The Issue

Countries worldwide are placing significant emphasis on clean hydrogen as a carbon-free alternative for established industries such as chemical and fertilizer production, as well as for emerging applications like transportation and power generation. Enthusiasm for clean hydrogen, coupled with Africa’s renewable energy potential, is driving ambitious project proposals across the continent.

Relevance

Hydrogen and other green fuels hold the potential to facilitate the world’s transition to net-zero emissions while also fostering industrialization in emerging markets. However, an extraction and export model is not good enough. Hydrogen projects must contribute to economic advancement and end-uses for the economies that host these projects.

Our Approach

The Hub aims to provide a nuanced analysis of specific clean hydrogen opportunities for emerging markets — cutting through the hype by monitoring the evolution of project scale, status, and potential end uses. Ultimately, the tracker will also analyze participating entities, financing, and offtakers, as well as the status and impact of relevant push and pull policies.

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For a full-screen version of this tracker, click here (works best on desktop).

Footnotes for Tracker: 

• Visualization created using Tableau Desktop Public Edition, version 2024.1.2.
• Data source: Publicly available announcements and press releases and IEA’s Hydrogen Production and Infrastructure Projects Database. Some values are calculated using stated assumptions and may differ from IEA.
• Project names are not official and location information is approximate and is likely to differ from actual project location.
• For multi-phase projects, earliest phase numbers are used if available.
• Electrolyzer capacity represents the reported capacity of electrolyzers. In cases where no electrolyzer capacity has been announced, assumptions are used to calculate potential electrolyzer need.
• Assumptions:
  • For projects that produce ammonia, the assumed capacity factor of the Haber-Bosch is 0.5.
  • For projects that don’t indicate electrolyzer capacity, an 150 metric tons of hydrogen per year per MW production capacity is assumed to calculate electrolyzer capacity (equivalent to 58.4 kWh/kg of hydrogen).

To submit questions or edits to this data, please contact info@energyforgrowth.org.