In April, Chariot also signed an MoU with the port of Rotterdam in The Netherlands to import renewables-based hydrogen. In May 2022, the Mauritanian government also signed a pre-feasibility study with Africa-focused energy company Chariot for a 10GW green hydrogen project, Project Nour. This has not prevented other investors from piling in. “What is trickier is the legal and regulatory aspects, because the price and carbon costs of, say, green steel or green ammonia still need to be defined,” he adds. In broad terms, roughly half the project will be financed by a consortium of equity investors, with the rest funded by regional and intergovernmental lenders, such as the IMF and the African Development Bank, he predicts. Nonetheless, Mr Chahid expects “breakthrough” commitments from off-takers, operators and financiers this year for green hydrogen projects in Mauritania, including CWP Global’s, and is assured that there is a “wide portfolio of companies that will need these products” - especially after the EU carbon tax is implemented. Wedged between the Maghreb and west Africa, Mauritania is comparatively stable in the conflict-riven neighbourhood of the Sahel region and in spite of its natural resources, its GDP remains relatively low at $7.9bn as of 2020. “If anything, it’s an advantage for Mauritania as we can sell excess cubic metres of water to the for their agriculture,” he says, estimating that CWP will desalinate 150 million tonnes of water - a third of which will go to local use once CWP’s desalination plant, or plants, are built. Nouri Chahid, general manager of CWP Global in Morocco and Mauritania, refutes the idea that the desalination process poses a problem to either the project or the future of green hydrogen production in Mauritania. ![]() ![]() Situated in the coastal regions of Dakhlet Nouadhibou and Inchiri, CWP Global aims to produce 1.7 million tonnes of green hydrogen for local use and export, to power steelmaking and produce ammonia to make fertiliser. “It’s so disproportionately large in comparison to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and the existing energy sector,” says Ben Attia, principal research analyst at Wood Mackenzie.Ī 2021 report from consultancy Rystad said that the majority of green hydrogen projects have appeared in water-stressed regions, prompting the need for more renewable energy capacity and higher costs to run these desalination plants, which effectively ‘clean’ and prepare sea water for use in hydrogen production. But the scale of the endeavour, which dwarfs the country’s whole economy by a factor of five, combined with Mauritania’s chronic water scarcity, has raised eyebrows.
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