Green Hydrogen Electrolysis Requires Enormous Freshwater in Regions Already Facing Scarcity

Producing one kilogram of green hydrogen via electrolysis requires approximately 9-10 liters of ultra-pure water as direct feedstock, but when accounting for purification losses, cooling needs, and system inefficiencies, real-world consumption reaches 20-30 liters per kilogram. Global hydrogen demand is projected to reach 150-500 million tons per year by 2050 under various net-zero scenarios. At the midpoint of 300 million tons, that would require 6-9 billion cubic meters of water annually — equivalent to the domestic water consumption of a country the size of the United Kingdom. This matters because many of the regions best suited for green hydrogen production — those with abundant solar or wind resources — are also among the most water-stressed. North Africa, the Middle East, Australia's interior, Chile's Atacama Desert, and the southwestern United States all feature prominently in hydrogen export strategies, yet all face severe water scarcity. Saudi Arabia's NEOM green hydrogen project, one of the world's largest planned facilities, intends to produce 600 tons of green hydrogen per day in a desert kingdom that already desalinates 70% of its drinking water. The pain is that desalination adds cost ($1-2 per cubic meter), energy consumption (3-4 kWh per cubic meter), and environmental concern (brine discharge into marine ecosystems). Every kilowatt-hour spent desalinating water for electrolysis is a kilowatt-hour not used to produce hydrogen, further reducing overall system efficiency. For coastal projects, desalination is feasible but adds complexity. For inland projects far from the coast, water sourcing becomes a genuine constraint. The structural reason this persists is that hydrogen production planning and water resource planning happen in separate government ministries and separate corporate divisions. Energy companies modeling green hydrogen economics typically assume water is available at negligible cost, while water authorities are not factoring massive new industrial water demand into their scarcity projections. The two planning processes are disconnected. In the first place, the hydrogen industry inherited a blind spot from the fossil fuel era. Steam methane reforming (which produces 95% of today's hydrogen) also uses water, but it is co-located with existing industrial water infrastructure at refineries. Green hydrogen's promise is that it can be produced anywhere with renewable electricity — but 'anywhere' includes places with no water, and the industry has been slow to confront that limitation honestly.