Political will a key driver for Central Asia hydrogen

While the region is seeing new interest from Middle Eastern and European developers, a lack of midstream infrastructure and uncertainty around local demand could be a hurdle for large-scale projects

Future hydrogen development in Central Asia will depend on political ambition to decarbonise and could face offtake and export hurdles, warns Yury Melnikov, independent analyst and member of the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s task force on hydrogen, drawing on the results of an open study due to be published in Geneva in the coming weeks. While the region is emerging as a new source of oil and pipeline gas to Europe in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war, unlocking vast hydrogen potential is lagging some way behind. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan present the most likely centres of Central Asian hydrogen production, owing to an abundance of energy resources—natural gas, wind and solar—and poli