New York-based clean energy specialist H2 Industries has unveiled plans for its second giant waste-to-hydrogen (WtH) project, adding a scheme in Oman to a similar venture in Egypt announced three months previously.

The choice of locations for these projects is telling. Both countries are under pressure to source new export income and are endowed with natural advantages making them ideally for the production and export of green hydrogen. These factors are placing them at the forefront of the sector’s development in the Middle East, with announcements of new projects and progress on existing ones coming thick and fast.

The production of hydrogen from urban waste is a niche attracting growing international interest—its appeal lying in the potential to simultaneously yield a sought-after clean fuel and utilise materials otherwise destined for methane-emitting landfill.

Oman’s per capita municipal solid waste (MSW) volumes are among the highest in the world. Evidence of the authorities’ focus on waste management emerged in March with an agreement between the government’s electricity and municipal waste-handling utilities to execute a delayed, c.$1bn waste-to-energy project at Barka, just north of Muscat, generating 130-150MW of power from 4,500t/d of waste.

67,000t/yr – Size of H2 Industries’ planned green hydrogen facility in Oman

Combined with an existing region-leading drive to become a world player on the green hydrogen scene, this new impetus made Muscat naturally receptive to H2 Industries’ approaches—apparently made to various countries—about hosting one of the company’s large-scale WtH projects.

On 20 April, H2 Industries signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Oman’s state-owned Public Establishment for Industrial Estates to develop a $1.4bn facility at an unnamed 200,000m² coastal site for converting an initial 1mn t/yr of MSW into 67,000t/yr of green hydrogen while capturing 1mn t/yr of pure CO₂. The former would be either exported using liquid organic hydrogen carrier technologies or combined with the latter to produce synthetic diesel or sustainable aviation fuel. First production is scheduled for 30 months from completion of the pre-development and approvals phases. Power for the project will be come from a captive 300MW solar PV plant with 70MW of storage.

Oman boasts several advantages for the development of green hydrogen, not least a highly supportive government, which in December unveiled a national strategy for the industry’s evolution that envisaged 30MW of electrolyser capacity onstream by the end of the decade.

Sun, wind and land

The sultanate enjoys ample sun, wind and land resources for renewables-based manufacture of hydrogen, as well as a favourable location for exports compared with Gulf competitors, bordering the Indian Ocean outside the Strait of Hormuz.

Such advantages were recognised by Hong Kong-based Intercontinental Energy when selecting Oman’s sparsely populated central Wusta governorate in May last year for its second planned green hydrogen hub—a 25GW project to be developed over ten years in a joint venture (JV) with Kuwait’s Enertech and Muscat-owned OQ to produce 1.8mn t/yr of hydrogen and 10mn t/yr of ammonia. FID is not anticipated before 2026 but progress in April saw Australia’s Worley appointed to carry out concept feasibility studies.

The most-advanced of the country’s green hydrogen schemes also moved forward last month.  India’s Acme, which is leading a JV with Norway’s Scatec for a 1.2mn t/yr green ammonia plant at Duqm—a fledging economic hub on the east-central coast emerging as the sultanate’s primary hydrogen cluster—announced receipt of international certification validating the carbon-free credentials of its production process. Negotiations on a crucial offtake agreement are reportedly nearing conclusion.

Only the venture planned by Belgium’s Deme has thus far provisionally signed-up a buyer, in the form of Germany’s Uniper, a move that looks prescient on the latter's part given the war in Ukraine.

Suez Canal

Aspirant hydrogen producers are seeing increased interest resulting from the EU’s urgency to find alternatives to Russian gas. H2 Industries’ c.$3bn WtH project in Egypt, seen as processing 4mn t/yr of solid waste into 300,000t/yr of green hydrogen, will be sited at East Port Said, at the European end of the Suez Canal.

While Muscat intends to encourage the emergence of several hydrogen clusters across Oman, Cairo is unsurprisingly zeroing-in on the huge opportunities offered by control over one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes to exploit the momentum behind decarbonising the heavily polluting maritime transport sector.

Cairo is unsurprisingly zeroing-in on the huge opportunities offered by control over one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes

H2 Industries’ project is one of at least five provisionally planned in the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone), with a heavy focus on bunkering. Three projects were added last month alone, all involving UAE-based developers.

On 25 April, Abu Dhabi government-owned renewables company Masdar and local player Hassan Allam Holding Group signed MoUs with the General Authority for the SCZone  the New and Renewable Energy Authority, the Egyptian Electricity Transmission Company and the Sovereign Fund of Egypt to develop two projects with combined electrolyser capacity of 4GW intended to yield 480,000t/yr of hydrogen and 2.3mn t/yr of ammonia by 2030.

One is planned within the SCZone, producing an initial 100,000t/yr of e-methanol for bunkering by 2026, while the other would be at an unspecified site on the Mediterranean coast. Like Scatec, which announced its own green hydrogen venture at the SCZone in March, the Emirati developer is already involved in Egypt’s renewables sector, while intergovernmental ties are close.

Days earlier, Dubai-based Amea Power signed an MoU with the same governmental quartet to establish a green hydrogen and ammonia project at Ain Sokhna on the western shore of the Gulf of Suez producing up to 390,000t/yr of ammonia. In the same week, French giant EDF and UAE-based Zero Waste inked a similar agreement on a 350,000t/yr green ammonia scheme explicitly aimed at the bunkering market. Cairo’s plan is to finalise the deals when Cop27 convenes in Sharm el-Sheikh in November, thereby showcasing the country’s attractions to other potential investors.

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Author: Clare Dunkley