four stations closed

Austria says goodbye to all hydrogen filling stations; also decline in UK and Germany

Published on 24-04-2025 at 14:41

In Austria, the state oil company OMV will close all filling stations where passenger cars can fill up with hydrogen in the coming months. Reason is the disappointing demand for the green energy source. The development is not isolated, as hydrogen filling stations in Germany are also closing their doors.

OMV, the Österreichische Mineralölverwaltung Aktiengesellschaft, is the only operator of public hydrogen filling stations in Austria. The group has four publicly accessible hydrogen refuelling stations in the country: in Asten, Graz, Vienna and Innsbruck. The pump in Asten will be the first to close at the end of June, while the other three will close during August and September. From then on, hydrogen-powered car owners will no longer be able to fill up with hydrogen in the country. They will then have to go to southern Germany. The reason for the closure of the Austrian hydrogen filling stations, is the disappointing demand for the renewable fuel. OMV is also making too large operating losses on the operation of the stations, which were built in recent years with European subsidy money. In addition, the Alpine country currently has far fewer hydrogen cars than was hoped for to justify the number of filling stations and the millions of euros of investment. There are only a few dozen hydrogen cars in Austria, for instance.

Germany

Hydrogen is not yet the big success for car owners in Germany either. For instance, as many as 22 of around 100 hydrogen filling stations that can be found in the country will close before the summer. Things are not much better in Britain, where Shell closed its only three hydrogen filling stations as early as 2022. According to Shell, because the sites were not performing satisfactorily and because the available space was too small to upgrade for larger vehicles and future technology.
While in more and more European countries hydrogen filling stations are giving up, in the Netherlands there is still plenty of subsidy available to meet the European target. Nevertheless, in our country too, the number of publicly accessible hydrogen refuelling stations for passenger cars stands at 25 and 620 cars are currently running on hydrogen. Set against the more than 9.2 million passenger cars that the Netherlands has, this is a very small number.

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This article was automatically translated from the Dutch language original to English (British).

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