The Nordic Hydrogen Route will drive decarbonisation, support regional green industrialisation, economic development and European energy independence. In addition, the Nordic Hydrogen Route will accelerate the creation of hydrogen economy and new investments to support Europe’s energy transition and increase the access to green and competitive domestic energy.
In practice, this project involves building a hydrogen transmission network in Northern Finland and Northern Sweden, which includes a cross-border connection. This network facilitates the distribution and transport of hydrogen within and between Finland and Sweden.
The pipeline is constructed underground and requires a 35 to 40-meter-wide strip of land during construction, with the permanent easement being approximately 10 meters wide. It is primarily routed through forest and arable land, avoiding groundwater, dense settlements and recreational zones. Farming can continue normally on arable land even after the pipeline is built. During operation, the pipeline is safely underground at a depth of at least one meter.
The Nordic Hydrogen Route is an initiative between Gasgrid and Nordion Energi. To drive decarbonization, support regional green industrialization, economic development, and European energy independence, a cross-border hydrogen infrastructure will be built up in Bothnian Bay Region.
There is no major gas network infrastructure in Bothnian Bay, on either the Finnish or Swedish side, so the Nordic Hydrogen Route will be newly built. The first sections of the pipeline network are expected to be operational early 2030s. A total of 1 400 km of dedicated hydrogen pipelines will serve up to 65 TWh of potential hydrogen demand in the Bothnian Bay region by 2050.
The pipeline is an important early building block towards a clean, resilient and integrated European energy system. The Nordic Hydrogen Route is at the forefront of answering EU’s decarbonisation and energy integration goals. In a wider context, the Nordic Hydrogen Route realizes a part of the European Hydrogen Backbone vision. In the long-term vision, the Nordic Hydrogen Route links to a wider European hydrogen infrastructure, enabling the import and export of hydrogen to Central Europe.
Low-carbon hydrogen will be a critical enabler of the transition for hard-to-decarbonise sectors of the economy like steel and metals, fertilizer and heavy transport sector (aviation, maritime), and those decarbonized value chains are altogether an important demand driver for the Nordic Hydrogen Route.
The Nordic Hydrogen Route will facilitate the development of an open access hydrogen market across the region, encouraging businesses to build new operations, such as recent initiatives in the fertilizer and steel industries. E-fuels is another major new industry that will drive the hydrogen demand in Bothnian Bay.
The regional hydrogen economy is expected to create up to 40 000 new jobs by 2050. Many of these jobs will be technical and highly skilled.
Regional industry along the Nordic Hydrogen Route represents around 20% of the combined emissions of Finland and Sweden in 2020. The pipeline therefore has great potential in helping the countries reach their respective climate neutrality targets of 2035 and 2045. The pipeline can facilitate emissions savings of up to 20 Mt CO2e per year by 2050 by enabling industries to embed renewable or low carbon hydrogen into their processes, and by replacing fossil fuels with e-fuels. This represents around 20% of current yearly emissions in Finland and Sweden. The estimate is based on public information about ongoing and proposed regional industrial hydrogen projects, and fossil fuel replacement by e-fuels.
Built onshore and offshore wind and solar capacity in the resource-rich region could reach 30 GW by 2050, exceeding the growth of regional electricity demand. By providing a reliable and cost-efficient platform for energy transfer, the Nordic Hydrogen Route decreases business risks and increases the ability of industries to fully utilize this abundant energy potential. As a pipeline that offers not only energy transfer but also buffering energy storage, the Nordic Hydrogen Route allows sector integration on a large scale, reducing costs through cross-industrial flexibility. At the same time, increased sector integration has benefits for energy system resilience, infrastructure co-optimization, and energy security.
The pipelines will transport hydrogen produced from abundant renewable energy resources – utilising excess or dedicated generation from up to 30 GW of renewable electricity capacity in the Bothnian Bay region by 2050. The Nordic Hydrogen Route investment is estimated at 5.5B EUR. The pipeline would enable ten-fold investments of around 55B EUR in wind and solar power and electrolysis, in addition to other investments along the hydrogen value chains. The pipeline network could transfer energy to hydrogen demand sites up to 2-4 times, depending on volume and distance, etc., cheaper than electric powerlines, building the hydrogen economy cost-efficiently.