Hydrogen Enters Latvia's Freight Decarbonisation Debate
Latvia's Ministry of Transport has published a draft informative report on decarbonising road freight, and hydrogen appears throughout it — with its own forecast scenarios, a share of a €40 million refuelling and charging budget, and Lithuania's fuel cell support programme held up as the template. The consultation is still open on the TAP portal, which makes this the moment for the Latvian hydrogen ecosystem to shape support intensity, technology neutrality and Baltic tax alignment.
POLICYNEWS
HydrogenLatvia
8/24/20264 min read
Something changed in June. Latvia's Ministry of Transport published an informative report on making the road freight sector sustainable — and hydrogen is not a footnote in it. It has its own forecast scenarios, its own share of the infrastructure budget, and its own place in the measures table. For a fuel that currently powers exactly zero registered trucks in this country, that is a meaningful shift in where the state thinks this sector is heading.
Heavy freight moves from the margins of climate policy to the centre
The report opens with a number that explains the urgency. Road transport produces 71.7% of Latvia's transport sector greenhouse gas emissions, and heavy freight alone accounts for 27.1%. Against that sits a fleet the report describes plainly: 100,269 freight vehicles registered in 2025, of which 96,342 run on diesel. Electric freight vehicles number 291 — roughly 0.3% of the fleet. Hydrogen vehicles do not appear in the register at all.
The renewal picture is not much better. The average freight vehicle is 12.2 years old and 18.4% of the fleet is over twenty. Sixty-four percent of operators told the ministry's survey they plan to renew by 2030 — and 91% of those plan to buy diesel again. With ETS2 bringing a carbon cost to transport fuel from 2027 and EU Regulation 2024/1610 tightening CO2 limits on heavy vehicles beyond 2030, every one of those purchases is a fifteen-year exposure taken on with today's assumptions.
Where hydrogen earns its place in the freight mix
The ministry's honest conclusion is that electrification will carry the bulk of the work. In the optimal scenario, electric vehicles reach around 80% of the freight fleet by 2050. Hydrogen's modelled trajectory is more modest — 0.20% by 2030 rising to roughly 26% by 2050 in the same scenario, against 9.7% if policy stays passive.
Read that as a defeat and you miss the point. A quarter of the fleet is not a rounding error, and the report is specific about which quarter. Hydrogen's potential, it says, sits in long-distance and international haulage and in the high-load N3 segment, where mileage between stops is long, refuelling windows are short, and battery mass eats into the payload that actually earns the money. That is precisely the segment Latvian operators compete in — 4,737 carriers held international licences in 2023, and international work remains the backbone of the sector's revenue.
So the strategic read for Latvian hydrogen ecosystem stakeholders is this: stop arguing hydrogen against batteries and start building the case in the segment where the ministry's own modelling already concedes the ground. The report allocates €40 million for 50-plus charging and hydrogen refuelling points — averaging around €800,000 each — aligned to TEN-T corridor requirements, with investment steered toward intermodal terminals, logistics centres and company depots near the main ports and transit routes. That is the first Latvian budget line where hydrogen refuelling sits beside charging as a peer rather than an afterthought.
Lithuania already ran this experiment and published the results
The most useful section of the report may be the one about the neighbours. Lithuania has spent the last few years running support programmes for zero-emission freight vehicles through both the Recovery and Resilience Facility and its Climate Change Programme — and, importantly, those schemes covered fuel cell vehicles alongside battery electric ones, with support intensity differentiated by vehicle category. The report cites €50,000 per N3 freight vehicle and €60,000 per M3 bus.
What Lithuania learned is the part worth reading twice. Purchase price gaps against diesel proved larger than expected, so support intensity turned out to be decisive in investment decisions. Market participants pushed for more flexible financing terms, including better use of leasing. Lithuania's response was to raise support toward €100,000 per vehicle and widen the eligible technology set to include biomethane.
Latvia's proposed instrument, by comparison, currently sits at 30% of eligible cost capped at €50,000 per unit — around €75 million for roughly 1,500 vehicles, or about 5% of the N3 fleet. The maximum scenario in the report would lift that to 50% and €100,000. Those two numbers are the difference between a programme hydrogen and electric trucks can actually clear and one that quietly funds the cheapest option in the room.
One Baltic rulebook beats three competing ones
The report is refreshingly direct about the regional problem. A 30% excise duty increase, it argues, is only defensible if all three Baltic states introduce it at the same time — because refuelling already shifts across borders in the frontier regions, and unilateral moves simply relocate the tax base rather than the emissions. The same logic applies to CO2-based vehicle taxation, road user charges and support instruments.
For Baltic hydrogen stakeholders this is the whole ballgame. A hydrogen corridor from Tallinn through Riga to the Lithuanian and Polish border only makes commercial sense if a truck faces comparable economics on every leg. Three separate national support schemes with three different intensities and three different eligible-technology lists produce refuelling stations that serve one market segment in one country. One aligned framework produces a corridor. The report says as much — the task now is making sure it survives into the final version.
The consultation window is open and the sector should use it
This is a draft informative report, not settled policy. It is in public consultation on the TAP portal, which means the support intensity, the eligible technology list, the infrastructure allocation and the Baltic coordination language are all still movable. The Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has already circulated it for sector comment.
We would encourage everyone in the Latvian hydrogen ecosystem — producers, technology suppliers, logistics operators, port and terminal developers — to file a position. A few things are worth raising specifically:
Support intensity: whether €50,000 per vehicle is enough to close a real fuel cell truck price gap, given Lithuania's finding that it was not.
Technology neutrality in practice, not just in wording, across the whole support package.
Hydrogen refuelling siting: making sure the €40 million infrastructure line names concrete TEN-T corridor locations and depot-based refuelling, rather than leaving hydrogen to compete for leftovers after charging points are placed.
Binding Baltic coordination language on taxation and support, not an aspiration.
Policy documents get written by whoever shows up. This one names hydrogen more often than any Latvian transport paper before it, and that did not happen by accident — it happened because the sector has been making the case. The consultation is where that case gets locked in or diluted.
Source: Par kravas autotransporta sektora ilgtspējas nodrošināšanas risinājumiem