World’s Largest Green Hydrogen Plant Nears Completion in Saudi Arabia’s NEOM
In the vast desert of northwest Saudi Arabia, a futuristic energy project is rising from the sands. The NEOM Green Hydrogen Plant – poised to be the world’s largest facility of its kind – has reached 80% completion across all its construction sites. This milestone, achieved at the start of 2025, marks a major step forward in a bold plan to produce clean “green” hydrogen fuel at an unprecedented scale. Backed by Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 initiative and international partners, the project is on track to start operations by 2026–2027, offering a glimpse into a greener energy future.
NEOM’s Bold Vision Takes Shape
The NEOM Green Hydrogen Plant under construction at Oxagon, NEOM’s industrial city on the Red Sea. Powered entirely by on-site solar panels and wind turbines, the facility will produce green hydrogen fuel without carbon emissions.
The green hydrogen plant is a flagship venture within NEOM, a planned high-tech region in Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk Province. NEOM, launched in 2017, is envisioned as a futuristic city-region powered by renewable energy and cutting-edge technology. The hydrogen project is located in Oxagon, NEOM’s industrial city by the Red Sea, which is being developed as a next-generation hub for advanced industries and clean energy. Covering over 300 square kilometers of desert and coastline, the site is anything but small – it’s essentially a mini-city for green fuel production.
Construction has been advancing rapidly, and the scale is immense. According to the NEOM Green Hydrogen Company (NGHC) – the joint venture driving the project – crews have been installing milestone equipment including huge wind turbines, hydrogen storage tanks, advanced electrolyser units, a massive air separation “cold box,” and kilometers of piping. The project remains on schedule despite its complexity. The 4 GW renewable power facilities (a sprawling wind farm and solar farm) are set to be finished by mid-2026, after which final commissioning of the hydrogen production equipment will begin. The first batches of green hydrogen, in the form of ammonia, are expected to roll out in 2027 – an ambitious timeline that reflects how high a priority this is for Saudi Arabia’s clean energy plans.
Inside the World’s Largest Green Hydrogen Plant
Once completed, the NEOM plant will be the world’s largest facility producing green hydrogen – hydrogen fuel made using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. Unlike conventional “grey” hydrogen (typically produced from natural gas and emitting CO₂), green hydrogen is made by splitting water (H₂O) with electricity from renewable sources, yielding no greenhouse gas emissions in the process. This makes green hydrogen a highly attractive clean fuel for the future. The NEOM project aims to harness that potential at an unprecedented scale, showing how deserts rich in sun and wind can become global energy suppliers without pumping oil or gas.
At the NEOM plant, huge arrays of solar panels and ranks of wind turbines will provide the power to electrolyse water and produce hydrogen. In fact, the facility will rely on around 5.6 million solar panels alongside over 250 wind turbines harvesting the desert sun and sea breeze. Together, these will feed a 2.2 gigawatt (GW) electrolyser system – essentially a giant water-splitting machine – to generate hydrogen gas continuously. The green hydrogen will then be combined with nitrogen from the air to create green ammonia, a form in which the fuel can be more easily stored and shipped worldwide. All told, the plant is designed to produce up to 600 tonnes of hydrogen per day once fully operational. That quantity of clean fuel is staggering – roughly enough hydrogen to fuel 20,000 buses each day – and would eliminate about 5 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year if it replaces diesel or other fossil fuels.
Crucially, this mega-project is being built using proven technologies, but at a scale and integration never seen before. Wind turbines and solar farms have been built elsewhere, and electrolysers are a well-understood technology – but combining all these on such a massive scale to produce hydrogen is a pioneering effort. The project even requires building a new port (or jetty) at Oxagon so that tankers can load the green ammonia for export. It’s a first-of-its-kind endeavor that, if successful, could demonstrate how to make green hydrogen viable on a global scale.
Powering a Clean-Energy Future in Saudi Arabia
The NEOM Green Hydrogen Company is a partnership between Saudi and international players: it’s an equal joint venture of ACWA Power (a Saudi renewable energy developer), Air Products (a U.S.-based industrial gases giant), and NEOM itself. Together they secured a hefty $8.4 billion investment to bring this vision to life. The project aligns tightly with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the national strategy to diversify the economy beyond oil and become a leader in renewable energy and clean technologies. For Saudi Arabia – a country synonymous with oil wealth – betting big on green hydrogen sends a powerful message about its future direction.
Why does green hydrogen matter? In the global shift to clean energy, certain sectors like heavy industry, shipping, and long-haul transport are hard to electrify directly. Green hydrogen (and fuels like ammonia made from it) offers a way to decarbonise those sectors by replacing coal, oil or gas with a fuel that emits no carbon when used. As one report notes, green hydrogen is seen as a critical component in reducing global carbon emissions precisely because it can be produced without greenhouse gases and used in many applications. In regions with abundant sun and wind – like the Arabian desert – it also provides a way to export renewable energy by shipping it abroad in chemical form. Saudi Arabia has even pledged that 50% of its power will come from renewables by 2030, and projects like NEOM’s are key to reaching that target while also creating a new export industry in carbon-free fuels.
Project leaders are confident about NEOM’s global role. “We’re progressing well on all fronts, including the solar and wind farms, and we have received all the major equipment,” said Wesam Alghamdi, CEO of NEOM Green Hydrogen Company, when discussing the construction progress. By late 2024 the project was already more than half complete, and Alghamdi emphasized that the plant is designed to ship hydrogen to every market, including the EU, with all its power coming from carbon-free sources. In other words, this Saudi project isn’t just for local use – it’s being built with the worldwide clean energy market in mind. The entire output of green ammonia fuel from NEOM is locked into a 30-year agreement with Air Products, which will handle selling and transporting it to wherever demand is highest. Likely destinations include Europe and Asia, where industries are seeking new green fuel supplies to meet climate goals.
Global Ambitions, Challenges and the Road Ahead
The sheer scale and ambition of NEOM’s hydrogen plant have drawn global attention. In fact, the CEO of Air Products, Seifi Ghasemi, highlighted that the world will need many more projects of this magnitude in the coming years. “Such is the rising demand for clean energy that the world needs 20 projects on the scale of the NEOM megaproject,” Ghasemi remarked, pointing to government targets in Europe that imply a huge ramp-up in hydrogen supply by 2030. He stressed that if we truly aim to decarbonise heavy energy sectors worldwide, “there is no alternative” but to develop hydrogen on a massive scale. This puts NEOM’s plant into perspective: it may be the largest green hydrogen project to date, but it could be just the beginning of a global build-out if climate goals are to be met.
That said, blazing a trail in new technology is never easy. NEOM’s project has faced unique challenges – from its remote location to the task of coordinating solar, wind, and hydrogen systems together. Market dynamics are also something the developers must navigate. Air Products initially shouldered significant risk, investing billions and planning infrastructure to distribute the ammonia to customers worldwide. Evolving conditions have prompted some strategy tweaks, such as seeking additional buyers for the fuel and timing new import terminals in line with confirmed demand. In the nascent green hydrogen market, policies and customer commitments are still catching up to the scale of supply projects coming online. Nonetheless, the NEOM venture has momentum and strong backing, suggesting that these hurdles can be overcome as the hydrogen economy matures.
As of mid-2025, walking through the Oxagon site one would witness a landscape transformed: wind towers dotting the horizon, an army of solar panels glinting under the sun, and futuristic industrial modules taking shape on the coast. It’s a scene that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. The project is also investing in people – training Saudi engineers and technicians to run this new industry, and creating hundreds of long-term jobs when the plant is fully operational. By building local expertise in green hydrogen, Saudi Arabia is planting the seeds of an industry that could flourish for decades to come, echoing the way oil fields once spawned entire ecosystems of skills and commerce.
In late 2026, when the NEOM Green Hydrogen Plant is expected to officially start full operations, it will signal a new chapter in the energy world. If all goes as planned, ships will carry Saudi-made green ammonia from the Red Sea to ports around the globe – a clean fuel born from sun, wind, and innovation. This pioneering project directly supports the country’s transformation agenda, aiming to position Saudi Arabia as a leader in the post-oil energy landscape. For observers everywhere, NEOM’s hydrogen venture is a compelling case study of how quickly the clean energy transition can move when vision, technology, and investment come together. And for the planet, it offers a hopeful example of the large-scale solutions needed to tackle climate change. As one chapter nears completion with 80% of the construction done, all eyes will be on NEOM as it races toward the finish line – and towards a more sustainable future.
Sources:
Naida Hakirevic Prevljak, “World’s ‘largest’ green hydrogen plant construction reaches 80% completion,” Offshore Energy, June 2, 2025.
NEOM Green Hydrogen Company, “World’s Largest Green Hydrogen Plant Reaches 80% Construction Completion Across All Sites,” press release, June 2, 2025.
Eva Levesque, “Neom Green Hydrogen will hit all markets, says chief,” AGBI, Nov. 19, 2024.
Dominic Ellis, “Air Products says Neom is now 80% complete,” gasworld, Jun. 02, 2025.
Analytics Compass, “World’s largest green hydrogen plant is now 60 percent complete,” Nov. 18, 2024.
Wikipedia: “Green hydrogen”; “Neom”.
Seifi Ghasemi (Air Products CEO), quoted in gasworld (Barclays Industrial Select Conference remarks), Feb. 22, 2024.