It’s been a big week for green hydrogen — or, more accurately, green ammonia.
Hyphen’s Namibian project just moved into FEED. Saudi Arabia is steaming ahead with its Yanbu plant. And suddenly the dream of a global green molecule export economy feels like it might just get bolted to the ground.
But let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t about hydrogen. Not really.
Hydrogen is the molecule everyone loves to argue about — too expensive, too leaky, too explosive, too inefficient. It’s the Betamax of the clean energy transition. But it’s also one of the only viable ways to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors like steel, shipping, and fertilisers. So we keep coming back to it, bruises and all.
The problem is that hydrogen is a pain to move. It’s light, it’s volatile, it needs to be cooled to minus 253°C to liquefy, and it makes metal brittle over time. You don’t just slap it into a pipeline and hope for the best.
That’s why so many of these massive export projects — from NEOM to Namibia — are choosing to convert hydrogen into ammonia. It’s easier to store, easier to ship, and we’ve already got the infrastructure to handle it. It’s the lowest-cost workaround for getting hydrogen from where it’s produced to where it’s (eventually) needed.
But here’s where the economics get fuzzy.
The Cracking Conundrum
You can’t burn ammonia in a fuel cell. You can’t inject it into a gas grid. In most cases, it needs to be turned back into hydrogen — a process known as “cracking” that’s both technically awkward and expensive.
Depending on the process and scale, cracking adds anywhere from $1.00 to $1.50 per kilo of hydrogen. And that’s before you lose 10–30% of your energy content in the process. Add shipping, conversion losses, terminal fees, and suddenly your “cheap” green hydrogen doesn’t look quite so cheap.
Even Air Products’ headline-grabbing offtake agreement at NEOM — a $6.5 billion deal — triggered a shareholder revolt. Because when you run the numbers, it doesn’t make a lot of financial sense unless you assume a very generous future carbon price or subsidy regime.
And yet… projects are moving forward.
Why?
Because someone has to.
This is the part in the startup story where the tech doesn’t quite work, the margins are horrible, and the VCs are getting twitchy — but you build it anyway because you know the market’s coming. You just don’t know exactly when, or in what form.
In the energy world, the people who normally take these early risks are startups. But startups don’t build $10 billion facilities in the desert. And the people who do — major corporates — are increasingly paralysed by shareholder activism and short-termism.
So that leaves governments, state-backed developers, and sovereign funds. The only players left with the risk appetite and the horizon to take a swing at a decades-long transition.
The Cost of Waiting
It’s easy to point out the flaws in these projects. Yes, there will be overbuild. Yes, some terminals will sit idle for a while. Yes, the economics are borderline.
But what’s the alternative? Wait until the market is perfect? Wait for a global standard on hydrogen quality, pipeline infrastructure, and cracking tech? Wait for a carbon price that finally makes green ammonia competitive?
We’ve been waiting for 30 years.
And we don’t have the option of waiting much longer. Climate change is not interested in our planning cycles, investor sentiments, or procurement delays. If we want green hydrogen to be part of the solution — and it has to be — then we need infrastructure. We need molecules. And we need someone to go first.
Build It and They Might Come
This is uncomfortable territory. You’re spending billions on infrastructure that may be underutilised. You’re betting on future policy and pricing that may or may not materialise. You’re making a product that needs expensive, inefficient reprocessing before it can be used.
But you’re also laying the foundations of something far bigger — a global trade in clean molecules that could underpin zero-carbon steel, clean shipping, and a fertiliser industry that doesn’t rely on grey hydrogen and Russian gas.
These early projects won’t all be winners. But without them, there’s no market to win.
We’re still at the point in the hydrogen story where someone has to take the pain up front. If we only build when the economics are perfect, we’ll never build at all.
So here’s to the early movers. The risk-takers. The ones still writing the business case at 3am. The ones who know that sometimes, you’ve got to light the stage before the audience shows up.
