By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 05

In one of the world's driest countries, the question a hydrogen plant must answer first is where its water goes.

In an arid country, the first question to ask any hydrogen project is not about carbon but about water, because splitting water for hydrogen is exactly what electrolysis does. Namibia is among the driest countries on Earth, and the Erongo region around Arandis has known real water shortages, so a new industrial thirst is a sustainability problem before it is anything else. Oshivela’s answer, visible in the plant that took its electrolysers in November 2024, is to recycle.

The design is a closed loop. The hydrogen made from water is fed to the furnace, where it strips oxygen from the iron ore and becomes water again, and that water is recovered and returned to the process. Instead of consuming fresh water at every pass, the plant is built to use the same water over and over.

Why water, not carbon, is the first test

Green hydrogen has a water cost that is easy to overlook. Producing hydrogen by electrolysis consumes water directly, and across the industry roughly ten kilograms of water are needed for every kilogram of hydrogen made. In a wet country that is trivial; in the Namib it is the constraint that can decide whether a project is responsible or ruinous.

That is why a green-iron plant in Erongo has to be judged first on its water balance. The region already competes for a scarce supply between towns and large mines, and any new industrial draw lands on a system with little slack to give.

In the Namib, a project’s water balance is its first environmental test, ahead of its carbon one.

A loop instead of a drain

Oshivela is engineered to sidestep that draw. Because the reduction reaction turns the hydrogen back into water inside the furnace, the plant can capture and reuse it rather than drawing fresh supply for each batch. The water becomes a circulating stock kept inside the process, not a river of fresh input consumed and discharged.

That closed loop is the plant’s strongest sustainability claim, and it is a design choice other hydrogen projects in the country cannot all make. A plant that recycles its water competes far less with a farm or a town for the same scarce litres than one that consumes as it runs.

The loop is the point – water kept circling inside the plant is water not taken from the land.

The stewardship logic

For a dry-land economy, that logic matters beyond one factory. Namibia’s scarce water underwrites livestock, irrigation and rural settlement, so an industry that promises jobs must not quietly bid water away from food production. A process built to reuse rather than consume is the kind of design that lets new industry and existing agriculture share a fragile supply.

The sustainability case is therefore about competition as much as conservation. The measure is not only how clean the iron is, but whether making it leaves the region’s water available for the farms and communities that depend on it.

That balance is what makes the closed loop worth watching rather than simply admiring. If the plant genuinely holds its water inside the process at scale, it offers a model for how heavy industry might expand in a water-stressed country without starving the land that feeds it – and if it leaks or falls short, it becomes a warning about how quickly an arid region’s margins can be spent.

In a dry country, the honest measure of new industry is the water it leaves for the farm.

The sustainability bet

The plant’s environmental success will show over time, in whether the loop holds as production scales and whether the wider carbon saving – about 27,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in this phase – is achieved without a hidden water cost elsewhere. Those are the right, unglamorous measures for a project in a semi-arid commons.

The risk is that a small pilot recycles neatly while a far larger later plant, drawing on more power and more throughput, strains the balance the first phase managed. Scale is where water-wise design is truly tested, not at fifteen thousand tonnes.

The loop must survive scale – a pilot that recycles proves the idea, not yet the industry.

For a farmer, a water authority or a sustainability investor in Erongo, Oshivela is a test of whether heavy industry can grow in a dry country without drinking its future. The decision it frames is whether to welcome water-recycling industry as a neighbour that shares the supply, while insisting, plant by plant, that the closed loop is real and holds as the ambition scales.

Sources: HyIron – Oshivela electrolysers; Oshivela process – closed water loop (HyIron); Competing in a thirsty world – hydrogen and water (ESI-Africa)