It was a humble start for such grand designs, as Namibian President Nangolo Mbumba hosted the king at an unfinished site near the port of Walvis Bay on the southern Atlantic Ocean, the baking rust-colored dunescape silent except for an occasional truck passing on the new roadway.
Europe, for its part, sees a means of furthering its green transition and bolstering energy security after it lost natural gas from Russia. The European Investment Bank has pledged a €500 million loan toward developing green hydrogen in Namibia, with the Netherlands’ Invest International contributing to a planned $1 billion Namibian hydrogen fund.
It’s a prospect that could transform the nation of 2.8 million with a gross domestic product of some $13 billion, or around one third that of Vermont, the smallest economy of any US state. While a sparse landscape is a bonus for clean-energy production, it’s historically proved a challenge to turn a profit from the moon-like emptiness of Namibia, a nation largely reliant on metals, diamonds, tourism and fishing. The government’s gamble is that costs of producing hydrogen will fall at the same time as the European Union imposes stricter rules on the use of fossil fuels that power industries such as the chemical cluster around Antwerp and the Ruhr area of Germany.
The planned location of CMB’s main facility some 50 miles northeast of Walvis Bay speaks to the race for Africa’s resources by the world’s economic powers. In its first phase, the Hyphen facility will be powered by 3.5 gigawatts of wind and solar projects—equal to more than half the capacity of large renewable plants built across South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized nation.