
4. ‘Fossil-based hydrogen with carbon capture’ is a subpart of fossil-based hydrogen, but where greenhouse gases emitted as part of the hydrogen production process are captured. The greenhouse gas emissions of the production of fossil-based hydrogen with carbon capture or pyrolysis are lower than for fossil-fuel based hydrogen, but the variable effectiveness of greenhouse gas capture (maximum 90%) needs to be taken into account.
The 8th of July 2020, the European Commission released the communication with title "A hydrogen strategy for a climate-neutral Europe". According to the Commission, hydrogen is enjoying a renewed and rapidly growing attention in Europe and around the world. Hydrogen can be used as a feedstock, a fuel or an energy carrier and storage, and has many possible applications across industry, transport, power and buildings sectors. Most importantly, it does not emit CO2 and almost no air pollution when used. It thus offers a solution to decarbonise industrial processes and economic sectors where reducing carbon emissions is both urgent and hard to achieve.
All this makes hydrogen essential to support the EU’s commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 and for the global effort to implement the Paris Agreement while working towards zero pollution.
Technological developments and the urgency to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions, are opening up new possibilities. Every week new investment plans are announced, often at a gigawatt scale. Between November 2019 and March 2020, market analysts increased the list of planned global investments from 3,2 GW to 8,2 GW of electrolysers by 2030 (of which 57% in Europe) and the number of companies joining the International Hydrogen Council has grown from 13 in 2017 to 81.
In transport, hydrogen is also a promising option where electrification is more difficult. In a first phase, early adoption of a hydrogen can occur in captive uses, such as local city buses, commercial fleets (e.g. taxis) or specific parts of the rail network, where electrification is not feasible. Hydrogen refuelling stations can easily be supplied by regional or local electrolysers, but their deployment will need to build on clear analysis of fleet demand and different requirements for light- and heavy-duty vehicles.
Hydrogen fuel cells should be further encouraged in heavy-duty road vehicles, alongside electrification, including coaches, special purpose vehicles, and long-haul road freight given their high CO2 emissions. The 2025 and 2030 targets set out in the CO2 Emission Standards Regulation are an important driver to create a lead market for hydrogen solutions, once fuel cell technology is sufficiently mature and cost-effective. Projects of the Horizon 2020 Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH-JU) are aiming to accelerate Europe’s technological lead.
Hydrogen fuel-cell trains could be developed to more viable train commercial routes that are difficult or not cost-effective to electrify: about 46 % of the mainline network is still being served by diesel technology today. Certain fuel-cell hydrogen train applications (e.g. Multiple Units) can already be cost competitive with diesel today.
For inland waterways and short-sea shipping, hydrogen can become an alternative low emission fuel, especially since the Green Deal emphasises that CO2 emission in the maritime sector must have a price. Scaling up fuel cell power from one42 to multiple megawatts and using renewable hydrogen for the production of synthetic fuels, methanol or ammonia - with higher energy density – are required for longer-distance and deep-sea shipping.
Hydrogen can become in the longer-term an option to decarbonise the aviation and maritime sector, through the production of liquid synthetic kerosene or other synthetic fuels. These are “drop-in” fuels that can be used with existing aircraft technology, but implications in terms of energy efficiency have to be taken into account. In the longer-term, hydrogen-powered fuel cells, requiring adapted aircraft design, or hydrogen-based jet engines may also constitute an option for aviation. To realise these ambitions will require a roadmap for the considerable long-term research and innovation efforts, including under Horizon Europe, the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking and possible initiatives as part of the Hydrogen Alliance.
Learn more about hybrid risk, in the following Cyber Risk GmbH websites:
1. https://www.hybrid-risk.com
2. https://www.hybrid-risk-management.com
3. https://www.hybrid-stress-testing.com
4. https://www.defensive-hybrid-intelligence.com
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Cyber Risk GmbH specializes in supporting organizations in understanding, navigating, and implementing complex European, U.S., and international risk related regulatory frameworks.
Content is produced and maintained under the professional responsibility of George Lekatis, General Manager of Cyber Risk GmbH, a well known expert in risk management and compliance. He also serves as General Manager of Compliance LLC, a company incorporated in Wilmington, NC, with offices in Washington, DC, providing risk and compliance training in 58 countries.
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