US Decarbonisation Firm Utility Global Hires Industry Veteran to Drive European Hydrogen Push

Utility Global, the US industrial decarbonisation company backed by private equity firm Ara Partners, has appointed Robert Nijssen as vice president of business development for Europe, formalising its push into a region it views as the most demanding proving ground for clean hydrogen.

The Houston-based firm, which entered the European market at the World Hydrogen Summit 2026, said the hire moves it from market entry to execution. Nijssen brings more than 25 years of international leadership across the industrial gas, petrochemical and energy technology sectors, with a specialism in hydrogen and carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS).

His remit is to convert Utility's stated ambitions into commercial deals, primarily with steel and refining operators, the hard-to-abate industries where the company believes the economics of its technology are strongest.

Closing the Ambition-To-Deployment Gap

Nijssen is candid that Europe's hydrogen sector has a familiar problem: policy ambition is running ahead of operating projects. He argues that Europe has set the most ambitious decarbonisation framework in the world, and that policy clarity is what gives operators and investors the confidence to commit capital. But across the hydrogen sector broadly, he concedes, there remains a gap between what has been promised and what has actually been built.

That gap, in his telling, is precisely the opening. Utility's H2Gen technology produces low-carbon hydrogen from the off-gases and biogas that industrial sites already generate, without drawing on the grid, and it does so on site. Because it integrates into existing infrastructure rather than waiting on a large-scale renewable electricity buildout, Nijssen says it can move from commitment to deployment faster than approaches that depend on new infrastructure maturing first.

The process also yields a concentrated carbon dioxide stream of up to 98 per cent purity, which the company says significantly lowers the cost of carbon capture.

A Bankability Argument for Investors

The pitch is being framed squarely at capital providers. Nijssen says there is substantial investor and lender interest in European industrial decarbonisation, but that backers have grown more discerning about which projects represent genuinely bankable risk and which still rest on assumptions about future infrastructure or policy.

He contends that works in Utility's favour. Because the technology slots into existing operations and does not require speculative infrastructure, he argues the economics are easier to underwrite today, which he expects to translate into more efficient deal timelines than rival approaches that ask capital providers to bet on infrastructure that does not yet exist.

Central to that argument is a convergence thesis. Hydrogen production and carbon capture have typically been pursued as separate plays, with separate capital stacks and separate justifications, an inefficiency Nijssen blames in part for CCUS struggling to scale. By producing hydrogen and a concentrated CO2 stream from a single process, he says, H2Gen lets one capital deployment address two decarbonisation objectives at once, improving the return profile and cutting the execution risk of coordinating disparate projects.

Deal Structures and Target Markets

On the types of deals he is pursuing, Nijssen points to direct commercial relationships with industrial off-takers as the near-term priority, but expects a varied mix as projects scale: direct deployment agreements, collaborations with infrastructure and engineering partners, and potentially joint development structures where the economics call for shared investment. The common thread, he says, is getting the technology into operating facilities rather than signing frameworks.

Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France are early areas of focus, the markets where industrial appetite and supportive policy are converging fastest. But Nijssen stresses the business case must stand on its own with or without subsidy, given that industrial customers are making decisions across asset lives of fifteen to twenty years.

Backing and Validation

The European drive is underpinned by Ara Partners, a global private equity and infrastructure firm with roughly $8.2 billion (£6.1 billion) in assets under management focused on decarbonising the industrial economy. Nijssen says that backing matters in a market where customers need confidence their technology partner has the financial staying power to support them across a full asset lifecycle.

Utility Global was also named to TIME's list of the World's Top GreenTech Companies for a second consecutive year, recognition the company says reflects external validation of both its environmental impact and financial fundamentals as it scales in Europe.

Whether that translates into operating deployments is the test ahead. Reflecting on a career that included leading a large-scale CO2 export terminal project in Europe, Nijssen says the lesson he carries into the role is that technical merit alone does not move projects. Commercialisation happens, he argues, only when a complex technology can be turned into an economic story that works for the operator, the investor and the regulator alike.