TSAU //KHAEB NATIONAL PARK, NAMIBIA – More than 700 miles northwest of Cape Town, plunked down seemingly at random beside a long, arrow-straight road through a vast expanse of orange sand, is a sign marking the boundary of Namibia’s Tsau //Khaeb National Park. The name, which means “soft sand” in the Nama language of southwestern Africa (the double backslashes represent a click sound), is surely preferable to the name given the region by the country’s former German rulers: Sperrgebiet, or “prohibited area.”

This land, hugging the western coast of Namibia, was originally set aside not for conservation, but for diamond mining. Starting in 1908, the shifting sands of Tsau //Khaeb were the source of millions of carats of diamonds, first exploited by foreigners — Germans, then South Africans — until 1990, when after a century-long struggle for liberation Namibia became an independent nation.

Today, with its diamond mines depleted, the 8,500-square area is valued for another sort of wealth: It’s one of the few places in the world that ranks highly for its level of solar irradiance and as well as its mean wind speed. That makes Tsau //Khaeb an ideal location for both solar fields and wind farms — a motherlode for renewable energy that could help Namibia build a future harvesting carbon-free power.

Mean wind speeds are around 30 miles per hour, strong enough to confound umbrella use. The level of solar energy is comparable with Baja California’s, or the Sahara Desert’s. As in most places, the two resources are negatively correlated, as the wind picks up at night, meaning that this stretch of Namibia can generate exceptional amounts of renewable energy around the clock.

Seeing the potential here, Namibia’s government in 2021 declared it would open bidding to build a renewable energy plant. The plan calls for a vast array of solar panels and a small forest of windmills to produce up to five gigawatts of power, making it one of the biggest renewable energy hubs in the world. When completed, Namibia’s wind and solar energy generation would roughly equal that of Norway, an economy 17 times its size.

What Namibia lacks is a market. The country is geographically large but sparsely populated with under three million inhabitants, most working in mining or subsistence farming. Neighboring South Africa isn’t really interested in Namibia’s potential power because importing it would threaten the tens of thousands of jobs in its own coal mines, which provide the feedstock for most of its electricity supply. No other country close by has billions of dollars lying around to invest in large-scale energy projects.  

You could call it a solution in search of a problem. And in this case one such problem lies about 7,700 miles to the north of Tsau //Khaeb National Park.

On an 1850-acre industrial site a half hour’s drive east of Amsterdam is the Netherlands outpost of the huge Indian Tata conglomerate, one of the world’s largest producers of steel used in construction. Blast furnaces must be heated to temperatures up to 2,700ºF to inject hot air into a mix of heated coal and other materials to essentially melt iron by reducing its oxygen content.

In doing so, the Tata plant produces an astounding eight percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the Netherlands, a country of 18 million. Under pressure to reduce the plant’s massive carbon footprint — in part to meet the European Union’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045 — the company is desperate to swap out coal for a renewable energy source.

“The Tata group has objectives about CO2 neutrality, and that's 2045,” says Hans Van der Weijde, a director in R&D at Tata Steel in Europe.

Much of Europe is densely populated, heavily industrialized, and limited by geography in how much clean energy it can create. Only sections along the North and Baltic Seas are as windy as Tsau //Khaeb, and even southern Spain isn’t as sunny. Individual countries are struggling to reach their ambitious climate-change goals under the Paris Accords. And they are just as desperate to replace the energy that disappeared when Russia’s natural gas fell under sanction after the expansion of its war against Ukraine in February 2022.

In 2021, Namibia’s government saw an opportunity in Europe’s aggressive climate goals. The question is how to get the energy produced by Namibia’s sun and wind to Europe. It’s too far from sub-Saharan Africa to connect through power lines. Undersea cables don’t have enough capacity. There is no trans-continental energy grid to handle such a transfer.

But if Namibia could leverage its ample solar and wind energy to make hydrogen, which is more easily transported over long distances, perhaps those resources could be exploited to its benefit. Hydrogen can contain a lot of energy; it’s an essential component of all sorts of industrial processes like oil refining and fertilizer production and can substitute for coal in steel manufacturing.

Almost all the hydrogen used today is produced through processes dependent on fossil fuels. The Namibian project can solve for that by using its energy from wind and solar sources to extract hydrogen from water, making what is called green hydrogen.

So Namibia’s government declared it would open bidding to build a hydrogen plant. And in November 2022, at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed a memorandum of understanding with Namibia’s president, Hage Geingob, to support green hydrogen in the country. Six months later, the country’s cabinet approved a deal to create Hyphen Hydrogen Energy, a company built specifically to turn renewable power from the facility into green hydrogen that can then be shipped to Europe, with enough energy left over to replace all the electricity that Namibia is currently imports. 

The project will cost an estimated $10 billion to build — a potentially transformative investment in a country, whose entire GDP in 2023 was $12.35 billion. If successful, the deal “has the potential to become one of the main renewable energy hubs on the African continent and even worldwide,” said von der Leyen.

It’s a radical way to rethink how we produce and transport energy, redrawing the map of global energy markets, by pulling renewable power from far-flung locations and bringing it to the large markets where it is needed most. Other places are blessed with Namibia’s combination of sun and wind, like southwest Yemen, northeast Somalia, Tibet, Western Australia and the Andean peaks. But either they don’t have ready access to large markets for power, or their political instability scares off potential developers.

Green hydrogen would provide a link — one way of transporting renewable energy as swiftly and easily as if it were gas or oil — that can connect it with markets, much in the same way that oil-producing nations connect to energy hungry consumers today.

Europe is hoping to produce 10 million tonnes of green hydrogen every year and import another 10 million tonnes by 2030 (though EU auditors said in July the Union was “unlikely to meet” this goal), with much of it expected to come from projects in the sun- and wind-rich regions of the Middle East and Africa. The US has directed $9.5 billion in subsidies to green hydrogen.

Here’s the hard part: hydrogen can be explosive when mixed with oxygen, which makes it difficult to handle and transport. Moving hydrogen around the world is an almost absurdly complex and wasteful process. The very first step — using renewable power to make hydrogen — loses about 30 percent of the energy that goes into the process. Then, hydrogen is transformed from a gas into liquid ammonia for transport, which loses more energy. Next it is conveyed thousands of miles by ship to Europe, where it is converted back into hydrogen — losing yet more energy — so that it can be pushed into pipelines that will need to be retrofitted for this purpose.

Only after about half the energy harvested in Namibia has reached its final destination can it be used in fuel cells for buses and cars or as a replacement for coal in a steel plant like Tata’s, which will need to build costly facilities to use hydrogen instead of coal. 

It’s a bold vision. A lot of things have to go right for it to work.

The hydrogen atom — a small molecule that contains a lot of energy — was discovered in 1766 by the English scientist Henry Cavendish. Within 70 years, scientists and engineers had learned how to extract hydrogen from water – the word literally means “born from water” – and to create electrical current by recombining hydrogen with oxygen in a fuel cell. Futurists, including Jules Verne, saw water, not oil, as the fuel of the 20th century.

By the 1960s, NASA began using liquid hydrogen to power its Apollo rocket launches and in 1966 GM introduced a prototype hydrogen fuel cell vehicle called The Electrovan in 1966 that could travel 150 miles on a single tank. On YouTube, you’ll find vintage footage of enthusiasts in the 1970s and 80s powering cars on jerry-rigged hydrogen fuel cells, then pulling over to drink the water coming out of the tailpipe. President George W. Bush was a huge fan of hydrogen cars, and offered more than one billion dollars in incentives for their development. Toyota introduced its first fuel cell passenger vehicle in 2014.

So what happened? Electric vehicles, instead of hydrogen-powered cars, took over the market for low-emission transportation. This was mainly because of a chicken-and-egg problem: Car companies didn’t want to commit to hydrogen-powered cars until there was sufficient refueling infrastructure, and energy companies didn’t want to invest in refueling infrastructure until there were enough hydrogen-powered cars to support them. Two decades after Bush’s initial push, only about 60 hydrogen fueling stations have been built for consumers in the U.S., mostly in California. A paltry 2,978 fuel cell passenger vehicles were sold in the US in 2023. Ford sells more than half that many gasoline-powered F-series trucks every day.

Some public transportation authorities have found hydrogen to be a better option than battery-electric vehicles but the numbers are low. There were only 85 fuel-cell busses in the US as of mid-2023, the last time the US Department of Energy updated this statistic, with 288 more in the works. Hydrogen buses haven’t gained much of a foothold in Europe, either, despite its lead over the US in most things green: At the start of 2023, just 370 hydrogen-powered buses were in operation there, with 1,200 more in the procurement pipeline.

Many in the energy field don’t think hydrogen cars will ever achieve more than a marginal use. Michael Liebreich, a consultant who has become the most influential evaluator of the economics of the energy transition, ranks hydrogen applications on a “hydrogen ladder” with “uncompetitive” at the bottom to “unavoidable” at the top. Cars sit on the lower rungs of the ladder. At the top are hydrogen’s long-standing role in making fertilizer, as well as novel applications in shipping and in hard-to-decarbonize industries like steelmaking.

To affect climate change, though, it’s not enough simply to use hydrogen in more applications. You have to change the method of making hydrogen. That’s the heart of the Namibian ambition: whether we can make hydrogen with renewable energy that’s economically competitive.

Very little hydrogen is accessible in its pure form. There’s enough underground to supply the planet’s energy needs for hundreds of years, but no one has figured out how to bring it to the surface. In the atmosphere it’s bonded to other elements to form hydrocarbons like methane (as in natural gas) and in coal. More familiar is the combination of two molecules of hydrogen with one oxygen molecule: H2O.

Extracting hydrogen from other elements takes an enormous amount of energy. The most common method — responsible for about 95 percent of production — is steam reforming, which uses high temperatures to produce hydrogen (along with methane and carbon dioxide) from fossil fuels. Steam reforming is messy and contributes about three percent of all carbon dioxide emissions every year. But it’s also cheap and relatively efficient.

The challenge is making green hydrogen at scale. The Tsau //Khaeb project will use its renewable power to extract the hydrogen from water, not fossil gas, through a more expensive and more energy-intensive process called electrolysis.

Electrolyzers are similar to batteries in that both devices have two electrodes, typically submerged in liquid. Their electrical current splits the bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen gas is captured and stored and the oxygen is either released into the atmosphere or captured for some other purpose. No carbon is involved, as in reforming, and the renewable energy used to power electrolysis makes the process virtually emission-free.

The chemistry isn’t complicated — electrolyzers have been around for decades — but it’s expensive. Electrolysis on the scale necessary to make hydrogen for industrial or commercial use is hugely inefficient: an electrolyzer loses energy when it operates: about 30 percent. So if you produce 100 kilowatts of energy, you end up with only about 70 kilowatts of energy stored as hydrogen.

That leads directly to the second challenge: cost. Today, hydrogen made the old-fashioned way goes for between one and three dollars per kilogram; the same amount of green hydrogen commands as much as $12 to the buyer. Bringing green hydrogen into cost parity will require more efficient electrolyzers, economies of scale, further drops in the cost of wind turbines and solar photovoltaic panels. and subsidies. According to Liebreich Associates, all that will contribute to a drop in the cost of green hydrogen projects of 60 percent by 2030.

“We saw in solar over the last years, things can move very quickly from plans to projects,” Frans Timmermans, the former executive vice president of the European Commission who was in charge of implementing EU’s Green Deal, told me in May 2023, on the sidelines of the World Hydrogen Summit in Rotterdam (not to be confused with the World Hydrogen Congress, which met for the fourth time in October, also in Rotterdam). “I think we can move very, very fast if the right regulations are in place.”

A short drive north of Tsau //Khaeb, in a small bay that the explorer Bartolomeu Dias claimed for Portugal in 1487, lies the port of Lüderitz. The port struggles to support its population of around 15,000: The collapse of the fishery in recent decades has slowed traffic through the port to the point that dolphins seem to outnumber the ships making their way from the harbor to the sea. But Hyphen has plans for the port that are at least as ambitious as those for the park: an extensive expansion to get the hydrogen from Namibia to Europe.

This is green hydrogen’s third challenge. Hydrogen is voluminous per unit of energy and extremely flammable. Compressing the gas is risky because a collision could break the container, exposing the hydrogen to oxygen which would produce an explosion. Turning the gas into liquid isn’t practical because it would have to be cooled to more than 250 degrees below zero Celsius, using up yet more energy.

One solution: Transport the hydrogen as ammonia, the pungent gas used mainly as a feedstock for fertilizer. Ammonia is made by combining hydrogen with nitrogen at a high heat in a century-old process known as Haber-Bosch, named for its inventors. It’s energy intensive, but the technology is cheap and readily available; we’re already making 240 million tonnes of ammonia every year. Paradoxically, four times as much hydrogen can be transported in ammonia than as pure hydrogen: hydrogen gas (H2) because ammonia is much denser.

The vast majority of today’s ammonia is made with hydrogen stripped from natural gas (basically methane, which contains four atoms of hydrogen). This is effectively CO2 manufacture with a sideline in ammonia: Every ton of ammonia produced releases two tons of the greenhouse gas. Hydrogen from electrolysis eliminates the natural gas, and completing the “green” ammonia transition is as simple as using renewable power to combine the hydrogen with nitrogen. “In terms of technical characteristics as well as costs, ammonia is the most promising option for long-distance hydrogen transport,” Aurora Research announced in a 2022 report.

Because of ammonia’s established use in fertilizer, 120 ports around the globe are already dealing with its import, export, and storage. The biggest in Europe is the Port of Rotterdam, a 48 square mile facility extending from the North Sea’s edge to the city’s downtown. 28,000 seagoing vessels, 90,000 inland vessels, and 438 million tonnes of goods annually make it Europe’s most productive port

The European Union sees ports like Rotterdam playing a critical role in both the manufacture of some of the 10 million tonnes of hydrogen it hopes to produce at home and for the equivalent amount that will be imported, mostly as ammonia.

“We believe we can deliver 4.6 of the 10 million tonnes the EU wants to see imported, but the size of the prize — the volume required — is gigantic,” Allard Castelein, Port of Rotterdam’s CEO until he retired in July 2023, told me at a May 2023 conference. So he expects the ports at Antwerp, just down the coast in Belgium, and Wilhelmshaven, near Hamburg in Germany, will also play significant roles in bringing hydrogen into Europe as ammonia. The scale of the energy transition calls for all hands-on deck.

Once the ammonia is shipped to Europe, the hydrogen must be safely extracted — “deconverted” or “cracked.” After it’s been  released from ammonia, the hydrogen can be compressed into a pipeline for transmission to Tata Steel and other users across Europe.

Cracking is pretty much green ammonia manufacturing in reverse: The ammonia is heated (ideally using renewable power), then passed over a nickel catalyst, which separates most of the nitrogen from the hydrogen. A second separation process yields pure hydrogen.

Just as electrolyzers lose about 30 percent of the energy that goes into them as they separate hydrogen from water, the process for separating hydrogen from ammonia is similarly inefficient. Ammonia crackers use up an additional seven-to-18 percent of the energy content just to operate. Then, some hydrogen is lost in the process. Researchers at CSIRO, Australia’s government research agency, estimated that overall, the best-case scenario for ammonia crackers was about 76 percent efficiency.

At this point in the process that initial 100 kilowatts of solar energy created in Namibia is down to just over half, about 53 percent.

That ratio could improve with economies of scale. The new ammonia cracker on drawing boards, from Duiker Clean Technologies in the Netherlands, will produce 70 kilograms of hydrogen a day and even larger crackers are being tested. Joshua Makepeace, a chemistry professor at the University of Birmingham in England who has studied ammonia deconversion, said that, “You’d expect they become a lot more efficient at larger scale; that's inherent to this type of catalytic process.”

Assuming that electrifying hydrogen production so that it’s carbon-free can be done at a cost that makes sense, and that the energy loss of electrolysis and ammonia cracking don’t burden green hydrogen with enough additional costs to sink it, and that enough large-scale crackers can be built to be cheap and effective enough that hydrogen made in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa can be exported to Europe at a competitive cost — deep breath — the next stage on hydrogen’s journey to users is through pipelines.

Operators of existing natural gas pipelines are big on the promise of hydrogen that could provide them with a revenue stream in the face of sanctions against imports of Russian gas and the gathering storm of emission-reduction targets. So a collaboration of 31 European transmission system operators wants to bring hydrogen to Europe’s heaviest energy users.

“We can reuse the natural gas pipelines for 85-to-90 percent of hydrogen distribution needs,” said Helmie Botter of Gasunie, the owner of the Netherlands’ transmission network.  “We’ll connect to storage, and to Belgium and Germany.” Europe has already laid out €750 million in subsidies for this purpose.

The short-haul pipeline operators, known as distribution system operators, or DSO’s, are also stepping up. They hope to pump hydrogen from Rotterdam to Tata (a big pipe runs right by its Netherlands plant).

But turning gas pipelines into hydrogen pipelines won’t be easy. Some pipes in natural gas networks are polyethylene plastic and hence no problem, but many thousands of kilometers of pipelines are made from different grades of steel that hydrogen could corrode. All these pipes must be tested.

“We just dig out parts of them, bring them to the lab, and test them,” said Eva Hennig, head of the Brussels office of Thüga, a German DSO, explaining the process of ensuring the pipelines are safe. “You don’t want to blow up a house. That would be the end of the story.”

Steel, so essential to the modern world, has largely been made the same way for the last 175 years. With no material to replace it, there was no need to improve on the process until people started to care about GHG emissions. Extracting and heating the coal, raising the temperature of the blast furnace as well as chemical reactions inherent in the process itself, produces about 1.8 kilograms of planet-warming gas for every kilogram of bridge-building material. As with ammonia fertilizer today, by volume, steel is a byproduct of carbon dioxide, not the other way around.

But simply not making it anymore isn’t an option. EVs, solar panels, wind turbines – all the most promising technologies to manage climate change depend on steel.

Around 97 percent of steel is made in a multi-stage process requiring lots of coal and producing lots of CO2. Crushed iron ore goes into a furnace with coke (processed from coal) and limestone where it’s heated to the approximate temperature of lava to get rid of its oxygen content. This “reduced” iron is then heated again, but without the coke, and oxygen is blown over it; this time, it’s carbon that is reduced. Steel can then be tapped out of the furnace so it can be cast. 

Making steel with hydrogen instead of coal produces as much as 95 percent less CO2, mainly because the reaction occurs at a lower temperature and involves no coal, and the second reaction is powered by electricity, which can come from renewable sources.  

At the moment, there exists only one commercial-scale plant in Sweden making steel with hydrogen, producing small quantities of fossil-free steel. But there are blueprints for more plants in France, Germany, and Spain as well as the Netherlands. (China’s many steel plants are newer, but it's fertilizer needs are great, so it’s also moving quickly with green hydrogen.) The hope is that, with many steelworks reaching the end of their useful lives in the coming decades, hydrogen-driven plants can replace them.

Some critics of the movement for green hydrogen like to point out that much of its manufacture, transport, and use depends on many of the very same players — namely, legacy energy companies like Shell, Uniper and GasUnie — whose products have contributed significantly to climate change. Is this the equivalent of paying Dunkin’ Donuts to design a weight-loss plan?

Corporate Europe Observatory, a Brussels nonprofit that investigates lobbying and influence by companies, thinks so.  A 2022 report asserted that Europe’s oil and gas companies see green hydrogen “as a back door for hydrogen from fossil gas: build the hydrogen hype, build economy-wide demand for hydrogen, and when there’s not enough green electricity or electrolyser capacity to supply it, [natural-gas fueled] hydrogen will step in.”

Other observers point out the whiff of exploitation in turning Namibia into a green hydrogen factory for customers abroad. There are some local benefits. Hyphen estimates that, over the first four years, the project will create 15,000 full-time equivalent construction jobs to build solar fields, turbines, transmission lines, a new port, an ammonia-production plant, housing for all the workers, and more; permanent jobs to operate the plants and the port will number 3,000.

Hyphen has set a goal of hiring 90 percent locals. “We have agreed to train Namibians in order to basically maximize the uptake of Namibian people on the project,” said Toni Beukes, who is head of environment, social and governance at Hyphen.

Beukes says that the project will produce far more energy that it needs to run the electrolyzers, so it will provide the surplus electricity to Namibia, which currently imports energy from South Africa’s coal-heavy grid.

For some critics, the prospect uncomfortably echoes Africa’s brutal colonial era, when European powers ransacked the continent for precious metals, mistreating workers and leaving little wealth for the Africans themselves. The difference today is that the prized commodities are sun and wind.

Samuel Furfari is an engineer and professor of energy geopolitics at the Free University of Brussels who served for decades on the European Commission’s directorate general for energy and has been a thorn in the side of the hydrogen industry.  He wonders if it is fair to ask people in sub-Saharan Africa, only 50 percent of whom are connected to an electricity grid, to build wind and solar so the energy they generate can be exported to Europe.

“You want that they make the electricity so a Berliner can run their car with hydrogen?” he asked.

Furfari and Corporate Europe Observatory worry that green hydrogen could turn out like the oil extraction and export of the last decades, which has done little to improve the health, wealth or development in resource-rich countries like Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea while delivering billions in profits to the likes of Shell.

Giovanni Forbes, 32, has lived all his life in Lüderitz, working until a few years ago on a crayfish boat until he found a job with an offshore aquaculture operation. “All these changes, also with the green hydrogen project, give a real boost to this community and towns like Lüderitz really need it,” he said. “All the promises, I hope they live up to expectations.”