Green Hydrogen: When the Algerian Sun Becomes Energy for Europe

Serge Mba — Libreville, Gabon — 2026-09-06

Algeria holds one of the largest solar endowments on the planet: around 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, with irradiation climbing from 1,700 kWh per square meter in the north to more than 2,200 in the south — and a Saharan territory covering most of the country. Add proven energy expertise, and you get the national green hydrogen strategy, adopted in late 2022 and presented in March 2023.

The targets are quantified, and they are ambitious. By 2040, Algeria aims to export 30 to 40 terawatt-hours a year — around 10% of the European market — for revenues in the order of $10 billion a year. The national renewable energy research center puts the target at 1.2 million tonnes of green hydrogen exported to Europe every year by 2040. And the infrastructure already exists on paper: the SoutH2 corridor, which is to link Algeria to Italy and then to Germany, runs 3,300 kilometers with a capacity of 4 million tonnes a year — more than 40% of the European REPowerEU objective — and has been granted European Projects of Common Interest status.

The partnerships are following. With Germany, investment projects in the order of $900 million have been filed; with Italy, the consortium brings together Sonatrach and Sonelgaz alongside the European players VNG, Snam and Verbund. A 50-megawatt pilot project is under way at Arzew with support from Berlin. Algeria does not merely announce: it is laying the first milestones of a complete industrial chain, from the electrolyzer to the export terminal.

This is not a fad: it is the logical continuation of Algeria's positioning. After gas, hydrogen; after pipelines, clean-energy corridors. Europe is looking for stable suppliers close at hand; Algeria sits a few hundred kilometers from its shores. Geography does the work — when political will joins in. For investors, the window is open; for the diaspora of engineers, this is the call of the south: clean-energy skills are precisely what your country is asking you to bring home.