The chairman of the world's largest oil refinery took the stage at Summer Davos on Tuesday and delivered a forecast that would have sounded far-fetched a decade ago: green hydrogen, he said, is about to do what solar and wind once did — collapse in price until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Zhao Dong (趙東), who heads Sinopec (中國石化), China's state-owned petrochemical giant, told the forum in Dalian that he expects green hydrogen costs to fall sharply within five to ten years, replicating the steep curves that turned photovoltaics and turbines from expensive experiments into the world's cheapest power sources. His personal target, stated plainly, is to make Sinopec "China's No. 1 hydrogen company."
The timing of his remarks is not incidental. This year's Gulf War has choked global crude oil flows, jolting energy markets and pushing corporations to accelerate their search for alternatives with more predictable supply chains. For Zhao, the disruption is an argument, not just a backdrop.
Sinopec's 20,000-Tonne Bet On Replacing Grey Hydrogen
Sinopec's hydrogen ambitions are not confined to the podium. The company has already built 20,000 tonnes of annual green hydrogen production capacity, directly substituting output previously generated from grey hydrogen — the fossil-fuel-derived variety that has long dominated industrial supply.
Its flagship facility sits in Kuche, in China's Xinjiang region, and is the country's first green hydrogen project operating at the 10,000-tonne scale. A 300-megawatt solar farm feeds an electrolytic water-splitting plant capable of producing 20,000 tonnes per year. As of September 2025, the installation had run continuously for more than 800 days. Every piece of core equipment is domestically manufactured. Hydrogen leaves the site through a six-kilometre dedicated pipeline, feeding directly into the adjacent Tahe Petrochemical (塔河石化) plant for refining operations.
A second project, in the coastal city of Qingdao, is China's first installation to produce hydrogen from seawater directly. Powered by a 13-megawatt solar array, it channels hydrogen output to nearby petrochemical facilities and hydrogen refueling stations — the first nodes, in Sinopec's framing, of a green energy network for China's coastline.
Together, the two sites make Sinopec's core argument: that green hydrogen is no longer laboratory-scale technology, and that Chinese industry can build and operate it without foreign components.
Heavy Freight, Not Power Grids, Is Hydrogen's First Market
Zhao was specific about where green hydrogen will find its earliest commercial footing — and it is not electricity generation.
Heavy transport is his chosen arena. Large freight trucks and commercial logistics vehicles, he argued, are natural candidates for hydrogen fuel cells: they cover long distances, carry heavy payloads, and need refueling infrastructure rather than charging time. A mature hydrogen ecosystem built around freight, he suggested, would be the sector's most commercially compelling entry point.
Sinopec is building that ecosystem through its existing national footprint. The company has already converted 146 of its petrol stations into hydrogen refueling points and established six cross-regional hydrogen corridor networks. Long-distance heavy truck demonstration programmes are underway across Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, and Jiangsu — a chain of provinces that together form one of China's densest industrial logistics belts.
The strategic logic is clear: Sinopec already owns the land, the national network, and the relationships with commercial fleet operators. Green hydrogen gives all of it a second life.
A Coal Group That Staked Its Future On Hydrogen
Zhao did not speak alone. Party Yanbao (黨彥寶), founder of Ningxia Baofeng Group (寧夏寶豐集團) — a company built on coal — told the same forum session that his company has committed to green hydrogen and plans to grow production by 5% every year.
The Baofeng case is arguably more instructive than Sinopec's, because it arrives from outside the state-owned energy hierarchy. Party's reasoning was grounded not in corporate positioning but in a straightforward energy systems argument. China's wind and solar costs have already fallen to striking levels — onshore wind power now costs around 0.1 yuan per kilowatt-hour — but renewable energy carries a structural liability: it is intermittent. Solar produces nothing after dark. Wind stops when conditions are calm.
Battery storage can buffer this, but grid-scale deployment remains expensive. Green hydrogen, Party contended, resolves the problem in a way that batteries alone cannot. Surplus renewable output — power generated on a sunny afternoon when demand is low — can be used to produce hydrogen, stored indefinitely, and converted back to electricity or used directly as fuel when the grid needs it. In other words, hydrogen does not simply compete with fossil fuels; it completes the renewable energy system by solving the one problem solar and wind cannot solve on their own.
If costs fall as both executives predicted — and the solar precedent suggests they might — the remaining question is not whether green hydrogen arrives, but whether the infrastructure to move and store it can be built fast enough to matter. （Related： Opinion | At Davos, China's Li Qiang Tears Down Walls. For Now. ｜ Latest ）
