Morocco, a regional renewable power giant, has been studying the potential for creating green hydrogen for some time and has been rewarded with a flurry of activity since the start of the year. In early March, an Italian corporate team agreed to consider jointly developing a plant in the north African kingdom. Just a month earlier Rabat and Lisbon pledged cooperation in the fledgling sector, echoing a more-detailed pact inked with Berlin in June last year.

The EU’s focus on north Africa’s solar resource, as the answer to the bloc’s decarbonisation conundrum, is galvanising these plans. The EU Hydrogen Strategy unveiled last July underpins a burgeoning interest in nurturing—and potentially financing—an export industry in the land- and sunshine-rich states on the other side of the Mediterranean.

Rabat’s early receptiveness to hydrogen’s potential is unsurprising and led to it creating a National Hydrogen Commission some 18 months ago. Lacking the fossil fuel resources of its eastern neighbours but gifted with plentiful resources of both sun and wind, the kingdom has leapt at the tumbling costs of renewable power generation, installing 3,685MW by end-2020—equivalent to about 40pc of its total capacity—and with a plan for capacity to cover 52pc of the kingdom’s electricity needs by 2030, equivalent to some 11GW.

The prospect held out by the EU's Green New Deal… to access concessionary external finance to develop a lucrative new export industry is undoubtedly accelerating cash-strapped Rabat’s own plans

Utilising some of this vast renewables potential to produce green hydrogen presents obvious attractions. It could potentially be used to stabilise the power grid—increasingly important as the proportion of variable wind and solar in the input mix rises—and in transport—to reduce the need for costly gasoline and diesel imports. Morocco also possesses an unusual incentive, in that one of its main export earners—phosphate-based fertilisers—requires ammonia, currently sourced from overseas in grey form at a rate of some 2mn t/yr but potentially producible more cheaply locally from green hydrogen if industry costs continue to fall.

Such a clear-cut domestic outlet may somewhat allay accusations of neocolonial exploitation over Europe’s plan to achieve its own emissions-reduction ends on the back of north African natural resources; some have noted echoes of the ill-fated Desertec Industrial Initiative, hailed then abandoned in the first half of the last decade.

Nonetheless, there remains some concern that Rabat will be financially induced to export its incremental green electricity to the EU, either directly—two 700MW interconnections with Spain already function—or via hydrogen. This would enable the EU to meet carbon-reduction commitments at the expense of replacing the kingdom’s own fossil fuel-based generation.

Green New Deal

The prospect held out by the EU's Green New Deal—published in December 2019 but retroactively assigned an important role in the continent's recovery from the downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic—to access concessionary external finance to develop a lucrative new export industry is undoubtedly accelerating cash-strapped Rabat’s own plans.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the European Investment Bank, Agence Francaise de Developpement and Germany’s Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau have already been heavily involved in financing the kingdom’s renewables buildout.

Aligned with its national hydrogen strategy last June, Berlin committed to directing €2bn of the envisaged €9bn investment towards international partnerships—and the agreement between the two countries later that month remains the kingdom’s most-concrete to date—calling for construction of a 1MW pilot electrolysis facility, potentially scaleable up to 100MW.

52pc – Solar’s share of Moroccan power generation by 2030

Morocco’s declaration of cooperation with Portugal this February was more nebulous, calling for “aligning the green hydrogen priorities” of the two countries and collaborating to encourage commercial demand. Meanwhile, the Italian companies—engineering, procurement and construction giant Saipem with Florence-based Alboran Hydrogen—announced merely that they would consider establishing a green hydrogen production plant in the kingdom, without indicating capacity, timeframe or putative local interlocutor.

While vaguer so far, green connections with southwestern Europe make more immediate sense than those with distant Germany by dint both of proximity and of existing infrastructure connections, primarily pipelines that could potentially be switched from natural gas to hydrogen.

Questions of the ultimate partition of the benefits aside, EU engagement will allow Morocco to access the expertise of some of the continent’s clean energy titans. The GreenH2 Cluster—a government-sponsored collaboration between business and academia aimed at nurturing the nascent hydrogen sector, and which convened its first assembly on 19 March —has stated that one of its central aims is to encourage international knowledge transfer.

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Author: Clare Dunkley