Manufacturing Trust: Lessons Learned from the First Year of the CertifHy EU RFNBO Voluntary Scheme
By Matthieu Boisson, Managing Director, CertifHy
Brussels, July 28th 2026 – A renewable hydrogen molecule is physically identical to a fossil one. What the market pays a premium for is not the physics – it is a credible claim about how that molecule was produced. And that claim carries real economic weight.
A little over one year ago, on 15 April 2025, we issued the very first certification under the CertifHy EU Voluntary Scheme to Tyczka Hydrogen GmbH. Shortly afterwards, Hy2Gen’s production site in Werlte, Germany, became the first certified RFNBO production facility. Since then, the Scheme has moved from early implementation to operational reality.
This first year of live certification has delivered clear lessons. Certification that adds trust turns regulation into revenue. When it adds cost without adding credibility, it becomes a burden – and producers are right to push back.
The most frequent findings in audits are rarely about RFNBO sustainability criteria or complex GHG calculations. Instead, they concern the fundamentals of the management system: missing procedures, expired calibrations, incomplete records, or internal controls that exist in practice but not on paper. Trust is manufactured. And much of that manufacturing happens in places nobody looks.
Certification that adds trust turns regulation into revenue. When it adds cost without adding credibility, it becomes a burden.
These gaps are highly predictable. They appear, project after project. This predictability is encouraging: it means they can be anticipated and corrected early, provided certification readiness is treated as an engineering discipline from the design stage instead of a final sprint before the auditor arrives.
Another recurring challenge lies in the availability of reliable reference data. A calculation is only as trustworthy as its inputs. When the necessary reference data is unavailable or inconsistent, genuinely compliant projects may be forced to rely on conservative default values that reduce the value they can claim. Strict thresholds are right, but they only work when the underlying data layer is equally robust.
At CertifHy, we see our role not only as verifying compliance, but also as sharing the lessons emerging from the first wave of certifications so the market can learn faster. Trust, at scale, cannot depend on every project learning the same lessons the hard way. Anticipation is the answer – and we intend to act on it.
This philosophy was at the heart of our recent webinar, Key Learnings from the First Wave of (Pre)certifications. Drawing on more than one year of operational certification and several years of precertification experience, we shared practical implementation lessons emerging from real projects: what successful Economic Operators do differently, where teams most commonly struggle, and how certification can be anticipated rather than improvised. I hope you will find it a useful resource for your own certification journey.