Project finance for green hydrogen and CCS.

An award is a place in a queue

The United Kingdom’s first Hydrogen Allocation Round is the cleanest public illustration of how far a headline sits from a bankable contract. Pinsent Masons, reporting the December 2023 announcement, recorded a shortlist of 20 projects and 408 MW; 11 projects and 125 MW announced as successful against an original 250 MW target; and, on the day of the announcement, only three of the eleven — 31.8 MW between them — with a signed Low Carbon Hydrogen Agreement. The weighted average strike price was £241/MWh, inside a £2 billion envelope that included £91 million of upfront capital co-funding.

The second round confirmed the shape. Energy Voice reported on 7 April 2025 that HAR2 drew 87 applications totaling 2.8 GW and shortlisted 27 projects at 765 MW against an 875 MW target. Roughly two-thirds of the capacity that applied will never reach a signed agreement, and the interval between shortlist and signature is exactly the window in which development capital is either committed or saved. Baringa’s retrospective adds the commercial point that shapes the brief: about 70 percent of production cost is electricity, so the power-sourcing decision, taken early and papered early, dominates what follows. A company that hires a contract lawyer after the power arrangements are fixed has bought a drafter for a decision already made.

Those are three different jobs behind one label. An energy major’s new-energy arm has its own general counsel line and its own board approvals; a developer or midstream owner runs capture as one business line, usually with an assistant general counsel attached to a named internal team; an infrastructure fund posts a deal-side seat inside the investment platform, where the standing credential gate is English-law qualification plus cross-border transactional training at an international firm. We have worked the London market for more than ten years, for energy majors, infrastructure funds, engineering contractors and mid-cap industrials. Over the trailing three years we closed 24 in-house searches here at a 93 percent completion rate, on a typical timeline of four to seven months, with a median of 13 working days from offer to signature. Counter-offer incidence across those searches ran at 32 percent — high for an in-house book, and highest where the candidate was leaving private practice rather than another company.

Of those 24 closed London mandates, 9 were energy-transition or project finance seats. 5 of the 9 sat inside a low-carbon or new-energy business unit rather than group legal, and 4 carried a title with no reference to projects at all. A company searching by title will not find these people, and a lawyer searching by title will not find these jobs.

A general counsel at a European infrastructure fund put the economics to us as arithmetic: the seat pays for itself the first time it kills something in month two instead of month twenty. A head of legal at a mid-cap industrial joining a UK capture cluster told us something narrower — the hard part was not the connection agreement, which the cluster largely dictated, but a government revenue-support contract with a conditions-precedent schedule longer than anything the board had approved before, and nobody in the building who had negotiated one.

The number that does not flatter us sits in the same telemetry. Of those 9 energy-transition seats, 3 were opened and then withdrawn before shortlist because the project the seat existed for slipped its own investment decision. Our London mapping tells us which lawyers exist and where they sit. It does not tell us whether a sponsor’s board will vote in March, and on that we are as blind as the client. We now ask for the board calendar before opening a search of this kind — a habit bought with three wasted processes.

Two engagements, anonymized

An infrastructure fund with three memoranda. A European platform held three hydrogen memoranda across its London portfolio and was funding early work on all three. It hired one counsel at the fund rather than at the assets, with a mandate to run a documentary stage gate. Within eleven months two had been closed out at heads of terms and the third had gone to financial close. The search ran five months and closed off the first shortlist.

A mid-cap industrial joining a cluster. A manufacturer joining a UK capture cluster had never negotiated a government revenue-support contract and had no in-house energy lawyer. It hired a head of legal with one contract-for-difference negotiation and one storage-permit file behind them. The search ran six months, and the counter-offer came from a law firm rather than another company — the pattern here, not the exception.

Outside counsel is not the constraint, and the buyer’s question is not who papers the deal. Chambers UK still files this work under Projects: Mainly International in its 2026 edition rather than under any freestanding hydrogen heading. That bench is deep. What it cannot supply is a person on the payroll whose job survives recommending that a project stop.