Green hydrogen: when Morocco’s “energy transition” expands into the occupied Western Sahara

Solidmar, 24/1/2026

Presented as a pillar of the energy transition and a driver of future growth, green hydrogen has become one of Morocco’s new strategic priorities. Through spectacular announcements and promises of massive investments, Rabat highlights its solar and wind potential to position itself as a supplier of “clean” energy to Europe. Yet behind this virtuous narrative lies a far less reassuring reality: a central share of these projects is planned in the occupied Western Sahara, a non-self-governing territory according to the United Nations, whose people have never been consulted.

The regions of El Aaiun-Saqiyat El Hamra and Dakhla-Oued Eddahab, incorporated by Morocco into its so-called “Southern Provinces”, now host several of the green hydrogen megaprojects approved under the “Morocco Offer”. This choice is not neutral. It fits into a long-standing pattern of exploiting the natural resources of Western Sahara —phosphates, fisheries and renewable energy— for the benefit of the Moroccan economy and foreign partners, in violation of international law, which requires the consent of the Sahrawi people.

Environmental rhetoric here serves as a new cover for a process of predation and normalization of the occupation. Western Sahara provides exactly what green hydrogen industrial actors are seeking: vast land areas, strong winds, high solar irradiation and strategic maritime access to Europe. These advantages are mobilized to attract investors, at the cost of completely erasing the Sahrawi issue from official narratives on the energy transition.

This headlong rush also takes place within a broader African context marked by the structural limitations of the green hydrogen sector. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars announced across the continent, most projects remain political showcases: the absence of guaranteed markets, exorbitant infrastructure costs, water scarcity and technological dependence on the Global North. Far from being a miracle solution, green hydrogen risks becoming a new form of green extractivism, geared toward export rather than the energy needs of local populations.

In the case of Western Sahara, these projects raise a fundamental question: can there be a just energy transition on an occupied territory? Without the consent of the Sahrawi people, green hydrogen appears less as a promise for the future than as a new instrument of dispossession, repainted in the colors of climate action and “green growth”. A transition that, once again, is being built without —and against— those most directly concerned.

Green Hydrogen: Fact Sheet

1. Definition and Classification

Hydrogen is classified by colour according to its production process and carbon footprint. These categories are distinct and parallel.

Precise Definition of Green Hydrogen:

Hydrogen produced by water electrolysis (separation of H₂O into H₂ and O₂) using exclusively renewable electricity (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal). It is the only category that guarantees zero CO₂ emissions linked to production.

2. Technical Characteristics

• Process: Water electrolysis (technologies: Alkaline, PEM, SOEC).
• Energy source: 100% certified renewable electricity.
• CO₂ emissions: Zero during production (near-zero full lifecycle if the supply chain is decarbonized).
• Calorific value: 33.3 kWh/kg (LHV) – High mass energy density.
• Forms: Gaseous (compressed at 350-700 bar), liquefied (-253°C), or chemical vector (ammonia, LOHC).
• Main applications:
• Heavy industry: Replacement for grey H₂ in refining, ammonia production, steelmaking (direct iron reduction).
• Mobility: Fuel cells for heavy transport (trucks, trains, maritime).
• Energy storage: Utilization of renewable electricity surpluses.
• Grid injection: Blending into natural gas networks (Power-to-Gas).

3. Global Production and Distribution (2023-2024)

• Installed electrolyser capacity: ~1.5 GW at end of 2023.
• Volume of green H₂ produced: Approximately 180,000 tonnes/year.
• Share of total hydrogen production: < 1% (global production is still dominated by >95% grey hydrogen).
• Geographical distribution of major projects:
• Europe: Leader in announced projects (Germany, Spain, Netherlands, France). EU target: 10 Mt/year by 2030.
• China: Largest current producer (capacity >300 MW), driving down electrolyser costs.
• United States: Accelerated growth via the Inflation Reduction Act (subsidies up to $3/kg).
• Middle East: "Gigafuel" projects for export (e.g., NEOM in Saudi Arabia: 4 GW).
• Australia & South America (Chile, Brazil): Focus on export via strong low-cost renewable energy potential.

4. Key Challenges

• Production cost: Currently $3 to $7/kg. The goal is to go below $2/kg by 2030 through economies of scale and falling renewable energy costs.
• Infrastructure: Need to develop transport networks (adapted pipelines, ships) and storage.
• Overall efficiency: Significant energy losses (electrolysis ~70-80% efficiency, + liquefaction/transport).
• Water: Need for ultra-pure water (~9 litres per kg of H₂) – challenge in arid regions.
• Certification: Implementation of guarantees of origin systems to trace renewable electricity.

5. Outlook (IEA & Hydrogen Council Scenarios)

• 2030: Target of 50-100 GW of electrolyser capacity for production of ~10 million tonnes/year (around 10% of the total H₂ market).
• 2050 (Carbon Neutrality): Green hydrogen would become the dominant form, with potential production of 500 to 800 million tonnes/year, essential for decarbonizing industry and transport.

Sources: International Energy Agency (IEA) – Hydrogen Report 2023, Hydrogen Council, European Commission, BloombergNEF.

From the Gallic Wars to the Conquest of the Americas and the Genocide in Gaza: Counterinsurgency as a Tool to Subdue Unruly Peoples

Ayman El Hakim, 23/1/2026

From ancient empires to contemporary powers, the same logic runs through the centuries: governing through violence populations that refuse domination. Gaza is not an exception, but the culmination of a long imperial history.

 

Counterinsurgency is often presented as a military doctrine born in the twentieth century, forged in colonial wars and later refined in the age of drones and algorithms. This is a comforting illusion. In reality, counterinsurgency is one of the oldest modes of imperial governance, experimented with long before modernity, systematized in the nineteenth century, industrialized in the twentieth, and today normalized under the language of security and humanitarianism.

What changes are not the fundamental objectives, but the vocabularies, the tools, and the thresholds of acceptability.

The Original Matrix: Conquer, Disperse, Erase

The wars of conquest in the Americas constitute one of the first modern laboratories of counterinsurgency. Confronted with organized, rooted, and resistant Indigenous societies, Spanish, Portuguese, and later Anglo-USAmerican colonial powers developed a grammar of domination that remains tragically familiar: the destruction of villages and subsistence economies, forced displacement and death marches, confinement in reservations, the fragmentation of communities, and racial and religious dehumanization.

The Indian Wars in the United States extended this logic throughout the nineteenth century. The goal was not merely to defeat Indigenous nations militarily, but to break their collective capacity to exist as peoples. The reservation was not a space of protection; it was a tool of permanent pacification, a technology of confinement.

Yet these populations were never passive. They resisted through guerrilla warfare, mobility, intertribal alliances, and the clandestine preservation of languages, rituals, and memory. Cultural survival was — and remains — a form of political resistance.

Before Modernity: Counterinsurgency Without a Mask

This imperial grammar did not originate with modern colonialism. It was already fully operative in Antiquity. The Gallic Wars, as staged by Julius Caesar, amount to counterinsurgency avant la lettre: exemplary massacres, systematic destruction of cities and granaries, mass enslavement of populations, and alliances with local elites to fragment solidarities. Rome understood that insurrection was not merely military, but social and political.

The repression of internal revolts — from the Servile Wars to the Jewish revolts in Judea — radicalized this logic: collective punishment, staged terror, deportations, territorial and symbolic erasure. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the renaming of the province after 135 were aimed not merely at defeating an enemy, but at destroying a people as a historical subject. Antiquity reveals without disguise what later empires would seek to obscure: counterinsurgency is first and foremost a technique of governance rooted in fear of unruly communities.

The Nineteenth Century: Empire Rationalized

Nineteenth-century European empires — British, French, Russian — systematized these practices. Counterinsurgency became an administrative science. In Algeria, India, Ireland, and southern Africa, the same methods recur: territorial grid systems, population registries, collective punishments, forced displacement, and the destruction of local economies.

“Pacification” was never peaceful. Its purpose was to produce a governable population stripped of autonomous political structures. In response, resistance took many forms: armed insurrections, clandestine networks, tax refusal, resistance to forced labor, symbolic reappropriation of land, and oral transmission of forbidden histories. Empire could occupy territory, but it could never govern without fracture.

The Twentieth Century: Counterinsurgency as Explicit Doctrine

With wars of decolonization and the Cold War, counterinsurgency became a formalized doctrine. In Malaya, Algeria, and Vietnam, the population was explicitly identified as the center of gravity of the conflict. Populations were regrouped, displaced, surveilled, tortured, and “developed.” Camps, “new villages,” strategic hamlets, and forbidden zones were not anomalies — they were the core of the system.

Politically, these strategies failed. Populations developed counter-counterinsurgencies: infiltration of imposed structures, reversal of colonial institutions, politicization of suffering, internationalization of struggles, and the construction of liberation narratives. Algeria and Vietnam demonstrate that a war can be lost militarily yet won politically and historically.

The Twenty-First Century: Containment Rather Than Conquest

The twenty-first century marks a major shift. The objective is no longer always to conquer or integrate, but to contain populations deemed irredeemable. Counterinsurgency becomes urban, permanent, technologized, and legally euphemized.

Gaza represents the extreme expression of this transformation: blockade, total enclosure, cyclical destruction, humanitarian dependency, and constant surveillance. Everything converges toward the management of life and death on a massive scale. What is happening in Gaza is not a moral or historical anomaly, but the most radical contemporary actualization of ancient imperial logics: governing a people by destroying the very conditions of its collective existence.

Yet resistance persists, often in invisibilized forms: the maintenance of social solidarities, self-organization of aid, transmission of memory amid annihilation, refusal of symbolic erasure, and the inscription of the Palestinian narrative in global space. Resistance is not reducible to arms; it is ontological — the act of continuing to exist as a people.

In a quieter register, Western Sahara operates according to the same contemporary grammar of counterinsurgency. Sand walls, territorial fragmentation, settler colonization, economic marginalization, and the criminalization of civil resistance: domination functions less through open warfare than through freezing, normalization, and the erosion of time. As in Gaza, international law is instrumentalized not to resolve the conflict, but to suspend it indefinitely. One is a loud laboratory; the other a silent one — but the logic is the same.

A Historical Constant: The Political Failure of Counterinsurgency

Across the longue durée, [long term] one conclusion is unavoidable: counterinsurgency can destroy, displace, and kill — but it consistently fails to produce lasting legitimacy. It radicalizes the societies it seeks to pacify, generates irreversible memories of violence, and transforms domination into chronic instability.

History teaches not the omnipotence of empires, but their structural fragility in the face of peoples who refuse to disappear.

Conclusion

From the Gallic Wars to the enclosed territories of the twenty-first century, counterinsurgency appears for what it is: not a response to violence, but a fear of politics — the fear of peoples who insist on deciding their own future. Every time it is imposed, it reveals less the strength of the dominant order than its inability to tolerate the existence of another historical horizon. And every time it fails, it leaves behind what empires fear most: peoples militarily dominated, yet politically irreducible.

Sahrawi Observatory exposes in new report: Renewable energy in Western Sahara as a tool for cementing occupation and resource plunder

 

Geneva (Switzerland) 24 June 2025 (SPS) – The Sahrawi Observatory for Natural Resources and Enviromental Protection (SONREP) launched its new annual report today under the title: “Sustainability for Whom? Renewable Energy and Environmental Justice under Occupation,” during an international virtual conference gathering experts in law and environment alongside civil society representatives from across the globe.

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The report highlights the rapid expansion of renewable energy projects in the occupied Western Sahara, warning that these projects are strategically used by the Moroccan occupying power to entrench its illegal control over the territory, flagrantly disregarding the environmental and political rights of the Sahrawi people.

The report confirms that these projects, which include wind farms, solar energy installations, and green hydrogen production initiatives, are implemented without the consent of the Sahrawi people, constituting a clear violation of international law and key rulings by the European Court of Justice and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

These rulings have emphatically reaffirmed that Morocco holds no legitimate sovereignty over Western Sahara and that any agreements or economic activities involving the territory without the express consent of its legitimate representatives lack legal validity.

The report further points out that these projects generate substantial profits for Morocco, while systematically excluding the Sahrawi people from economic benefits.

Moreover, the labor opportunities created predominantly favor Moroccan settlers, accelerating demographic changes in the occupied territory in direct contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Participants in the conference also warned of severe environmental and social consequences linked to renewable energy projects, particularly regarding green hydrogen production, which demands vast water resources in an already water-scarce region, thus threatening the water security and environmental sustainability of the Sahrawi population.

The report also exposes the involvement of foreign companies and governments, especially European, in supporting these projects through agreements with the Moroccan government, thereby making them complicit in the illegal exploitation of Sahrawi natural resources and undermining international efforts for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

In conclusion, the Sahrawi Observatory calls on the international community, especially governments and investment institutions, to immediately halt all energy-related economic activities in Western Sahara unless they have the free, prior, and informed consent of the Sahrawi people.

The report stresses that any just and sustainable energy transition must be grounded in respecting the Sahrawi right to self-determination and the permanent sovereignty of peoples over their natural resources.

Coinciding with the report release, SONREP officially relaunched itself as a Sahrawi institution specialized in documenting environmental violations and resource exploitation, and advocating for environmental justice under occupation, marking a significant enhancement of the Sahrawi people’s rights-based struggle on the international stage.