Dr. Kirsten Westphal
Dr. Kirsten Westphal is Executive Director at H2Global Stiftung and leads the independent Analysis & Research Division. H2Global provides a platform for know-how exchange, information and discussion for the public. The purpose of the H2Global Foundation is to promote the protection of the environment and the climate. Promoting the production and use of Green Hydrogen and other climate-neutral energy carriers at national, European and international levels is the major focus of H2Global. The primary objective is the timely market ramp-up and import of Green Hydrogen and Power-to-X (PtX) products to Europe.
Kirsten is a Member of the German National Hydrogen Council. She is also Deputy Head of the Advisory Council for the Hydrogen Roadmap of the State of Baden-Württemberg.
Between 2008-2021, she worked at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. Among other tasks, she headed the project “Geopolitics of Energy Transformation – Hydrogen” funded by the Federal Foreign Office, where she serves as an external advisor now. She was a Member of the Expert Panel to the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation in 2018-2019 and contributed to the Commission’s Report “A New World”, published in 2019.
Prior to that, she was Assistant Professor for International Relations and Foreign Policy at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen and at the Instituto de Relaciones Europeo-Latinoamericanas (IRELA), Madrid. She worked with PreussenElektra, and at the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt/ Main.
She is on the Advisory Board of the Royal Institute Elcano, Madrid, and the Regional Centre for Energy Policy Research (REKK) Foundation, Budapest. She is a Member of the Scientific and Advisory Board of 50Hertz and the Steering Committee of the German-Russian Raw Materials Forum.
She has published widely on international energy relations and EU external energy relations. Her books include Global Energy Governance in a Multipolar World (Aldershot/ Burlington Ashgate 2010); and The Political and Economic Challenges of Energy in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2018). Her recent publications on the geopolitics of energy transformation have appeared in Nature, Global Policy, Energy Strategy Review, European Energy Journal and at SWP.
