According to the Nihon Keizai website on June 4, China surpassed Japan in terms of hydrogen-related patent competitiveness and jumped to the top for the first time. Chinese companies mainly improve their technical strength in the field of manufacturing such as electrolytic cells that extract hydrogen through electrolytic water. In Europe and the United States, the trend of stopping hydrogen production due to inflation is strengthening and the gap is widening.
A data analysis company Asamuse, a funded by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, conducted statistics on patents in five fields: "manufacturing", "storage", "transportation and supply", "safety management" and "utilization". For about 180,000 patents applied worldwide from 2013 to 2022, the patent competitiveness of feasibility and patent rights remained and ranked.
Among the five fields, China ranks first in the four fields except "utilization" and the comprehensive strength of the country. In the last survey (about 140,000 patents from 2011 to 2020), Japan ranked first in comprehensive strength, and China ranked second. Since China proposed to achieve carbon peak by 2030 in September 2020, the number of applications each year has doubled to Japan.
The report said that China's obvious advantage is in the manufacturing field. With the larger-scale manufacturing equipment, efficiency is also improving in terms of systems. Data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that among the "green hydrogen" manufacturing plants produced by renewable energy electricity, the equipment costs of Chinese companies are only one-quarter of that of European companies by 2023.
Data from Wood Mackenzie Consulting Company in the United Kingdom shows that the electrolytic cell manufacturing capacity of Chinese companies accounts for 60% of the world, and the order-taking production of overseas brands is also increasing.
The report said that the Chinese government announced the development plan for the hydrogen energy industry in 2022, clearly proposing that hydrogen energy is an important part of the national energy system in the future. The plan also proposes to increase the production of green hydrogen to 100,000 to 200,000 tons per year by 2025, but in fact the speed of the plan has far exceeded the target.
Japan announced its basic hydrogen strategy in 2017. The reason why China surpasses Japan in terms of the speed of its plan is that it has a large number of participating companies. There are only a few companies in Japan, such as Asahi Kasei and Toshiba, while the competition in the Chinese market is fierce.
According to the report, Japan and Europe have always developed the demand for hydrogen in the fields of people's livelihood such as fuel cell vehicles (FCV). On the other hand, from the perspective of Chinese companies, more than half of the demand in industrial fields such as chemicals and steel that consume a large amount of hydrogen is occupied. In the field where it is difficult to replace thermal energy with electricity, hydrogen as an alternative energy source has attracted much attention. Baowu Steel Group has introduced hydrogen to its existing steelmaking furnaces, and China has also made progress in technology development in use. (Reference message)
