Germany has set ambitious targets for expanding its hydrogen production capacity to meet rising demand in the coming years. However, half or more of this hydrogen is planned to be imported from other countries, because Germany’s densely populated territory limits its capacity to produce enough domestically. To achieve this, Germany has begun cooperating with many African, South American, and Asian countries on projects to produce green hydrogen for export, and Kazakhstan is one of the countries Germany has turned to.

The Mangystau region in western Kazakhstan is a desert territory on the Caspian coast with powerful wind corridors and intense sun which is set to become the site of one of the world’s largest hydrogen plants. Hyrasia One is a proposed hydrogen project backed by the German-Swedish developer Svevind Energy. If built, it would be among the largest green hydrogen facilities worldwide, and the numbers behind it speak for themselves: 40 GW of wind and solar capacity, 20 GW of electrolysis, producing up to two million tonnes of green hydrogen a year, most of it destined for export to Europe. The estimated investment is €50 billion, and the wind and solar plants would cover a stretch of the Mangystau steppe more than twice the size of the region’s own Ustyurt State Nature Reserve. Numbers of this scale will inevitably reshape the region, and understanding the project’s socio-economic and environmental impacts is therefore essential.

Summer temperatures in Mangystau, a region larger than the whole of Tajikistan, can reach 50°C and annual rainfall barely tops 150 millimetres. This extreme environment puts the region at a disadvantage compared with other parts of Kazakhstan: the land is unsuitable for farming, and the share of agricultural income is the lowest of any Kazakh region. Other economic sectors are also poorly developed. Mangystau has become known above all for its oil and gas industry, producing roughly a sixth of Kazakhstan’s oil. Most locals are employed by oil and gas companies or in related services. When the industry first arrived, oil and gas seemed like a stroke of luck for the region, a sector that was expected to solve persistent problems such as high unemployment and difficult socio-economic conditions. In practice, however, it has brought even more tension between local communities and the government.

Employment in the oil and gas industry has created jobs in the region, and the average salary is quite competitive compared with other available work. However, two trends are now pulling in the opposite direction. First, the region’s population has grown rapidly. Second, oil and gas production in Mangystau has started to decline, as the main reserves approach their limits and extraction becomes more difficult. As a result, the number of available jobs in the sector is shrinking even as the workforce expands. This situation is partly the responsibility of past governments, which allowed the region to become heavily dependent on oil and gas and did not do enough to diversify the regional economy. By the fourth quarter of 2024, Mangystau had the second-highest poverty rate in the country, at 7.9%. Moreover, government policy has long focused on attracting outside investors, while local communities have been treated mainly as a source of labour rather than as equal partners in the benefits of resource extraction. Once the oil and gas reserves are exhausted, the investors are likely to leave the region, and the local situation could deteriorate further. The inequal power distribution between international investors and local actors has led to recurrent tensions and protests. In 2011, security forces opened fire on striking oil workers in Zhanaozen, killing between 14 and 17 people in what became the most violent suppression of a labour protest in independent Kazakhstan’s history. More recently, the nationwide unrest of January 2022 began in Mangystau as a local protest against a sharp rise in gasoline prices, before spreading across the country.

The current government recognizes the need to diversify the regional economy and has become more focused on Mangystau. It strongly welcomes the Hyrasia One project as a development that could ease the region’s socio-economic problems. How many of those problems it would ease is harder to say. The company’s public estimate is around 1,800 jobs. In a region of roughly 740,000 people, the oil and gas sector employs tens of thousands across many companies, and Ozenmunaigas, the region’s largest, alone accounts for more than 10,000 workers. Against that backdrop, 1,800 jobs is a modest figure. And the skilled, permanent roles are expected to be filled by foreign specialists while the industry establishes itself. The investment agreement commits the project to a workforce that is 90 per cent Kazakh, with most operational jobs promised to Mangystau residents, but the oil sector had arrived with similar assurances.

Beyond these socio-economic considerations, building Hyrasia One would mean erecting the largest renewable energy installation in Kazakhstan’s history. Forty gigawatts of wind and solar plants are more than ten times the country’s currently installed renewable capacity, all of it built within a single decade, all of it in one corner of the country. From any climate perspective, this should be welcome news. It is not, however, welcome news for Kazakhstan’s climate. Almost all of the electricity those turbines and panels generate will be converted into hydrogen and shipped abroad, most of it to Germany. Kazakhstan’s domestic grid will remain what it is today: roughly 70 per cent powered by coal, with some of the highest per-capita emissions worldwide. The country’s own target for renewables in domestic power generation by 2030 is 15 per cent. The world’s largest new green energy project is being built on Kazakh soil to decarbonise somewhere else.
The contradiction also runs through Kazakhstan’s own hydrogen plan. The latest Hydrogen Energy Development Concept aims for 25,000 tonnes of hydrogen production by 2030, with at least half of that amount to be “green”. The plan posits 15,000 tonnes of annual exports by the same date and aims to draw one billion tenge (about two million euros) into the entire hydrogen sector. Hyrasia One alone proposes up to two million tonnes of hydrogen annually from 2031, at a stated investment of fifty billion euros. The project is roughly eighty times larger than the country’s national hydrogen ambition, and its financing exceeds the national investment target by a factor of about twenty-five thousand.

The Concept itself names the southern and central regions of Kazakhstan as the parts of the country with “sufficient water resources” for hydrogen electrolysis. Mangystau, in the arid west, is not among them. It does not appear as a hydrogen-producing region in the Concept at all; it appears only as a source of natural gas. The strategy the Kazakh state has formally adopted does not account for the project it has agreed to host.

This is the pattern that has been documented in Germany’s earlier hydrogen agreements with Morocco, Namibia, and Senegal and called green colonialism by some critics. The renewables build-out happens in the producer country, but the decarbonisation happens in the importer country. The producer keeps its coal-based energy production; the importer keeps its industry.

To understand the environmental impact of this project, we need to understand what resources are required in large volumes and how they may burden the environment. Hydrogen production needs water and electricity. The calculation is straightforward: producing 1 kg of hydrogen requires 9 liters of deionized water; an additional 10–20 liters per kg are needed for water purification and process cooling, bringing real-world plants running on fresh water to roughly 20–30 liters per kg; and around 70–100 liters of water are required per kg if salt water is used, due to desalination losses. Annually, the proposed 2 million tons of hydrogen production are therefore expected to require around 80–140 million cubic meters of water drawn from the Caspian Sea.

The Caspian Sea is a unique and at the same time fragile ecosystem. It is home to the Caspian seal and sturgeon, species that can be found in the wild only there, as well as many other endemic species. Populations of the Caspian seal and sturgeon have already declined due to the oil and gas industry, climate change, increasing water withdrawals, and pollution; the Caspian seal population has dropped by around 90% over the past 100 years.

Central Asia does not have to imagine what the loss of an inland sea costs. Within a generation, the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, shrank to a fraction of its former size after its feeder rivers were diverted to grow cotton, taking the region’s fishing economy with it and leaving a salt-laden seabed whose dust still harms the health of those living nearby. The mechanism at the Caspian would differ, and the volumes Hyrasia One would withdraw are small against the sea’s scale; but the Aral remains a warning of what can follow when a shared body of water is treated as a free input for production elsewhere.
Adding further pressure by withdrawing water from the Caspian does not appear sustainable given the sea’s current condition. However, 80–140 million cubic meters of water drawn from the Caspian is negligible compared with the total volume of the sea and the water that evaporates from it or flows in from rivers. The withdrawal would equal only about 0.1–0.2% of what the Caspian already loses annually. The main question that could genuinely deteriorate the Caspian ecosystem on the Kazakhstan side is what will be done with the brine and wastewater left over from the hydrogen production process.

The publicly available information about the Hyrasia One project is mostly general, such as the volume of hydrogen to be produced and the electricity capacity from solar and wind. However, the question that really matters for the environment, namely what will be done with the brine, is not addressed. One of the cheapest and easiest options is to discharge the brine back into the sea. However, the salinity of brine water is typically two to three times higher than that of the source water, and returning it to the sea can create hypersaline zones in which most marine species cannot survive.

Besides water, electricity is the other main resource that would be consumed in large volumes, generated on-site from solar and wind plants. Five renewable-energy clusters are planned to span roughly 5,500 square kilometres of the Mangystau steppe, with the wind farms alone requiring over 5,000 turbines (each 225 metres to the blade tip) and the solar arrays covering some 150 square kilometres. The developers describe the land proposed for solar and wind plants as empty. The company’s own statement of proposed activity calls the project territory “not inhabited”, with no residential buildings. A conservationist opposing the project describes the Ustyurt Plateau, where the most contested clusters would stand, as “an almost untouched desert zone”.

But land without residents is not land without use. Seen from outside, it reads as available space, but for the people of Mangystau, that space is dense with meaning. Mangystau is among the most sacred landscapes in the country: it is the resting place of 362 auliye, or holy elders. Five of these mausoleums are included on UNESCO’s Tentative List of World Heritage sites. The company says it screened the state register of Mangystau’s monuments and adjusted its industrial site to preserve them. However, that register is narrower than the living pilgrimage geography, and the adjustment covers the coastal plant, not the clusters spread across the steppe. The pattern here is the same as with water: there is no proper communication with, or involvement of, local communities, and they remain excluded from the decision-making process. This creates a serious risk of conflict or merely misunderstanding between residents, the company, and the government.

Several publications have also raised concerns that the project could disrupt the migration routes of many bird species since Mangystau lies on a major flyway. So far it is not clear how the project would affect these populations: beyond articles in the mass media by ecologists and biodiversity researchers, no proper environmental assessment results or peer-reviewed research are publicly available. It is also worth noting that Mangystau contains habitat for several species on the brink of extinction, such as the Persian leopard, the Ustyurt urial, and the Ustyurt population of the saiga antelope. How a project of this scale would affect the region’s already deteriorated biodiversity remains equally unclear.

The scale of the project is enormous, and its potential contribution to the global energy transition should be correspondingly significant. However, in both its macro and micro dimensions, Hyrasia One appears to follow the pattern of green colonialism: nearly all of the hydrogen produced would be exported, while local communities are treated as a source of labour rather than as partners. The project would undoubtedly reshape the socio-economic and environmental landscape of the region, but no clear understanding of those changes is yet available beyond preliminary assessments by ecologists and activists circulating in the media. The project raises more questions than it provides clear answers, and the numbers needed to evaluate its true impact are still missing. What this shows is that the planning and deployment process must seriously incorporate the views of local communities, to avoid further tension between locals, the company, and the government in a region whose social aspect is already strained. The decisive question, then, remains open: Hyrasia One – At What Cost?