How Oman is preparing to lead on hydrogen exports

Oman sits on some of the world's most abundant solar and wind resources but some freshwater is extremely scarce. The conventional assumption is that this combination would disqualify a country from leading in green hydrogen, a fuel that requires significant volumes of purified water to produce at scale. That assumption is wrong.

Scarcity forced Oman to think in systems long before the hydrogen economy arrived. Water-rich countries are only now discovering the governance complexity that Oman has been navigating for decades. The accumulated experience of integrating energy, water and food as a single policy challenge rather than three separate ones, is turning out to be the real competitive advantage.

The IEA projects Oman will be among the top six renewable hydrogen exporters globally by 2030. The more consequential story is not the export volume. It is the governance model that makes it possible, and what the rest of the world can learn from it.

Most hydrogen discourse treats water as a line item: desalinate as needed, account for the energy cost, move on. In arid regions this framing fails immediately. Water is a sovereign resource with competing claims from agriculture, municipalities, industry and now a nascent hydrogen sector. Countries must balance these competing political priorities.

Desalination addresses the supply question but does not resolve the governance one. Desalination at industrial scale carries significant energy demand, produces heavy brine discharge that threatens marine ecosystems and, if poorly managed, creates the perception that a new export industry is being built on water that local farmers and communities cannot afford to lose. This perception alone has delayed projects in other markets.

A 2025 life cycle assessment from the PtX Hub and MDPI put concrete numbers to the challenge. Producing one kilogram of hydrogen requires approximately 35 kilograms of purified water, creating an absolute dependency on desalination in climates where rainfall is measured in millimetres per year. The question is how to govern everything that relies on desalination.

The energy-water-food nexus is a practical policy design challenge, and the countries that are solving it first are building a structural advantage that will compound over time.

Countries that embed nexus thinking into their hydrogen regulatory frameworks from the start will outcompete those that bolt it on later. This is the difference between projects that get built, financed and accepted by local communities and projects that stall in permitting, face community opposition or generate environmental liabilities that outlast the commercial case.

The governance architecture that matters has four components. First, integrated resource planning across energy, water and agriculture ministries rather than sequential departmental approvals that treat each sector as independent.

Second, brine valorization requirements built into project design from day one, turning waste streams into recoverable minerals rather than marine discharge.

Third, surplus water allocation frameworks that determine in advance how excess desalinated water flows to agriculture and community use.

Fourth, community water commitments written into project approval as hard contractual requirements, not corporate social responsibility language that carries no enforcement mechanism.

Oman Vision 2040 provides the policy backbone for all four. It integrates water security and economic diversification as parallel national priorities with shared infrastructure and shared accountability. This alignment at the national planning level allows hydrogen developers in Oman to work within a coherent system rather than navigate contradictory mandates. It is also what gives international investors the confidence that the governance framework will hold.

Oman is not waiting for the governance framework to be perfected before moving. The ACME Group project is on track for commissioning the first commercial-scale renewable hydrogen venture in the country in Q4 2026, and the first real-world proof that the integrated model can be executed at scale.

The nexus is visible in the infrastructure choices. Solar arrays are being integrated with wastewater treatment facilities to support local food security ambitions. Desalination capacity built to supply electrolysis plants is simultaneously relieving pressure on groundwater reserves that have been in sustained decline. The energy and water goals are engineered to reinforce each other, because Vision 2040 requires both outcomes and funds both simultaneously.

Surplus desalinated water redirected to agriculture is not a secondary benefit or a public relations gesture. For a country with significant food import dependency, reducing that dependency is a hard fiscal and security interest. Hydrogen infrastructure that generates freshwater as a byproduct addresses that interest directly. The economics of arid hydrogen production, properly understood, include the value of the water it produces alongside the value of the fuel.

Oman is not the only arid country building a hydrogen sector. The experiences of Namibia and Chile, approaching the same challenge from different starting points, validate the governance argument from two directions simultaneously.

In Namibia, the Hyphen Hydrogen Energy project received a ten million dollar African Development Bank loan in January 2026. The project commits to supplying three million litres of clean water daily to the water-scarce region of Luderitz as part of its core project structure. Community water security is a deliverable. The result is a project with broad local support and a clear social license to operate. The Oman model, applied in a different geography, is producing the same outcome.

In Chile, the story is more instructive. Seven major projects totaling $25 billion are currently working through environmental permitting. Late 2025 assessments flagged severe risks to marine biodiversity from brine discharge. The government is now implementing a Brine to Value initiative, but retroactively, after the projects were already designed and the permitting process was already underway. The cost of that sequence, in delay, in redesign, in political capital, is real and measurable.

Nexus governance embedded early is cheaper and faster than retrofitting it.

Oman built systems thinking into national policy before the commercial pressure to move fast arrived. Namibia replicated that instinct from the start. Chile is learning the same lesson through a more expensive path. The destination is the same. The cost of getting there is not.

Oman entered the hydrogen economy carrying what looked like a structural disadvantage. It is emerging with something more durable: a governance model designed for the conditions the global energy transition demands. Water scarcity, competing resource claims and the need to build local economic and social legitimacy are not Oman-specific problems. They are the problems every hydrogen-producing nation will face as the sector scales.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has sharpened the stakes. When a single chokepoint can disrupt energy, water and food flows at once, integrated governance stops being a sustainability question and becomes a security one.

As the hydrogen economy grows, the countries that attract long-term investment will not necessarily be those with the cheapest renewable electricity or the largest available land. They will be the ones that can demonstrate stable, integrated resource governance. The ones that can show that water commitments are enforceable, that brine management is built in, that agriculture and community needs are addressed in the project structure rather than in the press release. The countries that learned earliest how to govern scarcity will be the ones the rest of the world studies next.

The Global Future Council on Energy Nexus shares ideas and examples through its Energy Nexus Insights series, comprising blogs, articles and infographics; guides for public and private sector decision-makers; and sector analyses.