NEOM Green Hydrogen Mega-Project Enters Commercial Production Phase, Guyana Watches Closely

The NEOM Green Hydrogen Company, a joint venture between Saudi Arabia's ACWA Power, Air Products and NEOM itself, has confirmed that its mega-project on the Red Sea coast has formally entered commercial production. The facility, sitting on more than 300 square kilometres of desert plain near Oxagon, is now producing approximately 600 tonnes per day of green hydrogen, converted on site into about 1.2 million tonnes per year of green ammonia for export.

The project, with a capital cost north of US$8.4 billion, draws power from 4 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity, paired with one of the largest electrolyser arrays ever assembled, supplied by ThyssenKrupp Nucera. Air Products has the off-take for 30 years, with the first cargoes already routed toward Rotterdam, Hamburg and Yokohama under multi-year contracts indexed to a mix of European Union Emissions Trading System carbon prices and grey ammonia benchmarks.

The signal from Riyadh is unambiguous. Even as Saudi Aramco continues to defend its 12 million bpd of crude capacity, the Kingdom is positioning itself to capture the molecule export market of the future. Guyanese policy makers are taking note. The Ministry of Natural Resources, working with the Inter-American Development Bank, has commissioned a pre-feasibility study on whether the country's vast hydropower potential along the Mazaruni and Potaro rivers, including the long-debated Amaila Falls hydroelectric project, could underpin a green hydrogen or green ammonia hub at a future deep-water port near Crab Island, Berbice.

The economics, however, remain challenging. Levelised cost of green hydrogen out of NEOM is estimated at between US$3.50 and US$4.20 per kilogram, still well above the US$1.50 per kilogram needed to genuinely compete with natural gas derived ammonia. For Guyana, where the gas-to-energy project at Wales aims to deliver 50 million standard cubic feet per day of associated gas from the Stabroek block to a 300 MW combined cycle power plant by 2026, the more immediate priority is cheap domestic electricity rather than hydrogen exports.

Even so, the longer term is firmly in the picture. Guyana has committed under its updated Nationally Determined Contribution to keep more than 99.5 per cent of its forest cover intact, and the Low Carbon Development Strategy 2030 specifically mentions exploring hydrogen as a vector for monetising carbon credits and renewable energy. ExxonMobil itself has been quietly building a low-carbon solutions business unit, and several of its Guyanese executives have visited NEOM under technology exchange protocols.

For local engineers and the University of Guyana's faculty of engineering, the NEOM milestone is also an opportunity to align technical curricula with electrolyser maintenance, cryogenic ammonia handling and renewable integration. The Guyana Energy Agency, for its part, has signalled that any future hydrogen ambitions will not displace the urgent need to harness gas from Liza, Payara and Yellowtail to bring down the cost of electricity for households and industry, which still hovers around US$0.27 per kilowatt-hour.