By RenewaNews · Monday, August 24, 2026 · 6 min read

Green Hydrogen Is Moving From Announcement Risk to Execution Risk

Original illustration created for RenewaNews.

Construction is finished at NEOM's $8.5 billion green hydrogen complex at Oxagon. The plant has entered commissioning, with commercial operations targeted for 2027, Renewables Now reported on August 12, 2026. POSCO Holdings and Samsung Engineering walked away from a green hydrogen project in Oman that had been running since the mid-2020s.

Both projects were, at one point, comparable headline numbers. One is now commissioning turbines. The other no longer exists.

What actually got built at NEOM

NEOM Green Hydrogen Company's facility integrates 4 GW of solar and wind generation to feed more than 2 GW of alkaline electrolysis supplied by thyssenkrupp nucera, according to Decarbonfuse's August 19, 2026 report — the only account in circulation of the plant's completion status and offtake structure. That report puts the renewable generation and transmission network at 95% complete as of March 2026, and describes Air Products' offtake as an exclusive 30-year agreement covering all ammonia output from the site. Renewables Now's August 12, 2026 report on Serhan's earnings-call remarks independently puts output at 600 tonnes of carbon-free hydrogen per day.

What makes NEOM instructive is not the capacity figure. It is the sequencing: land and transmission infrastructure resolved first, electrolyser hardware contracted and delivered, offtake locked in for three decades, and only then a construction-complete milestone that a CEO could confirm on an earnings call rather than in a press release. That is the order investors should be checking for elsewhere.

HyDuqm shows where the sequence breaks

The HyDuqm project targeted 220,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year for export to South Korea, built around a consortium that included two large, well-capitalized Korean industrials. The partners cited an "in-depth assessment" of global renewable hydrogen offtake dynamics as the reason for cancellation. Consortium strength and a plausible export corridor were not enough. The project failed on the offtake side — the same variable NEOM had already solved with Air Products years before commissioning began.

That gap is not an isolated case. Energy News, citing an IEA assessment it did not further identify, reported on August 19, 2026 that the global pipeline of low-emissions hydrogen projects has shrunk by 10 million tonnes per year, to 27 million tonnes by 2030. The same Energy News report cited a Nature Energy analysis finding that only 7% of hydrogen capacity announced for 2023 was actually installed and operating on schedule, and said more than 100 GW of announced electrolyzer capacity risks never entering operation unless investment decisions are finalized by 2027. Those figures come through a single trade-press summary rather than a named IEA document, and should be read with that limit attached.

Those numbers describe the same phenomenon HyDuqm just demonstrated at project scale: announcement volume has consistently outrun bankable demand.

Reliance: capacity build ahead of the production target

Reliance Industries occupies a middle position. Its Dhirubhai Ambani Giga Energy Complex in Jamnagar is constructing an electrolyser giga-factory intended to scale to 3 GW of annual manufacturing capacity by the end of 2026, executive director Anant Ambani said, as reported by Renewables Now on September 1, 2025 — the report that also disclosed the site's 550,000-acre Kutch, Gujarat land development and Reliance's target of 3 million tonnes of green hydrogen output by 2032. The company has already commenced production of heterojunction solar modules at the site to power its own hydrogen operations and is licensing electrolyser technology from Nel ASA, the Times of India reported on August 30, 2025, in which Mukesh Ambani restated a target of producing green hydrogen below $1 per kilogram. Both reports are now roughly a year old, and neither the giga-factory's end-2026 target nor its construction status has been updated since.

That is a company building its own supply chain — modules, electrolysers, land — rather than waiting on external vendors. It is also a company that has not yet produced hydrogen at commercial volume. The giga-factory milestone due at the end of this year is a manufacturing capacity test, not a production test, and Reliance's 3 million tonne target sits eight years further out. The distinction matters for anyone modeling offtake availability before the early 2030s.

India's allocation stage versus a construction stage

India's central government has moved further on paper than most developers have moved on the ground. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has allocated annual production capacity for 862,000 tonnes of green hydrogen to 19 companies under the SIGHT program, and awarded 3,000 MW of annual electrolyzer manufacturing capacity to 15 firms, according to a Press Information Bureau release dated November 12, 2025. Three ports — Deendayal, V.O. Chidambaranar, and Paradip — have been designated integrated Green Hydrogen Hubs.

Those are allocations and designations, not commissioned assets. They tell an investor which companies have cleared a government gate and which corridors are meant to carry export volume. They do not yet tell an investor which of those 19 allocation-holders will do what ACWA Power just did at Oxagon: convert a capacity number into a completed, energized facility with contracted offtake.

South Korea is still redesigning the demand side

South Korea's difficulty has been getting buyers to show up. Its first clean hydrogen power tender in 2024 attracted bids for only 750 GWh out of 6,500 GWh on offer, with the award going to Korea Southern Power Co. S&P Global Platts, citing unnamed industry sources, reported on April 17, 2025 that foreign exchange and delivery risk were the deterrents, and that the government was expected to broaden eligible production pathways — including waste gas and biogas — to widen the bidder pool in 2025.

The response so far is an MoU, not a financing package. Korea South-East Power and the Saemangeum Development Agency signed an agreement for a 320 MW power-to-gas-to-power complex in Buan, designed to absorb surplus output from a 1 GW onshore solar farm, Energy Monitor reported on August 17, 2026. The article describes this as following a period of "sluggish development" after the undersubscribed 2024 tender. An MoU for a P2G2P system is a genuine attempt to solve the demand-matching problem that sank the earlier auction. It is also several stages behind an energized electrolysis train at Oxagon or a giga-factory under construction at Jamnagar.

The FID gap, by the numbers

The IEA's Global Hydrogen Review, published November 25, 2025, put low-emissions hydrogen production on track for 1 million tonnes in 2025 — still under 1% of global hydrogen output — while noting that more than 200 projects have reached final investment decision since 2020, even as FIDs continue to trail the pace of announcements. NEOM cleared land, transmission, electrolysers, and offtake before its CEO could tell analysts the plant was built. HyDuqm never cleared offtake and no longer exists. Everything documented above sits somewhere between those two poles.