Sep 23, 2026 · 25 min · 10 segments
Namibia was supposed to become one of the countries powering Europe’s climate goals: a multibillion-dollar EU-funded project to develop green hydrogen promised jobs and economic growth. But when…
Olivier van BeemenGuest
Emma du ChatinierHostSo a couple of months ago, we also had our colleague Jesse Pinster here talk about how hydrogen works.
In Europe, also for people that have not listened to the episode, a little recap.
Why was Europe betting on hydrogen? What was it hoping to achieve with investing a lot in green hydrogen?
Well, Europe has this ambition that by 2030, the climate ambition is to have 55% less carbon.
And in order to get the last parts of it, you need to make some industries sustainable that are very hard to electrify, for example.
So you have the steel industry, you have the airlines, air transportation, those sectors are really hard to...
idea was we can use batteries, but what we can do here is use green hydrogen.
And then it was even reinforced, it was even strengthened by the war against Ukraine, where energy provision became such a big and tangible problem.
so we need more autonomy we need more variety in in the sources of our energy so that was even another big push for for green hydrogen one of my sources told me in in those years and in those months it was like a gold rush everything you said with green hydrogen would be uh people would react enthusiastically to it and then everything was possible so that that's kind of how it's uh how it got born
And Europe realized that it cannot produce all this hydrogen alone and it always had this plan to import a lot from abroad.
There was the intention to import 10 million tons of hydrogen by 2030 from countries outside of Europe.
So a couple of months ago, we also had our colleague Jesse Pinster here talk about how hydrogen works.
In Europe, also for people that have not listened to the episode, a little recap.
Why was Europe betting on hydrogen? What was it hoping to achieve with investing a lot in green hydrogen?
Well, Europe has this ambition that by 2030, the climate ambition is to have 55% less carbon.
And in order to get the last parts of it, you need to make some industries sustainable that are very hard to electrify, for example.
So you have the steel industry, you have the airlines, air transportation, those sectors are really hard to...
idea was we can use batteries, but what we can do here is use green hydrogen.
And then it was even reinforced, it was even strengthened by the war against Ukraine, where energy provision became such a big and tangible problem.
so we need more autonomy we need more variety in in the sources of our energy so that was even another big push for for green hydrogen one of my sources told me in in those years and in those months it was like a gold rush everything you said with green hydrogen would be uh people would react enthusiastically to it and then everything was possible so that that's kind of how it's uh how it got born
And Europe realized that it cannot produce all this hydrogen alone and it always had this plan to import a lot from abroad.
There was the intention to import 10 million tons of hydrogen by 2030 from countries outside of Europe.
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