Unravelling the Green Hydrogen Value Chain: A Digital Sustainability Toolset Advancing Clean Energy and Decent Jobs

The transition to affordable and clean energy sources is essential for creating a sustainable future. Green hydrogen, as an emerging energy carrier, has the potential to meet increasing energy demands while mitigating environmental impact and achieving SDG 7. The incorporation of green hydrogen into any energy system is a complex process that entails numerous challenges. These challenges include fluctuating energy outputs from renewables, the technical demands of storing hydrogen across varying pressures and temperatures, the intricate logistics required for its safe transportation, skills, and other considerations. Given these complexities and the constantly evolving knowledge around green hydrogen, it becomes important to identify skills and technologies propelling the development of the green hydrogen value chain. This study presents a systematic approach for identifying and analysing the skills and technologies pivotal to the green hydrogen value chain. Using natural language processing techniques, hard skills, soft skills, and emerging technologies are extracted and categorised from published literature. A token classification model, built upon the pre-trained BERT architecture and fine-tuned with domain-specific data, enables the precise identification of contextually relevant entities. The results reveal a taxonomy of skills and technologies, highlighting critical workforce capabilities such as material science expertise, project management, and leadership skills, alongside emerging technologies like PEM electrolysers and nanostructured materials. These results provide actionable insights for addressing skill sustainability, fostering workforce development, advancing decent work and economic development, and guiding technological innovation to strengthen the green hydrogen value chain. The integration of real-time updates ensures that the analysis remains current.