On 4 July 2026 the government announced it would release €450 million for the HyStock project in Zuidwending, Groningen — the first large-scale underground hydrogen storage facility in the Netherlands. Four salt caverns, leached out by Nobian, ready to hold hydrogen that should be flowing through them by 2032. The Minister of Climate and Green Growth spoke of market failure. She meant something else. She meant that no private investor is willing to shoulder this bill. That reason is not market failure. That reason is physics.

What the cabinet has decided

The announcement itself is simple. HyStock receives €450 million. Nobian leaches out four salt caverns beneath Zuidwending — an operation lasting several years. A hydrogen transport pipeline is planned for 2032. Ultimately there could be thirteen caverns. The money is intended to cover three specific risks that "a normal investor is not yet willing to bear": the uncertain price of the so-called cushion gas, the risk that the storage will not fill up sufficiently in its first years, and possible delays due to permits. Any operational shortfalls, however, will remain with HyStock itself.

Read that last sentence again. The taxpayer bears the risk that the storage will never turn a profit. The company bears the risk that it will make too much profit. That is not market failure. That is a specific form of state aid that in Brussels is usually called "strategic investment" and in The Hague "supporting the industrial transition". Both terms are euphemisms for the same thing: a private company unwilling to carry a public risk profile is given public risk capital — without any share in the upside.

Taken in isolation, that is not interesting. Where it becomes interesting is in the question: which technology are we betting on with this money?

The price no one puts on the table

In On the coach box or on the luggage rack, published on 20 June, one figure was isolated that immediately makes Dutch hydrogen policy untenable. At the factory gate, without any subsidy, a megawatt-hour of primary energy costs:

Source	€ / MWh
Uranium	€12
Geothermal heat	€20
Carbon-Alert bio-ethanol	€32
Natural gas	€40
Wood pellets	€45
Grey hydrogen	€67
Fuel oil	€70
Green hydrogen at the Dutch pump	€540

Five hundred and forty euros per megawatt-hour. Against thirty-two. Seventeen times more expensive than the cheapest available alternative. That is not a price gap that a more efficient electrolyser or a larger scale will erase. Electrolysis structurally requires 52 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of hydrogen. Compression to 700 bar adds another ten per cent. Transport and storage a further fifteen. These loss factors are written into the laws of nature — not into the business plans. They will not vanish with €450 million of cavern-building and they will not vanish with ten years of government tenacity.

For the heating of an average Dutch home this means — as calculated in The nature-adjusted analysis — that a household at social-assistance level would, under a hydrogen transition, spend more than a quarter of its income on energy alone. That is not a transition. That is household destruction.

The rest of Europe is walking away

For those wondering whether this is a biased Open Visor analysis, three facts that did not come from us.

Stellantis — parent company of Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat and Opel — stopped its hydrogen programme in 2025. Publicly, definitively, citing structural cost disadvantages. Bosch — the German supplier giant — wound down its fuel-cell division in the same period. Volkswagen, Mercedes and Stellantis had been working since 2017 within the IPEN framework on ethanol fuel cells; that effort was halted when the political wind in Brussels and The Hague turned towards battery-electric and hydrogen. These parties are not naïve. They have done the arithmetic that the Minister of Climate and Green Growth apparently did not have done.

And in Tochigi, Japan, a Nissan installation has been running since 2026 that converts bio-ethanol into electricity at seventy per cent efficiency. No 700-bar cylinder. No cavern-building. No cushion gas. A liquid in a tank, a catalyst, a membrane — and current flows out at room temperature. Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrated the underlying cold oxidation in 2009. PNAS published in 2022 a catalyst with 99.9 per cent CO₂ selectivity at a record-low potential of 0.35 volts. In 2025 Brookhaven licensed the technology to Chemcat Japan. Seventeen years between the American scientific breakthrough and the Japanese commercial licence. Throughout those seventeen years Europe was present as a spectator.

The €450 million for Zuidwending is the Dutch way to entrench that spectator role. Not by correcting a mistake, but by making it more expensive.

What that same four hundred and fifty million would yield elsewhere

This is where the debate stops being academic. €450 million is not an abstract figure. It is a concrete pile of money that could have been spent on something else. Four comparisons, all based on figures from earlier Open Visor analyses.

Comparison one — Carbon-Alert energy hubs. A 100-kilowatt hub costs €180,000 to build, produces 800,000 kilowatt-hours per year at 9.97 cents, and pays for itself within three years without a single cent of subsidy (The thirty cents that turn Europe around). For €450 million you can build two thousand five hundred hubs. Together they represent 250 megawatts of installed capacity, two billion kilowatt-hours per year, and around 1,750 permanent jobs in installation, maintenance and operation. Spread across Groningen, Brabant, Friesland and Zeeland — precisely where grid congestion hurts most.

Comparison two — the rapeseed hectare. In The Rapeseed Multiplier it was calculated that switching from rapeseed to Carbon-Alert NL raises gross farm income from €1,400–1,900 per hectare to €7,500–12,000 per hectare — a factor of four to eight. At Dutch level: the start-up financing for a pilot project of 1,000 hectares amounts, according to the same analysis, to €15–25 million. With €450 million you can pay for fifteen to thirty such pilots, or one national rollout of 20,000 hectares with matching Tier-1 processing infrastructure. That is a quarter of the Dutch nitrogen-crisis hectares solved in one stroke — with farm income that leaves subsidy dependence as a side note.

Comparison three — BiCRS carbon removal. In The Brussels Consequences Map — BiCRS version the model price for permanent CO₂ removal via anoxic biomass injection in the equatorial belt is set at €40 per tonne — against a real production cost of €22–28 per tonne. For €450 million you buy 11.25 million tonnes of permanent CO₂ removal — almost a tenth of annual Dutch emissions, definitively and verifiably out of the atmosphere, at half the current EU-ETS price. The hydrogen-cavern alternative delivers not one tonne of removal. It delivers a hole in the ground through which something is supposed to flow that today is seventeen times more expensive than the alternative.

Comparison four — five to ten thousand European vocational places. In What Brussels really receives the counter-value of 3,500 hectares of Carbon-Alert pilot in the Netherlands, Germany and France was calculated: €15–25 million via Horizon Europe. Of the €450 million there remains, after the agricultural pilots and the energy hubs, enough to set up the complete Dutch vocational modules on ethanol operations and SOFC maintenance in five hundred vocational colleges — making two generations of unemployed workers from the metal and installation sector immediately deployable in the industry that is now taking shape in Japan and Korea.

The real anatomy of the waste

Added up, the €450 million for HyStock delivers, in the "political luggage rack" scenario — as we called that route in the previous triptych — a cavern complex that after ten years stores a molecule whose final price at the pump lies seventeen times above the best alternative. In the "coachman" scenario the same funds deliver: 2,500 energy hubs, twenty thousand hectares of agricultural transformation, eleven million tonnes of permanent carbon removal, and the complete vocational training pipeline for the industry we have spent seventeen years watching. The choice is not ideological. It is arithmetic.

The responsible official — the Minister of Climate and Green Growth — speaks of market failure. But there is no market failure. There is a market that is reading the price signals and pulling out. That market is called Stellantis. That market is called Bosch. That market is called Volkswagen. They have seen the figure of €540 per megawatt-hour and left. What the cabinet is doing is not correcting market failure. What the cabinet is doing is artificially propping up a physically unsustainable route with taxpayers' money — exactly as previously happened with SDE wind farms, gigafactory subsidies and hydrogen corridors, all three now documented as financial sunk costs.

The three silent assumptions that make this waste possible

Behind every state expenditure of €450 million on a loss-making route lie three silent assumptions that no one in the House of Representatives explicitly tests. One — that hydrogen "will remain necessary anyway for industry". That argument holds for precisely two applications (refinery hydrocracking and ammonia synthesis) and does not hold for mobility, heating or stationary electricity. For those three applications ethanol-SOFC has been proved cheaper. Two — that "the learning curve will make hydrogen cheaper still". That is a curve which, after fifteen years of subsidy, has yet to achieve twenty per cent cost reduction, against an ethanol learning curve of seven to nine per cent per year since 2020, documented by IEA Bioenergy Task 39. Three — that "we should not put all our eggs in one basket". This fallacy conceals the fact that the current basket contains a single egg: battery plus hydrogen — while leaving out the third egg, ethanol-SOFC, inverts the diversification argument.

What a responsible minister can do today

The €450 million has been committed, not disbursed. The decision lies in the House of Representatives. A responsible minister would today do three things. One — pause the commitment until an independent recalculation on the website eu-bicrs.openvizier.org has been carried out in which the same €450 million is tested against alternative spending on a bio-ethanol-SOFC rollout. Two — send a parliamentary letter that explicitly acknowledges that green hydrogen at the Dutch pump costs €540 per megawatt-hour and that ethanol-SOFC costs €32, and that policy will be reconsidered in that light. Three — state publicly that the seventeen-year Asian lead in ethanol-SOFC can only be closed if the Netherlands chooses now — in 2026, not in 2032 — for production in Groningen, Brabant and Friesland.

These three steps cost no extra money. They save €450 million. They also open up a technological route that can create 350,000 European jobs without a single cent of subsidy.

The bill presented to the voter

What remains is the question of who pays the bill. €450 million of taxpayers' money is not neutral money. It is money that comes from households that, according to the calculation in The nature-adjusted analysis, under the government track structurally spend a thousand euros a year more on energy than under the ethanol-CHP track. Those same households now pay, via taxation, towards cavern-building that worsens the energy poverty they are in rather than relieves it. For the social-assistance household Sandra — €5,667 a year for hydrogen-transition energy versus today's €1,824 — that is not a fiscal nuance. It is an existential one.

The question the House of Representatives must answer next week is not whether Zuidwending will yield a technically interesting cavern. It will yield a technically interesting cavern. The question is whether the Netherlands can afford €450 million in order to confirm seventeen years of Asian lead on the cheapest available energy route — while the same funds, spent elsewhere, would close precisely that gap.

The answer is arithmetic. And the answer is no.

— The Open Visor · Climate edition · Investigation & analysis · 5 July 2026

Related reading on openvizier.org:

• The thirty cents that turn Europe around — the physics and the learning curve
• On the coach box or on the luggage rack — the complete energy-price comparison
• The nature-adjusted analysis — what households really pay under three tracks
• The Rapeseed Multiplier — a factor of four to eight on farm income
• What Brussels really receives — Carbon-Alert on a European scale
• The Brussels Consequences Map — BiCRS version — CO₂ removal at €40 per tonne

News source: NRC, 4 July 2026, "Cabinet releases 450 million for hydrogen storage in Zuidwending" (photos supplied by the author).