Europe’s quest for hydrogen smacks of colonialism

Amidst geopolitical turmoil around its fossil fuel supply, Europe is struggling to sustainably meet its high energy demand without provoking domestic resistance to renewables expansion. Governments and industries are scrambling for alternatives, including the relocation of renewable energy production and its consequences overseas.  

Green hydrogen is currently being proposed as an efficient low-carbon energy carrier to import renewable energy into Europe’s consumption centres. Produced through the electrolysis of water powered by renewable electricity, green hydrogen can be transported over long distances by pipeline or shipped in the form of green ammonia. 

The cornerstone infrastructure project designed to realise this vision of renewable energy import in Europe is the proposed SoutH2 Corridor, a 3,300 km pipeline linking green hydrogen production sites in Algeria and Tunisia to consumers in Italy, Austria, and Germany. Once operational, it should be able to transport up to 4 million tonnes of green hydrogen annually, roughly 40% of the EU’s 2030 renewable hydrogen import target set out in the REPowerEU strategy.  

However, transforming electricity into green hydrogen and vice versa is an inefficient process that wastes around 75% of the energy input. Hence, delivering SoutH2’s full green hydrogen capacity would require approximately 230 terawatt-hours of renewable electricity – more than ten times Tunisia’s current electricity generation and nearly half of Germany’s.

Meeting this demand requires a vast expansion in renewable energy. Purpose-built solar and wind plants would occupy roughly 6,300 square kilometres of land, about 3.8% of Tunisia’s territory. In addition, 140 billion litres of water would be consumed, generating an estimated 210 billion litres of brine waste from water desalination annually. 

Supplying Europe’s hydrogen needs will place immense ecological pressure on North African water-stressed landscapes and energy-insecure communities, a far cry from a ‘just and sustainable energy transition’ that the EU Commission claims the pipeline will realise.

The material footprint of SoutH2 reveals what the rhetoric of green hydrogen obscures: Europe’s energy security would be built on the appropriation of land, water, and renewable electricity from its southern neighbours, shifting ecological burdens rather than eliminating them. This is not a just and secure energy future for all, this is a form of green energy colonialism that must be challenged.  

The potential impact of SoutH2, and the EU’s involvement, have not gone unnoticed. In April 2025, despite the suppression of civic space and President Kais Saïed’s authoritarian rule, protests led by the Stop Pollution Movement and Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights outside a GIZ energy cluster in Tunis denounced a neo-colonial energy strategy. Local activists warned that green hydrogen will destroy thousands of hectares of land and draw on their already scarce water resources.

In March 2025, a global coalition of 87 civil society organisations denounced the project’s neo-colonial extractivist logic, the promotion of public debt in North African countries, and its expansion of the EU’s fossil gas networks. 

Indeed, the SoutH2 Corridor claims to be more than 65% repurposed gas pipeline infrastructure. This compatibility of hydrogen with existing gas systems is celebrated as efficiency, yet it should instead be read as a warning. The corridor serves as an excuse to extend the lifetime of fossil fuel infrastructure.  

European corporations such as RWE, OMV and TotalEnergies are already positioning themselves to enlarge their profits in the emerging green hydrogen industry. These companies are formal supporters of SoutH2 and significant EU lobbyists. Of the corridor’s 24 corporate and institutional formal supporters, 23 have European headquarters, illustrating Europe’s dominance in North Africa’s future energy trajectory.

The pipeline may one day carry a new fuel, but politically it bears an older logic, by which European prosperity is secured through extraction and ecological sacrifice beyond its borders. 

But not everything is decided. With SoutH2 still in its early stages of development, there is still time to prevent the corridor’s realisation. Companies have not taken their final investment decisions and the EU could be pushed to withdraw its political and financial support.

A different energy future remains possible, one where Europe takes full sovereignty of its energy sources and assumes responsibility for its associated impacts, without externalising the costs to the Global South. 

Etta Stevens is a researcher at the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, specialising in conflicts of green hydrogen narratives and infrastructure. Marcel Llavero-Pasquina is a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he coordinates the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. His research focuses on the role and strategies of the fossil fuel industry in the energy transition.