Global Trade Deciphered
Global Trade Deciphered explores global trade, geopolitics, and the global economy, featuring expert analysis from leading world-class expert guests. Hosted by Justin Hayden Miller, a global trade lawyer and partner at a top European law firm, it’s ideal for business leaders, policymakers, and anyone curious about international business and trade policy. Follow for insights to stay ahead. A Privileged Discussions Productions podcast.
Global Trade Deciphered
Driving the Future: Europe’s Hydrogen Mobility Transformation | Dr. Guldner, BMW Group
Recorded live at BMW’s Cutting-Edge Innovation FIZ Center in Munich. Join global trade lawyer Justin Hayden Miller in conversation with Dr. Jürgen Guldner, having headed BMW's Dynamic Development he is Head of Hydrogen Projects at BMW Group, being a founding member of the Hydrogen Council. Elon Musk’s call for automotive disruption sparks debate as Europe navigates energy transition and global trade shifts. Could hydrogen technology be a game-changer?
- Elon Musk’s views on automotive disruption
- H2-ICE vs. fuel cell vehicles: Hydrogen powertrain options
- BMW-Toyota collaboration: Decade-long partnership
- Hydrogen as an energy carrier: Imports, storage, grid support
- Battery electric vehicles vs. hydrogen: User needs and applications
- Hydrogen infrastructure in Europe: Current state and future networks
- Supply chain for hydrogen technology: Europe’s capabilities
- Trade policy and hydrogen: Regulatory frameworks
- Global hydrogen race: China, Japan, Korea developments
- BMW hydrogen 2028: Pilot fleet and production plans
The episode includes key topics for trade professionals, policymakers, and industry leaders concerning hydrogen’s potential in Europe’s energy and trade landscape. Essential for shaping hydrogen energy policy, trade strategy, or corporate sustainability.
Share with your network to ignite discussions on Europe’s green trade future.
Don’t miss the next bonus episode: Justin test-drives BMW’s hydrogen prototype, launching in 2028. Subscribe to the podcast for more global trade trends and analysis, and connect via X @JustinHaydenM or contact us by email on globaltradedeciphered@gmail.com.
If you like the podcast, please subscribe so you don't miss any episodes and leave a rating. Also tell friends and colleagues about it so the podcast can grow.
*Follow Justin on X: @JustinHaydenM
or contact us by email at GlobalTradeDeciphered@gmail.com
Sign up to our newsletter. (We won't spam you and will remove your email on your request.) https://bit.ly/PrivilegedDiscussions
*Disclaimer: This podcast is simply for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not in way constitute legal, business, financial or other advice whatsoever. Should you require advice then please seek such from an appropriately qualified professional, explaining your specific circumstances.
With the automotive industry driving ten percent of global exports, but facing big challenges, are hydrogen powered cars the game changer that Europe needs? To address these issues, I am thrilled to bring this episode direct from BMW's Cutting Edge Innovation FIZ Center in Munich, Germany. And I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Jürgen Guldner, who has led BMW's Vehicle Dynamics Development and heads BMW's Hydrogen Projects as a key founding member of the Hydrogen Council. Welcome to Global Trade Deciphered. I'm your host, Justin Hayden Miller, a global trade lawyer with a leading European firm, decoding the policies shaping global trade and emerging trends. A huge thank you for inviting me here today to your impressive innovation center in Munich to share your expertise with us. An expert in the hydrogen sector and a globally recognized engineer whose postdoctoral work in automated driving at the University of California even laid the foundations for autonomous vehicles. Dr. Jürgen Guldner, welcome to Global Trade Deciphered. Thanks a lot for having me. Elon Musk has famously said that cars have followed a design and engineering paradigm where they're largely unchanged. But he said they're now ripe for disruption. Cars are going through a revolution at the moment, don't you agree?
DrJürgenGuldner:Absolutely. There's so many innovations coming into the automotive industry right now, both on the powertrain side, but also in terms of the usage pattern, the interface between the driver, the passengers, and the vehicle. All those things are being revolutionized as we speak.
JustinHaydenMiller:And your particular involvement at the moment concerns leading edge hydrogen technology. Correct.
DrJürgenGuldner:I've been in the hydrogen project for seven, eight years now. And right now I'm responsible for everything that's beyond the vehicle itself. Things like infrastructure advocacy. I'm active in the hydrogen associations, both on a national and international level, and also I'm promoting hydrogen for BMW.
JustinHaydenMiller:Well, you're certainly a leading world authority in the domain. There's a point of view that circulates on the internet that hydrogen cars can use a combustion engine, essentially petrol or diesel engines, and that combustion thermal engines can easily be transformed into hydrogen vehicles by simply tweaking them a little. Is that the case? It's a bit simplistic, isn't it?
DrJürgenGuldner:That is actually how we as BMW started with hydrogen about 40 years ago, at the peak of the energy crisis in the 70s. BMW started developing hydrogen-powered vehicles using the combustion engines. And at some point we had a fleet of vehicles called the Hydrogen 7, which was a very famous pilot project, that used a dual-fuel combustion engine that could run on gasoline or on hydrogen, and so it had two tanks. From that great project, we learned a lot how to handle hydrogen in a vehicle, but we also learned that we need to do the next step, which is hydrogen fuel cell systems rather than combustion engines.
JustinHaydenMiller:So there are two primary methods for designing hydrogen-power vehicles. The first uses hydrogen as fuel in an internal combustion engine, ICE, H2ICE, where the hydrogen is burned, used to produce mechanical power. Correct. And the second method uses hydrogen in a fuel cell to generate electricity, which powers an electric motor in a fuel cell, FC electric vehicle, which is called an FCEV.
DrJürgenGuldner:Right. It's a chemical reaction between the hydrogen and the tanks in what we call the fuel cells, and there the hydrogen reacts in a very controlled manner with oxygen from the air that we take in through compressor and air filter. The product is electricity that then is used to drive the vehicle using the same electric motors that we use on our battery electric vehicles, and the end result basically is pure water, H2O, which then is the only exhaust that such vehicles have. The hydrogen 7 project basically laid the groundwork for the uses of hydrogen in the automotive industry.
JustinHaydenMiller:But Europe's a world leader in combustion engine cars, so why isn't it simply privileging the combustion type H2Is rather than reinventing the wheel, as it were, by concentrating on fuel cell hydrogen FCEVs?
DrJürgenGuldner:It very much depends on the application. For a passenger vehicle in private use, the fuel cell technology has distinct advantages. And the main reason is that a fuel cell is more efficient because it produces electricity and then the electricity can be used directly to drive the vehicle, to power the vehicle. And that just gets more range out of the same amount of hydrogen. And since space is limited in a car to store hydrogen, went that route. It's a little bit of a different story in trucks, in lorries, and also construction machinery, where the difference in terms of range or output is not so big as in passenger vehicles. Passenger vehicles having a lot of dynamic movement, a dynamic use pattern. Trucks, lorries are driving more at constant speed, constant load, where the fuel cell system and the combustion engines don't have that big of a gap in efficiency. And especially in construction machinery, fuel cells simply are not powerful enough. But for a passenger vehicle, the clear path is fuel cell systems.
JustinHaydenMiller:You're developing the hydrogen models in collaboration with Toyota. We've seen difficulties concerning the Renault Nissan arrangement. How are you leveraging the different strengths and cultures of BMW and Toyota?
DrJürgenGuldner:We have been working with Toyota for more than 10 years now, very successfully, because the companies share the same vision of bringing hydrogen mobility onto the roads of the world. We also have a lot of similarities in the term how we approach things and the competencies of the two companies very much complement each other. So we've had a very fruitful cooperation. We started with generation one, where we basically integrated a hydrogen fuel cell system into a BMW with a 5GD, and we built a few prototypes of that, and that was the first successful adoption. And then generation two is the generation that is in our pilot fleet of the BMW IX5 hydrogen, where we took the fuel cells, the individual cells from Toyota and built our own fuel cell system around it with the dynamics and power. And now the third generation is underway where we even intensified our collaboration and we will actually go into production with a BMW hydrogen powertrain model in 2028.
JustinHaydenMiller:And that's the BMW IX5 hydrogen.
DrJürgenGuldner:The pilot fleet is the BMW IX5. We have not announced the model that we will go into production with, but that announcement will come very soon.
JustinHaydenMiller:During my lifetime, people have constantly been saying that we'll run out of oil. Even as a child, I remember my uncle telling me we'd start running out ten years later, and that was a few decades back. But hydrogen, an element contained in water, is the most abundant element in the universe, around 75% of total mass. So I imagine we're relatively unlikely to run out of hydrogen anytime soon. Tell us what advantages and challenges there are for hydrogen cars over battery electric vehicles.
DrJürgenGuldner:Well, maybe we should spend a few minutes on talking about hydrogen as part of the energy transition. The future of our energy systems when we go away from fossiles will be renewable energies from the sun, the wind, and hydropower. And that produces electricity.
JustinHaydenMiller:That's a crucial point, isn't it? Renewables are intermittent, right? You can't easily store electricity, at least not on a national level. How does hydrogen bridge that gap?
DrJürgenGuldner:Today already we use a lot of electricity directly. And in the mobility sector, we use electricity then to power battery electric vehicles by charging the batteries and then driving them. Now in the energy transition, electricity alone cannot do the whole job. Because we need some ways to transport energy over longer distances. Consider countries like Japan and Korea, but also Europe, we will have to import renewable energy over longer distances. Today, we in the fossil world, obviously, we import a lot of oil and gas, and in the future we'll have to import renewable energy, and over longer distances at least, the only way to do that is with molecules, and hydrogen is a candidate for such import. For example, in Japan, when you want to import the sun or solar energy from Australia to Japan, the only way to do that is with hydrogen or a derivative that is produced from hydrogen like ammonia. Just like liquid natural gas, LNG. Exactly. That uh comparison with liquid gas is as absolutely right. And hydrogen solves that problem. Yeah. Either in the liquid form for ship transport, for example, or also using hydrogen pipelines by converting today's natural gas pipelines into hydrogen pipelines. And there's something called a European hydrogen backbone that's in the making. It'll take you know a few years, but that converts a lot of the existing natural gas pipelines, which usage is going down when we convert things away from fossil fuels, and the pipeline network can be re-commissioned to be transporting hydrogen over longer distances. So for example, from the south of Europe or the north of Europe, wind energy into the industrial centers. The other advantage of hydrogen is that as a gas, and very similar to natural gas again, you can store it over longer periods of time. So you literally can kind of save the sun from the summer for the winter by transforming it into hydrogen and storing it like a gas. Otherwise, the renewable energies are basically wasted. When there's too much renewable energy out there and the grids are full and no one uses the energy at that moment in time, then it's basically wasted because the solar plants or the wind farms have to be turned off because otherwise the grid would crash. So hydrogen can act as a buffer for the energy system. So we need both. For road transport now, mobility, we see the same thing. We see a duality between battery electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles. And it depends on the usage and especially on the users. I mean, battery electric cars are great in daily use, and they're great if you can charge them at home, for example, preferably with your own solar panel. They're wonderful to drive, um, great acceleration, it's silent. People love them. But if you don't have that and if you travel a lot and always have to charge publicly, so to speak, then it could become cumbersome. And some people tell us that they want to drive a zero emission vehicle, but the battery car doesn't fit into either of their daily lives because they don't have electric charging at home. All the people living in big cities, it's difficult to get electric charging to all the parking spots.
JustinHaydenMiller:Yeah, and that's why I don't have one yet.
DrJürgenGuldner:Yes, the the hydrogen mobility can be a catalyst for the energy transition and for the buildup of the hydrogen economy. We will need hydrogen for the bigger industries, a lot of steel and chemical processes, um fertilizers and so on. They need hydrogen anyways in the future and defossilized hydrogen. And to build that energy of hydrogen production from renewable energy, mobility can be one of the first off takers. And then later on, hydrogen will be transported in large quantities. There are projects, for example, in the UK, to mix hydrogen with natural gas in a pipeline and kind of co-transport it and then later on again filter the hydrogen out and extract it basically from this mixture. In Europe, we're going more the direction of really having dedicated hydrogen pipeline networks that then can distribute hydrogen. For mobility, obviously, you have to bring the hydrogen to a fueling station where it's then stored. Again, here we have technologies where we can store it as liquid or as a gas at the station and then it's put into the vehicles by a compressor.
JustinHaydenMiller:Let's talk about some of the problems and the processes to actually transport the hydrogen from major centers, pipelines, etc., to the vehicles and to the people themselves. Stellantis, the world's fifth largest automaker, has recently cancelled its hydrogen vehicle program because of limited availability of hydrogen infrastructure and high investment requirements. Jean-Philippe Imparato, Chief Operating Officer, said recently, quote, the hydrogen market remains a niche segment with no prospects of midterm economic sustainability. Do you agree with him on that?
DrJürgenGuldner:I agree that the infrastructure at the moment is at a critical point. There are some fueling stations that sell hydrogen that are being closed because they're too small and don't have the offtake basically to make them economically sustainable. But on the other hand, there are new fueling stations being opened. Bigger ones that have an offtake from commercial vehicles and they also serve passenger cars. And there's a new network of economically viable stations in the making that is actually growing. And at BMW, we're also working with some partners to enhance the network. In terms of the marketability, we see a clear path that when we reach scale in terms of hydrogen number of vehicles, hydrogen consumed at hydrogen fueling stations, and also, of course, in the hydrogen production, that we can reach an economic viability.
JustinHaydenMiller:Especially with Europe's supply chain strengths already in place for natural gas, liquid natural gas LNG, petrol, and diesel.
DrJürgenGuldner:The main advantage here is that the hydrogen technology, especially the fuel cell technology, is very versatile. The same fuel cell technology can be used in like intra-logistics, forklifts, for example. And we as BMW use hydrogen forklifts in our own plants already today. It can be used in passenger vehicles, it can be used in buses, it can be used in bigger trucks and lorries, also coaches. And it's always the same technology. So we will see economies of scale. And the advantage here is that the hydrogen fuel cell technology uses much less raw materials than the battery technology. And also the hydrogen technology is available in Europe. Already today there are companies that fulfill the full value chain or have the components needed to build fuel cell systems. So it is a technology that we have available in Europe and I think we should use it.
JustinHaydenMiller:I don't mind saying that I'm surprised that the European community and European governments generally are not investing in hydrogen a lot more than they are. And concerning the possibility that you mentioned that gas pipelines can be converted to transport hydrogen, it was announced in September 2025 that a new gas pipeline is intended to be built between Russia and China, the New Power of Siberia too, otherwise known as the PS2 Altai pipeline. The Chinese, for example, they are world leaders in the battery sector for electric vehicles, but I am convinced that the Chinese have hydrogen squirrely in their sights, and they'll switch much more towards it in the years to come.
DrJürgenGuldner:Yes, I completely agree that Europe has to step up in the next few months and years to keep this technology. And it's absolutely correct that China is already investing heavily in hydrogen as well. The largest hydrogen production is in China already. They have a few 10,000 hydrogen vehicles on the roads, mainly commercial vehicles, and they already have more than 400 fueling stations out there. As I said, we have the technology maturity in Europe. We have companies here that have the competency in all the components needed for a fuel cell vehicle, and we should use it. And in Europe, we had a study that came out, I think about two years ago, that was commissioned indirectly through the European Commission that actually showed that a dual infrastructure, meaning hydrogen integrated into fueling stations and electric charging as a sum is cheaper than trying to do everything electric. Can you explain why? Because electric infrastructure gets more and more expensive the more we want to build it. Because you not only have to invest into the chargers, but also in the grid upgrade that brings the power to those chargers, and you always have to design the network for the peak demand. Otherwise, especially in logistics where time is money and trucks and lorries and buses don't have the time to stop for longer just because there's a few other trucks wanting to charge, then all of a sudden, you know, you need an infrastructure that is designed for peak, and that is very expensive when you go into scaling. Just imagine a few megawatt chargers, 10 or 20 or 30, at each rest stop, you know, multiply it out, it's always the power demand of a small city that you need. And with hydrogen, it's easier to use existing infrastructure, existing gas stations, add hydrogen as a fuel that they can sell. And yes, building a hydrogen fueling station at the beginning is expensive, but scaling it, selling more hydrogen, you just add a few dispensers and you add the number of hydrogen deliveries basically per day.
JustinHaydenMiller:In fact, I see Europe as simply following technologies of other continents by following the green agenda programs of other economies, which are in their favour, putting nearly all efforts in battery electric vehicles, for example, where the US and China have made strides. Europe must do a lot more to be ahead of the game by developing its own technologies, such as what you're doing here at BMW with hydrogen. And Europe needs to get the necessary infrastructure in place for this to be able to work. Specifically, what does Europe, the European Union, need to do to get this moving?
DrJürgenGuldner:Well, one thing really is to recognize that hydrogen mobility is a second pillar in the decarbonization of mobility and really integrate that into the strategic dialogue discussions with the automotive industry and have it as a second technology. And to be very clear, battery electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles are not competition. They're both part of the solution for the decarbonization of mobility. The second thing is regarding infrastructure, we do have a regulation in place called the Alternative Fuel Infrastructure Regulation that actually promotes hydrogen fueling infrastructure and electric charging infrastructure along the major corridors called the Taitei 1 Trans-European Network for Transport and also in the urban nodes, so all the towns and cities in Europe. And the implementation date is the end of 2030. I think we should speed that up. There's a revision coming up in Europe this year or early next year, and we should speed up the implementation of hydrogen fueling station networks such that we actually have the backbone for people to adopt hydrogen vehicles, especially in the commercial vehicle sector. People need the security, people need to see that hydrogen is there in the coming and especially there to stay. And then what you said about single stations, yes, we need projects like hydrogen clusters, hydrogen hubs, or hydrogen valleys, and Europe has a funding mechanism for hydrogen valleys there, which could be extended because it integrates the hydrogen production, the distribution, the fueling stations, and the vehicle usage. For example, in the Netherlands, there's a funding scheme that actually promotes or funds hydrogen stations and vehicle end users because we have to get the people, the logistics companies, or those people who actually purchase the logistics transport into interested in decarbonization and being able to afford decarbonizing their own transport. And that is at the moment, at the beginning, needs some subsidies that can later on be phased out. Another good measure could be a kind of contract for difference, again, for those end users, for the logistics companies that helps them to switch from a diesel to a zero emission vehicle. It basically comes down to sensible regulation of money. Yeah, and and helping and especially the end users to make the switch. Things like having to pay the road taxes for zero emission vehicles helps the end user. Because at the beginning, each new technology comes with a cost. We have cost calculations that clearly show that this is temporary, that we just need to get to the scale of enough vehicle production. And we see also some truck OEMs preparing programs to launch vehicle into series production, and we see a clear cost down curve coming up. But we need to get through this, let's call it Valley of Death, where we help the end users to adopt to this new technology. Well, tell us about the vehicle that you're currently developing. In 2023, we launched our BMW IX5 pilot fleet of hydrogen vehicles. These are not for sale, small fleet of prototypes, but pretty well-developed prototypes that we used to showcase the technology around the world. We did a world tour with those cars on more than a million kilometers, more than 20 countries that we visited, and the response was very positive. Based on that positive response, we decided to go into production with a hydrogen powertrain at BMW in 2028.
JustinHaydenMiller:So it will be released in 2028.
DrJürgenGuldner:Correct.
JustinHaydenMiller:And that will be with the fuel cell electric, the FCEV.
DrJürgenGuldner:We showcased the fuel cell system itself, third generation of fuel cell systems at the Munich Mobility Show, but we have not announced a vehicle model yet.
JustinHaydenMiller:Jürgen, what are your predictions for the future in respect of hydrogen and especially for hydrogen mobility vehicles? Where do you think we'll be in, say, five years' time?
DrJürgenGuldner:Well, the future is always hard to predict, right? So my personal motto is it's better to shape the future, and that's why I'm working on hydrogen because I truly believe that hydrogen should play a role in the mobility of the future, in addition to battery electric vehicles. It depends very much on the circumstances in the different regions of the world. As BMW, we are a worldwide leader of technology, we're a worldwide leader of sustainability. That's why we're working in this dual technology pass, developing great battery electric vehicles and also great hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles. And the markets will develop differently. And as we talked about before, it will depend on the infrastructure. And we see a lot of infrastructure coming up in Korea and Japan and China already for hydrogen. We hope that there will be an infrastructure in Europe that sustains also hydrogen vehicles here. Since the technology is available in Europe, I don't see why it should not happen, but it takes a really a joint effort of the whole industry: hydrogen production, hydrogen distribution, fueling station operators, and vehicle OEMs and end users to actually make it happen. I hope that the European Commission and also the national governments will reinstall some trust into this technology in the future. And then hydrogen can play a major role in the decarbonization, because that's actually what we're looking for. We need to go away from fossil fuels and switch. It's always better when you want to change the behavior of people to offer choices, to offer also technology choices that fit then to the individual mobility needs.
JustinHaydenMiller:I believe there's an analogy here. You had Alexander Graham Bell who invented the telephone, but when the telephone was sold as a new device in the US, there was very, very little infrastructure in terms of the telephone lines. And it was actually Germany that stole the show in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries by rapidly installing telephone infrastructures. And when the US saw the Germans were catching up with them, it was then that the US massively invested in US infrastructure itself. I see something similar unfolding in the hydrogen space. The winners will be those who foresee the opportunities and invest early in production and stations and get the infrastructure in place in time.
DrJürgenGuldner:There definitely is a lot of competition out there in all the technologies, and I agree with you. We should, as Europe, um step up, and that's why I said it the time really is now. We have to step up in the next few months and years and build this infrastructure to allow the scaling and the market activation that is needed to bring the technology to the roads. The technology is mature, the technology is available in Europe, and now it's a matter of just do it.
JustinHaydenMiller:I think that's a very elegant way of ending the episode, Jürgen. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this issue with us, for inviting me to your wonderful innovation center in Munich, and thank you once again for being on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Do follow the podcast so you don't miss the next bonus episode where I test drive BMW's hydrogen prototype vehicle discussed in this episode and planned to be released onto the market in 2028. If you're listening to this, then thank you for having listened to the podcast from beginning to end. If you like it, do subscribe so you don't miss any episodes, and feel free to leave a rating. This will help others find it. You can find me on X at Justin Hayden, followed by the letter M. Or send me an email at globaltradedeciphered at gmail.com. And if I didn't mention a legal caveat, then I wouldn't be worth tuppence as a lawyer. So here goes. The content of this podcast is intended only to provide an information resource of interest and does not constitute legal, tax, business, or financial advice of any kind. Should you require advice, then you should engage an appropriately qualified person to provide you specific advisory services in the field. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this podcast are my own and do not necessarily represent the views, thoughts, or opinions of any law firm, nor that of any third party, other person, company, or organization. Global Trade Deciphered is a privileged discussions productions podcast. Stay tuned for the next episode.
Podcasts we love
Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.
Good Bad Billionaire
BBC World Service