NewsBase Horizons, the thought leadership side of the IntelliNews sister site Newsbase, spoke with Jerry Lin, Merchant & Clean Energy Business Development Manager at Linde LienHwa during the ongoing NET-ZERO TAIWAN / ENERGY TAIWAN event in the Taiwanese capital, discussing the direction the company is taking with promoting and enabling hydrogen use in Taiwan.
“We are definitely moving in this direction,” through a solution Linde LienHwa calls “hydrogen as a service” Lin says. He stressed that the offering goes beyond the fuel itself though: “It’s not just selling hydrogen. We are providing a total solution, including supply of hydrogen, refuelling stations, and everything in between that goes into this business.”
At present, the company is focusing on heavy-duty transportation, which Lin currently sees as the best market for hydrogen. In doing so, Lin pointed to better service and loading capacity than regular fuels, “a very short refuelling time” and a reasonable fuel cost, provided there are government subsidies forthcoming.
On company targets in the next 12 months and in the years ahead, Lin said Linde LienHwa built its first hydrogen station in Taiwan last year, in Kaohsiung in the south of the country. As of late 2026, it is aiming to add another station in the north, perhaps near Taipei or in the centre of the country around Taichung, Taiwan’s second largest city.
On what kind of subsidies the company needs from the government, Lin cannot offer details at present but responds that “The government is actually working on this as well,” as those officials the firm is in contact with understand that hydrogen still costs far more than electricity or diesel he states. To this end Lin claims the government is looking to compensate the emerging sector with subsidies so that hydrogen’s cost per kilometre matches what electricity and diesel users pay in fuelling their vehicles.
But when pushed on the type of hydrogen being used; grey hydrogen derived from natural gas, blue hydrogen the product of the same natural-gas process, but with most of the CO₂ captured and stored underground and green hydrogen made by electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, Lin added a new form of hydrogen to the mix. “We call our hydrogen a low carbon hydrogen,” he said. “So we don’t actually specify it as a colour” in the more commonly used sense.
He explained that the company’s steam reforming technology naturally produces carbon dioxide alongside hydrogen, but Linde LienHwa captures this CO2 and uses it in other processes. It then uses this low-carbon hydrogen across all of its products, customers and markets.
NewsBase Horizons put to Lin the view held by many, that hydrogen is still seen as an out-of-reach fuel of the future because it cannot be easily transported, to do so is expensive and for a number of other physical reasons; a problem captive hydrogen projects are now working to circumvent in some parts of Asia.
According to Lin this is a question of demand. In some countries, he said, liquid hydrogen is used during the transportation process because the volumes being shifted are huge. In Taiwan, a tiny island when viewed alongside other hydrogen markets such as India, Lin reveals that the company uses trailers to transport hydrogen as a gas, which he considers more reasonable for the local market - and presumably the easiest option in that trucks are able to reach any part of Taiwan by road in as little as four to five hours.
For now then, while the Linde LienHwa infrastructure in Taiwan is still modest given the company’s lone refuelling station, and some aspects of improving that set up are still vague with significant expansion some way off, the firm’s goal of “having another one, maybe in the north or in the central areas in the coming years” remains Taiwan’s best bet at enabling hydrogen to gain a proper foothold in the country.