The development of blue and green hydrogen has been identified as national priorities in a number of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, most notably Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, and Qatar. For example, Qatar announced plans for a US$1 billion plant to make blue ammonia, while Saudi Arabia already commenced work on the NEOM Green Ammonia project, a $US5 billion green hydrogen plant and one of the world’s largest hydrogen projects. With increasing investment and capital outlay on hydrogen projects, the MENA region is projected to become one of the world’s largest exporters of green hydrogen by the year 2050 with an approximate export value of US$200 billion. Despite the rise in hydrogen investments, corresponding law, governance, and institutional frameworks to support hydrogen production are yet to be formulated and communicated, and key vectors for implementation remain, at best, loosely articulated, including mission-critical public–private partnerships (P3), which have been so successful in similar contexts. There is a rather limited legal and/or policy framework that specifically relates to hydrogen across the MENA region. The injection of significant amounts of hydrogen into the national energy networks and grids comes with a wide range of questions across the entire hydrogen production and supply chain. A comprehensive legal framework is required to clarify licensing and permitting processes for hydrogen production, storage, commercialization, and export; while health, safety and design standards for hydrogen infrastructure will need to be elaborated upon to limit environmental, social and governance risks. The chapter explores the guiding principles of an optimal hydrogen regulation framework for MENA countries. It analyses current regulatory uncertainties and gaps in the design and implementation of hydrogen projects across the MENA region and draws upon experiences from other regions with legal pathways for addressing those challenges.

Aside from implementing WWS and storage technologies, the main suggestions for reducing or eliminating energy-related emissions have included using natural gas for electricity instead of coal, using natural gas or coal with carbon capture, using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels for electricity, using biomass with or without carbon capture for electricity, using liquid biofuels instead of gasoline or diesel for transportation, and using blue instead of green hydrogen. Non-energy-producing methods have also been proposed to remediate global warming. These include primarily synthetic direct air carbon capture and geoengineering. Policies that include these technologies along with WWS technologies are referred to as “all-of-the-above” policies, since they involve promoting most all technologies, regardless of their side effects, cost, effectiveness, or length of time between planning and operation. The justification for using these technologies is that they are a bridge between current carbon-intense technologies and WWS. This chapter discusses these non-WWS technologies and delineates the reasons why they are not needed or helpful for solving global warming, air pollution, and energy security problems.