Hydrogenics Europe and the EIC Accelerator: An Electrolyser Exit

Hydrogenics Europe NV, the Belgian arm of the Canadian hydrogen company Hydrogenics, builds electrolysers, the machines that split water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity, at a plant in Oevel, part of the municipality of Westerlo. In the European Commission's list of companies selected at the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot of today's EIC Accelerator, it appears with the project HyLYZER, a grant-only award. Phase 2 grants in that round were worth up to €2.5 million. What happened next is the puzzle of this case: CORDIS, the EU's project database, holds no Phase 2 grant agreement for HyLYZER or for any other project of the company. Five months after the selection, Cummins Inc. completed its takeover of the parent group, and in February 2026 Cummins said it would stop new commercial activity in electrolysers.

The only HyLYZER project on CORDIS is a Phase 1 feasibility study, grant agreement 826968, which ran from 1 August to 30 November 2018 with an EU contribution of €50,000 towards a total cost of €71,429. The full CORDIS Horizon 2020 dataset lists nine Horizon 2020 projects for Hydrogenics Europe NV, under Belgian VAT number BE0473539251, and none of them is a Phase 2 grant. Why no Phase 2 agreement was signed is not public: neither the company, Cummins nor the Commission has said whether the grant was declined, withdrawn or never offered.

Where Hydrogenics Europe Stands Now

The company is still registered and active. The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO) lists it as active in a normal legal situation on 7 October 2026, with registered capital of €395,227,000. Its last filed annual accounts are for 2023, deposited in July 2024 with the National Bank of Belgium; no accounts for 2024 or 2025 were on file on 8 October 2026. The Belgian Official Gazette published capital changes in January 2024, January 2025 and December 2025, according to Staatsbladmonitor.

Its future is tied to a decision taken in Indiana. In its annual report for 2025, filed on 10 February 2026, Cummins wrote that it had "fully impaired all of the goodwill for our electrolyzer business" in the third quarter of 2025 and that "we intend to stop new commercial activity in the electrolyzer space, subject to information and consultation in accordance with local legal requirements". The same report still lists Oevel among the manufacturing sites of Accelera, Cummins' zero-emissions unit. Hydrogen Central, reporting Cummins' full-year results, put the 2025 charges for the electrolyzer business at $458 million, of which $415 million were non-cash.

The cuts at Oevel came in two rounds, and the reports disagree on the details. On 6 December 2024 VRT NWS reported that 100 jobs, 50 blue-collar and 50 white-collar, were under threat because the company wanted to move production fully or partly to Guadalajara in Spain. On 18 February 2026 VRT NWS reported that another 100 jobs would go "this year" because Cummins was stopping all commercial activities, that 100 jobs had already been lost "last year", under a social plan negotiated in January 2025 that runs to the end of 2027, and that the union ACV-CSC METEA expected 60 people to stay to finish orders and commission and maintain installations. newmobility.news wrote on the same day that the first 100 jobs had been cut "by the end of 2024" and that about 80 functions would be kept. The Belga News Agency put the workforce at about 250 and reported that management had announced 85 layoffs at the end of 2025 and 15 more in early January 2026, with about 80 jobs to remain. All three agree that a full closure was not planned at the time.

The Technology: PEM Electrolysis at Industrial Scale

An electrolyser makes hydrogen from water and electricity; if the electricity is renewable, the hydrogen is close to carbon-free, unlike the hydrogen made from natural gas that industry mostly uses. The Oevel site has its roots in alkaline electrolysis through Vandenborre, which the company absorbed in 2007, and HyLYZER is its proton exchange membrane (PEM) line, in which a solid polymer membrane replaces the liquid electrolyte. CORDIS lists Hydrogenics Europe in the Haeolus project, which put a 2.5 MW PEM electrolyser into a Norwegian wind farm whose growth was limited by grid bottlenecks, a use case for a technology that can follow the swings of wind power.

The HyLYZER project set out to industrialise this. Its CORDIS summary describes an industrial-scale PEM electrolyser producing "on-site clean high purity hydrogen with zero-emissions from renewable energy sources" at 85% efficiency at stack level, aimed at steel, fertiliser, chemical and glass plants, and claims that each tonne of hydrogen produced this way offsets about 10 tonnes of CO2. The Phase 1 report says the study planned a HyLYZER 1000 pilot plant, confirmed patent protection and freedom to operate, and found strong market interest.

The technology did reach customers. In January 2021 Cummins announced that a 20 MW PEM system of four pressurised electrolyser skids was running at Air Liquide's hydrogen plant in Bécancour, Quebec, able to make more than 3,000 tonnes of hydrogen a year from hydropower; Cummins called it the largest PEM electrolyser in operation in the world. Air Liquide described the same 20 MW plant, completed on 28 January 2021, as able to make up to 8.2 tonnes of low-carbon hydrogen a day with Cummins technology. Neither source says where the Bécancour stacks were built, so the share of Oevel in that project cannot be established from public records.

What the EIC Selection Promised, and What the Record Shows

The feasibility study made large promises. Its report projected "sales in 2021-2025 of 622.3 MM€, EBITDA 60.01 MM€, IRR of 70.58%, ROI = 7.4" and a payback of two years. Hydrogenics Europe's filed turnover for 2021 to 2023, the three years for which accounts are public, was €43.0 million in total. The forecast covered five years and may have counted sales booked by other group companies, so the comparison is not exact, but the gap is wide.

Because no Phase 2 grant agreement exists on CORDIS, there is no Phase 2 work plan, report or deliverable to check against. The delivery of the EIC project is therefore rated unclear: the HyLYZER product line exists and was sold, but nothing links it to an EIC Phase 2 grant, and whether any EIC money was paid out after the April 2019 selection is not public.

1. Phase 2 grant agreementNot foundCORDIS lists only the 2018 Phase 1 study (826968).
2. Industrial PEM electrolysers in operationDelivered20 MW system at Air Liquide, Bécancour, January 2021, per Cummins; not tied to an EIC grant.
3. €622.3M of sales, 2021 to 2025Not achieved€43.0M filed turnover in 2021 to 2023.
4. Scale-up of production in BelgiumReversed1 GW plan of 2022, then production moved to Spain and sales stopped.

The Cummins Years

Cummins completed its purchase of Hydrogenics Corporation on 9 September 2019, according to the company's filing with the SEC: a Cummins subsidiary acquired 15,486,610 shares, 81.4% of the company, for US$15.00 a share in cash, while Air Liquide's The Hydrogen Company swapped its 3,537,931 shares, 18.6%, for shares in the buyer. Law firm Torys, which advised Hydrogenics, reported the same terms. On 30 June 2023 Air Liquide said it had sold its stake, which it described as 19%, to Cummins; Hydrogen Central reported the sale on the same terms.

Under Cummins the Belgian plant was meant to grow. In September 2022 Cummins said it would expand PEM electrolyser manufacturing in Oevel to 1 GW a year with support from IPCEI Hy2Tech, the EU-approved state aid scheme for hydrogen technology, funded in Flanders by the innovation agency VLAIO; WaterstofNet reported the plan. In October 2024 Accelera opened a PEM electrolyser factory in Guadalajara, Spain, with 500 MW of annual capacity and an investment of €75 million, according to Chemical Engineering and Renewable Energy Magazine. Two months later the transfer of Oevel production to Spain was announced.

The Money

The filed accounts show a business that grew in staff and capital while its losses multiplied. Turnover rose from €13.04 million in 2019 to €22.18 million in 2022, then fell by 77% to €5.14 million in 2023. The net loss grew every year, from €4.40 million in 2019 to €23.36 million in 2022, and rose 2.59-fold to €60.57 million in 2023. These figures come from the accounts filed with the National Bank of Belgium and match those shown by Companyweb and Staatsbladmonitor.

Average staff rose from 72.9 full-time equivalents in 2019 to 219.1 in 2023. The owner covered the losses with fresh capital: registered capital was €16.76 million at the end of 2020, €169.23 million at the end of 2023, and €395.23 million in the register in October 2026. Equity stood at €85.30 million at the end of 2023, after an accumulated loss of €83.93 million carried forward.

Other EU Funding

The EIC selection was a small part of the company's EU funding. The CORDIS Horizon 2020 dataset records €9.11 million of EU contributions to Hydrogenics Europe NV across nine projects, mostly as a partner in hydrogen demonstrations. The largest were Haeolus, which installed a 2.5 MW PEM electrolyser in the Raggovidda wind farm in Norway (€2,281,765.68), HyBalance, a power-to-hydrogen demonstration (€1,826,325), and FLEXnCONFU, on power-to-X solutions to make gas-fired combined cycle power plants more flexible (€1,776,285). The German sister company Hydrogenics GmbH in Herten appears separately in other projects.

Why Europe Should Care

Electrolysers are at the centre of EU climate and industrial policy. The Commission's hydrogen strategy of July 2020 set a goal of at least 40 GW of renewable hydrogen electrolysers in the EU by 2030, and Hy2Tech, the IPCEI that backed the Oevel expansion, was designed to build a European manufacturing base for them. In July 2024 the European Court of Auditors found these targets were not realistic and rested on "political will" rather than robust analysis, as POWER Magazine and Engineering News reported. Oevel shows the cost of that gap on the supply side: one of Europe's oldest electrolyser plants, with decades of know-how, is being reduced to a service base because its owner sees too little demand.

The Verdict

Hydrogenics Europe, Cummins and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.