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On 8 November 2022, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and 1Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre launched the first phase of a project to establish a major green hydrogen plant in Egypt’s Ain Sokhna on the Red Sea.
President El-Sisi and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre launched on Tuesday the first phase of a project to establish a major green hydrogen plant with a capacity to produce 100 MW, as part of the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) being held in Sharm El-Sheikh.
The event took part of the final day of the Climate Implementation Summit, with more than 100 heads of state and government gathering on the opening days of COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt to work towards the implementation of existing climate agreements.
El-Sisi hailed the project, which will be implemented in cooperation with the Norwegian energy giant Scatec, saying it provides “a practical model of investment partnership that stimulates sustainable economic development with a focus on the role of the national and foreign private sector besides the government’s role, working side by side in this fruitful sector.”
Scatec has been a major developer at Egypt’s massive Benban solar park in Upper Egypt’s Aswan, one of the largest solar parks worldwide with a total capacity of 1.8 GW.
The Green Hydrogen Plant is part of Egypt’s wider green hydrogen strategy, which has the vision to produce green hydrogen at the cheapest price worldwide.
The strategy, implemented in cooperation with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Arab Union for Sustainable Development and Environment, seeks to help Egypt contribute to eight percent of the global hydrogen market, Egypt’s cabinet said in a statement on Saturday.
President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said: “Green hydrogen has become one of the most important solutions on the way toward a green economy during the coming years. It is an example where developing countries, including Egypt, are taking great steps. However, we still have to face challenges resulting from the tendency of some countries to back local green hydrogen in a way that decreases their production cost.”
“This causes an imbalance in the global hydrogen market and contributes to undermining the competitiveness of the green hydrogen produced in developing countries compared to the developed countries,” the President added.
Moreover, during the High-Level Roundtable on “Investing in the future of Energy: Green Hydrogen” on the margins of the Sharm El Sheikh Climate Implementation Summit at COP27, co-chaired with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, President El-Sisi, and the Prime Minister of Belgium, Mr. Alexander De Croo, announced the launch of the “Global Renewable Hydrogen Forum”.
The Forum constitutes a multi-stakeholder public-private platform designed to facilitate large-scale deployment of renewable hydrogen to foster decarbonization of local industries, accelerate just transition and unlock the environmental and socio-economic benefits of the global hydrogen economy, and identify the best instruments enabling the cross-border trade of renewable hydrogen between renewables-rich developing countries the developed countries.
