The network will train 10 ESRs (30 fte years) and 6 ERs (11.5 fte years) in research on production and storage of hydrogen. Training young people in research aimed at realising the hydrogen exconomy is a stated European policy goal. Training is provided in the scientific areas that are associated with the research objectives, with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and intersectorial aspects. It will be based on personalized career development plans to provide the ESRs and ERs with balanced sets of skills and advanced knowledge at the leading edge of science and technology.

The current commercial process for producing hydrogen is steam reforming of natural gas. Hydrogen can also be produced from coal using gasification technology. Both methods have as disadvantages that they result in CO₂ emission (even if CO₂ could be sequestered, the safety of sequestration techniques is presently under discussion), that the availability of natural gas and coal is limited, and a disadvantage of natural gas is that most of it is present in non-EU, sometimes unstable countries, with consequences for energy security [6]. Other methods of producing hydrogen use nuclear energy, electricity from solar cells or from wind energy, biomass (which cannot be grown in sufficient quantities to fulfill world energy needs), and photobiological and photoelectrochemical processes [6]. Photoelectrochemical hydrogen production is mentioned in both a recent energy technology analysis of the International Energy Agency (IEA) [6] and in a recent report of the National Research Council and the National Academy of Engineering of the US (NRC/NAE report) [5] as an important research area where the kind of technological and conceptual breakthroughs required for the hydrogen economy are possible, and the network will focus its research on production of hydrogen exclusively on this production technique.

Hydrogen can be produced efficiently and cheaply using a tandem cell [16, 17]. This device (see Figure below) connects a photoelectrochemical cell to a Grätzel solar cell. The Grätzel cell converts energy in red light to electricity, providing the small extra bias to drive oxygen production over the metaloxide electrode which absorbs blue light in the photoelectrochemical cell. Hydrogen Solar, which aims to bring the tandem cell to the market, reports an efficiency of 8% for a tandem cell based on a WO3 photoanode in the photoelectrochemical cell [18].