Hydrogen and hydrogen derivatives

Our hydrogen assets help our clients gain a holistic view of the developing hydrogen economy. We help clients develop their corporate and business unit strategies, identifying best markets, pricing, and hub strategy. We also advise about partnerships.

Applying the McKinsey business building framework helps our clients to navigate the uncertainty of hydrogen by de-risking projects. We can develop a full potential plan for startups and scale-ups, and conduct vendor and commercial due diligence. We also offer fundraising support.

Developing and executing large capital projects is hard enough under stable conditions. Our approach to leverage best-in-class tools tailored for uncertainty and unclear interfaces enables our clients to lower project risk and regain control. Our expertise covers areas such as plant-as-a-product, project delivery excellence, design-to-value, and manufacturing scale-up.

Our Hydrogen Global Trade tool provides a perspective on potential hydrogen and derivative trade flows for over 70 regions and five end-products to meet projected demand via domestic supply, piped, or shipped imports, including a detailed perspective on cost of supply.

The Hydrogen Value Pool Model represents our proprietary perspective on the hydrogen equipment market across the value chain, providing a comprehensive view on hydrogen equipment revenue and EBIT pools.

Our Project and Investment Portal provides a comprehensive perspective on Green and Blue Hydrogen industry growth trajectory, including detailed information on more than 1,000 announced projects across the globe.

The Hydrogen Cost Perspective delivers end-to-end hydrogen value chain costs across more than 40 geographies, 40 technologies, and 40 end-uses. It allows clients to understand both the competitiveness of different hydrogen-end-uses compared to conventional and other low-carbon technologies and the potential end-user willingness-to-pay for hydrogen across all end-use sectors.

Renewables and Hydrogen Ecosystem Atlas is our navigation map for the energy transition. This interactive geospatial tool integrates 35+ detailed data layers and multiple McKinsey solutions into a centralized platform to enable critical decision making on green hydrogen and clean fuels projects around the world, including project siting, offtaker search, and infrastructure development. This tool can be used by developers, utilities, and investors alike to make faster, better-informed project development decisions.

The Hydrogen and Derivatives Cost Optimization Model (H2-COM) is a solution that determines the optimal build-out of green hydrogen or derivative production plant (e.g., renewable energy, electrolyzer, storage, and derivative plant capacities) to achieve lowest possible levelized production cost. The optimization has hourly granularity and considers output firmness requirements as well as location and time-varying design parameters. The tool leverages McKinsey’s latest perspectives on all components costs and performance inputs and it can also model production costs with the latest policy requirements (e.g., time-matching).

Developed a clean fuels and chemicals strategy for a hydrogen producer.

Rapid cost and manufacturing scale-up diagnostic for an electrolyzer and fuel cell manufacturer.

Supported a private equity firm define its hydrogen growth-equity fund strategy.

Helped to build a disruptive zero-carbon business that is revolutionizing the steel industry.

Authored by the Hydrogen Council in collaboration with McKinsey and Company, Hydrogen Insights 2023 summarizes the current state...

Authored by the Hydrogen Council in collaboration with McKinsey and Company, Global Hydrogen Flows addresses the midstream...

A critical cost-competitive energy vector

Hydrogen as an energy source will play a key role in transforming aviation into a zero-carbon / climate-neutral system over the...