Half of Lithuania knows nothing about green hydrogen. That is a permitting risk, not a PR problem.
A new Spinter Research survey for Amber Grid finds 52% of Lithuanians know nothing about green hydrogen, while 75% of those who do know it back producing and exporting it. We look at why that combination is a delivery risk for the Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor, and why Latvia and Estonia should measure their own baseline before the routing decisions start.
NEWS
PtXBaltic
9/10/20266 min read
Every second Lithuanian says they know nothing about green hydrogen. That is the headline from a Spinter Research survey commissioned by Amber Grid, and it is easy to file it under public relations and move on. We would file it somewhere else entirely: under project risk. Because the gap the survey measures is not a communications gap. It is the gap that shows up eighteen months later, at a municipal hearing, when a compressor station needs a permit and nobody in the room has a working mental model of what hydrogen is.
A baseline number the rest of the Baltics does not have
The numbers are worth sitting with. Fifty-two percent of respondents openly admit they know nothing about green hydrogen. Ten percent say their knowledge is sufficient. Thirty-eight percent land in the middle - they know the term exists, but not enough to judge whether it is good or bad for them. Amber Grid also reports that nearly half of respondents do not recognise that green hydrogen is made by electrolysis using renewable electricity, and that some believe it is extracted from underground deposits the way natural gas is.
That last finding is the one that matters most, and it is more interesting than it looks. A person who thinks hydrogen is mined has an entire chain of assumptions attached - about drilling, about depletion, about who owns the deposit, about whether this is just fossil energy wearing a new coat. None of those assumptions are true, and all of them will surface later as objections. The Lithuanian survey did not create that problem. It simply found it, and put a number on it.
Latvia and Estonia have no comparable number. We are building toward the same infrastructure, on the same timeline, into the same information vacuum - and we are doing it without knowing how deep the vacuum is.
Support given on credit is not the same as a social licence
The survey also carries what looks like good news: 75 percent of those familiar with the term support Lithuania becoming a producer and exporter of green hydrogen. Amber Grid CEO Nemunas Biknys put a sharp frame on it, saying that confidence is largely given on credit - people believe in a green future but still struggle to picture how it will work in practice.
Credit is the right word. Approval that has never been tested against a specific asset in a specific municipality is not a social licence; it is goodwill with no collateral behind it. And the composition of that support tells you where it will bend. Respondents rated replacing petroleum in transport (60.2 percent) and emissions-free energy (59.2 percent) as the main benefits, with energy independence close behind at 53.8 percent. Export came last, at 22.1 percent.
Read that against what is actually being built. The Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor is, at its core, an export corridor - surplus Baltic wind and solar converted into a molecule and moved to industrial demand in Germany and Poland. The public supports the domestic story. The infrastructure is being justified by the export story. That is not a contradiction yet, but it is a seam, and seams are where opposition finds purchase.
The misconceptions bite at routing, compressor stations and permits
Here is what we mean in practical terms. A hydrogen transmission project does not fail because the electrolyser underperforms. It slows down at land access, route corridors, environmental impact assessment, and the compressor stations that need siting in places where people live. Every one of those steps is a conversation with a community that has, on these numbers, roughly a coin-flip chance of starting from zero knowledge - or worse, from confident misinformation.
And the safety question will be asked. It should be asked. Hydrogen has a wider flammability range than natural gas and a smaller molecule, which changes materials selection, leak detection and pipeline integrity practice - these are real engineering considerations that the industry has decades of experience managing in industrial settings. But an operator who first meets that question inside a permitting hearing, from a room already primed with the idea that hydrogen is a mined fossil product, has lost the argument before opening the slides.
A 2,500 km corridor moves at the speed of its slowest consent process
The Nordic-Baltic Hydrogen Corridor connects six transmission system operators - Gasgrid Vetyverkot in Finland, Elering in Estonia, Conexus Baltic Grid in Latvia, Amber Grid in Lithuania, GAZ-SYSTEM in Poland and ONTRAS in Germany. It holds Project of Common Interest status under the Baltic Energy Market Interconnection Plan for hydrogen, granted in April 2024, and the operators have put its potential contribution at up to 37 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent avoided per year by 2050. The feasibility work explicitly covers pipeline routing, compressor station planning, and environmental and safety permitting.
So the permitting exposure is not a footnote in this project. It is named in the scope. And a cross-border asset of this shape has an unforgiving property: it is only as fast as its slowest national consent process. A delay in one jurisdiction is not a local delay. It is a corridor delay, and it re-prices the whole chain for everyone upstream and downstream of it.
Which means public understanding stops being a national matter. If Latvian consent lags, that is a Finnish and German problem too. We would put it plainly: on a corridor project, your neighbour’s awareness deficit is your schedule risk.
Latvia’s stretch runs through the same information vacuum
Conexus is a full partner in this corridor, and Latvia’s segment will need the same land access, the same route decisions and the same station siting as everyone else’s. We have no reason to assume Latvian public knowledge is materially better than Lithuanian public knowledge - the media environment, the education pipeline and the absence of visible hydrogen infrastructure are broadly comparable across the three countries. We also have no evidence that it is worse. That is precisely the problem. We are guessing.
A representative national awareness survey is cheap relative to a permitting delay on a PCI-status transmission project. Amber Grid has now demonstrated both that it can be done and what it yields: not a vanity statistic, but a map of which misconceptions are load-bearing and where communication effort actually pays. Replicating it in Latvia and Estonia, ideally with comparable questions so the three datasets can be read together, would give Baltic hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders something they currently lack - a shared baseline, measured before the shovels move rather than after the objections start.
Explain the asset, not the ambition
Biknys made a second point that deserves more attention than it got: society does not need deep technological knowledge, but the sector has a duty to answer fundamental questions of safety and benefit. We would sharpen it further. The unit of communication that works is not the energy transition. It is the specific object arriving in a specific place - this pipeline, on this route, carrying this molecule, made this way, with these safety systems, employing these people.
Strategy documents and corridor maps do not travel well into a village hall. A clear answer to "what is this thing, why is it here, and what happens if it leaks" does. The Lithuanian survey is, read correctly, an instruction sheet for what those answers need to cover: hydrogen is manufactured not mined, it is made by splitting water with renewable electricity, and the reason it is being built here is that the Baltics have more wind than they can use domestically.
What this signals for the Baltic hydrogen ecosystem
One survey in one country is not a regional verdict, and we would not stretch it into one. The sample was 1,006 respondents aged 18 to 75, with a stated margin of error not exceeding 3.1 percent - solid for a national picture, and Lithuania-specific. The BNS release accompanying the study also carried a claim that around 70 percent of new European gas infrastructure projects are now hydrogen initiatives; we have not been able to verify that figure against a primary source and would treat it as the operator’s framing rather than an established statistic.
What survives the caveats is straightforward. Public support for hydrogen in the Baltics is broad, shallow, and pointed at benefits that differ from the ones the corridor business case rests on. That combination is workable, but only if it is treated as an engineering input with a schedule attached - measured, tracked, and addressed asset by asset - rather than as something the communications team handles once the route is already drawn. Amber Grid has just shown the region what measuring it looks like. The useful next step is for Latvia and Estonia to find out what their own numbers are.
Source: Lithuanians support green hydrogen, yet every second person admits knowing nothing about it