The EU's dirty hydrogen push in South Africa - revealed

EU politicians are presenting green hydrogen as a win-win fuel, claiming it will lead to low-carbon industrialisation in the Global South while decarbonising economies in Europe. 

This idea is at the core of the Clean Trade and Investment Partnership (CTIP) between the EU and South Africa, the first agreement of its kind, designed for Europe to get access to the country’s green hydrogen.

The reality on the ground, however, is much dirtier — and very far from win-win. 

Corporate Europe Observatory visited frontline communities in South Africa who are confronted with planned green hydrogen projects. This tour was in collaboration with local environmental justice group groundWork.

MEPs will have the opportunity to hear from affected communities we visited, at the launch of our documentary on the impacts of green hydrogen. The screening will be followed by a debate held by the parliament’s delegation for relations with South Africa in Strasbourg next week (9 July). 

The stories of impacted communities have a common thread: no community consultation, the appropriation of resources like land, water, and minerals, the inefficient — and unfair — use of renewables to produce energy for export to Europe instead of directly serving local needs, and the dumping of negative consequences onto local people.

Green hydrogen’s dirty underbelly

Around Boegoebaai in South Africa’s Northern Cape, for example, petrochemical giant Sasol is planning the country’s biggest hydrogen export cluster. The local indigenous Nama people fear losing 70,000 hectares of their land and cultural heritage sites to the project.

In Ermelo, a coal mining town in the Mpumalanga province, people have neither been properly consulted nor informed, even though green hydrogen projects have received permits, which should have required community consultation.

In the Vaal Triangle on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Sasol and steel maker ArcelorMittal have inflicted severe pollution and human rights abuses on communities for decades, converting these areas into ‘sacrifice zones’.

Now the same polluters are planning resource-hungry hydrogen projects, with the risk of worsening the situation on the ground. That the projects are financed with public money is an extremely bitter pill for all those who have been struggling to hold the companies to account.

Around South Africa, communities also fear that hydrogen will aggravate the country’s water scarcity and stress, as people already lack access to clean water for drinking needs and farming.

Green hydrogen plants need a fair amount of water: around 13,680 Olympic swimming pools would be needed every year if South Africa was to reach the government’s 2050 hydrogen production goals. 

It is high time for EU lawmakers to listen to their concerns.

In March 2025, the European Commission and the South African government announced negotiations for a Clean Trade and Investment Partnership, which will by and large be about securing EU access to green hydrogen from South Africa.

And yet, the people who will be mostly impacted by green hydrogen have so far been ignored by Brussels. That has to change. Directly impacted communities should have the greatest weight in determining whether green extractivism happens on their land — not outside interests.

Instead, both the EU and South Africa have put big polluters in the driving seat of their hydrogen policies. When announcing the CTIP talks, for example, they made clear that they want to particularly cater for the interests of the petrochemical company Sasol.

Sasol is the South African government’s main partner in the development of green hydrogen, but also a huge producer and user of hydrogen from fossil fuels.

The company has been lobbying the EU for permission to sell large quantities of synthetic aviation fuels from its Secunda refinery complex as renewable. Yet, production at Secunda is largely coal-based and only a small part of the inputs will be replaced with green hydrogen. Thanks to the CTIP Sasol could get the final go-ahead to sell its fossil-based fuels as green.

Tune out the hydrogen lobby

Another example of the successful lobbying by polluters: the EU’s overblown targets for the use, production and import of green hydrogen.

The EU’s 2030 targets for green hydrogen are set at 20 million tonnes, with half to be produced domestically, and the other half imported. Compare that with the less than 0.097 million tonnes of green hydrogen produced globally in 2023, and you get an idea of how wildly unrealistic that target is.

Lobby groups like Hydrogen Europe and their many members from the fossil fuel industry will happily use it to sneak fossil-based hydrogen through the back door.

This shows how the promised transition to green hydrogen is being used to delay the move away from fossil fuels and actually slow down the energy transition.

Yet, green hydrogen, too, has a dirty underbelly as the experience of South Africa’s frontline communities shows.

Their stories are about land grabbing and water poisoning, destroyed health and livelihoods – and about the deepening of inequality and poverty caused by decades of exploitation under Apartheid and beyond.

These voices show that the EU must scrap its hydrogen import targets and wake up to the destructive impact of its green hydrogen plans on local communities and their environments. This will require tuning out the hydrogen lobby and listening to the voices of affected people.

The scramble for hydrogen must be stopped in its tracks before it causes any more damage.

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