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Hydrogen plays an important role in decarbonization—it is needed both for energy storage and in areas where batteries cannot be used, such as shipping and steel production. To be climate-friendly, hydrogen must be produced from green electricity. However, production is complex and expensive, and in industrialized countries such as Germany, there is not enough land or electricity generated from renewable energies to meet demand. Germany, like the EU, therefore plans to import a large proportion of the green hydrogen it will need in the future. Many African countries have abundant wind and solar resources, and large-scale green energy projects are being developed for the production of green hydrogen, for example in North Africa, Senegal, and Namibia. The problem: The green electricity generated there is needed much more urgently by the local population, because many of the countries planning to export hydrogen have massive problems supplying their own populations with electricity, such as South Africa, which has been suffering from massive power outages for years. In many cases, such as in North Africa, the projects are being implemented under authoritarian regimes and the local population affected by them is not being involved in the planning process. And the projects often take place in particularly arid areas, where the high water requirements for hydrogen production further exacerbate droughts and endanger sensitive ecosystems, as in Namibia, where the largest planned project is located in a national park. Instead of implementing a just transition on a global scale, these projects perpetuate colonial dependence and exploitation in the form of green colonialism.
