Ouarzazate is a beautiful town in south-central Morocco. An important holiday destination nicknamed the “door of the desert,” it is where major films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Mummy (1999), Gladiator (2000), and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) were shot—and where parts of Game of Thrones were set. But Ouarzazate is not only renowned for its splendour. Since 2016, it is where one of the grandest solar energy projects in the world has come to sit. Marketed as an initiative to end Morocco`s dependency on hydrocarbon imports, the project provides electricity to more than a million Moroccans and is constitutive of a wider effort meant to put the country on a “green path.” A closer look, however, invites serious doubts about the costs and benefits of the venture.
In the first instance, there is the dispossession at the origins of it all: The 3,000 hectare solar facility was built on land historically used by Amazigh pastoralists, who neither consented to nor subsequently accrued much benefit from its functioning. In the second, there is the project’s financing. Debts of USD9 billion were taken on from the World Bank, European Investment Bank (EIB) and others for the plant’s construction, all of which are backed by state guarantees. As such, it is the Moroccan taxpayer ultimately on the hook should anything go wrong. Thirdly, there is economic viability. The project, structured as a public–private partnership (PPPs), has recorded annual deficits of around €80 million since launch. As is so often the case with PPPs—legal arrangements which facilitate the privatization of profits and socialization of losses—these have been covered by the public purse. Fourthly, there are the social and ecological bills: The Ouarzazate plant relies upon concentrated solar power (CSP), which necessitates extensive water use for cooling down the system and cleaning the solar panels. In a semiarid region like Ouarzazate, this has implied diverting limited water resources away from households and farms.
Nor is the case of Ouarzazate’s mega solar project exceptional. In Midelt, 450km northeast of Ouarzazate, the same story of land grabbing and decarbonisation by dispossession is playing out. There, the construction of the largest hybrid solar plant in the world—a facility combining CSP with Photovoltaic (PV) technologies—again advances at the expense of local pastoralists. Per Hassan El Ghazi, a young shepherd:
“Our profession is pastoralism, and now this project has occupied our land where we graze our sheep. They do not employ us in the project, but they employ foreigners. The land in which we live has been occupied. They are destroying the houses that we build…In the end, we are invisible and we do not exist for them.”
Pundits and activists have dubbed projects like those in Ouarzazate and Midelt as ‘green grabbing’: Schemes where ecological objectives are used for orchestrating land theft and other forms of dispossession. Worryingly, the appropriation of land and resources a la “green grabbing” are becoming increasingly common. Not only observed in the installation of solar and wind farms, appropriations are also present in conservation and carbon credit projects that deprive indigenous communities of their land and territories and in the confiscation of communal lands for biofuel production.
The reality of climate breakdown is already visible across the Middle East and North Africa, undermining the ecological and socioeconomic basis of life. Mitigating breakdown’s consequence will of course require a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a rapid transition towards renewable energies. In view of the troubles evinced in Ouarzazate and Midelt however, questions on the risks and dangers presented by an energy transition beg asking. Might not the great green push maintain the same practices of dispossession and exploitation that currently prevail—might it merely reproduce injustices and exclusions which have plagued the Middle East and North Africa for decades?
The Bankruptcy of the International Climate Talks
Every year, the world’s political leaders, advisers, media and corporate lobbyists gather for the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) on the issue of climate change. And yet, despite the threat facing the planet growing more proximate and existential with each passing year, governments are doing little to arrest the growth of carbon emissions. After three decades of what the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has called ‘blah blah blah’, it has become evident that international climate talks of these types are without substance or ambition. Hijacked by corporate power and private interests, they promote false profit-making solutions like carbon trading and so-called ‘net-zero’ and ‘nature-based solutions.’ Contrarily, they eschew the imperative of forcing industrialised nations and fossil fuel companies to reduce carbon emissions and leave fossil fuels in the ground.
With COP28 held in Dubai, UAE, in 2023, the Arab region has hosted the climate talks five times since the COP’s inception in 1995: COP7 (2001) and COP22 (2016) in Marrakech, Morocco; COP18 (2012) in Doha, Qatar; and COP27 (2022) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The yield from these gatherings are minimal, as the most recent iterations can attest. Yes, COP27, held in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, achieved an agreement on Payment for Loss and Damage which has been lauded by some as an important step in making richer countries accountable for the damage caused by climate change in the global South. Alas, as the agreement lacks clear funding and enforcement mechanisms, it seems likely to meet the same fate as the broken promise (first made in COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009) of providing $100 billion in climate finance by 2020. The lack of seriousness at COP28, meanwhile, was signalled by the UAE’s appointment of Sultan al-Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as conference president. As Al-Jaber’s example makes plain, the same principals and interests which have driven climate change that are now shaping the response to it. The ultimate goals of these persons and corporate entities is to maintain existing power structures and to protect (if not grow) private profitability.
Despite calling for a climate transition (including in the Arab region), it is these goals—profit and power— which also underline the interventions of international financial institutions (IFIs) and northern governments. Like the World Bank and IMF, the development agencies of northern governments—including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the EU, and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ)—are wedded to a capitalist (and often corporate-led) energy transition rather than one led by and for working people. Their analysis of climate change and the needed transition is therefore circumscribed if not dangerous, likely to reproduce the patterns of dispossession and resource plunder that characterise the prevailing fossil fuel regime
For the Middle East and North Africa, further privatisation of water, land, resources, energy and even the atmosphere itself is at the heart of the green transition being followed. And though private sector mediation of the energy transition is not unique to the region, it is comparatively advanced. The dominance of private interests within Morocco’s solar strategies have already been touched on. Similar developments are evinced in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. In Tunisia’s case, in fact, a major push is under way to expand the privatisation of the country’s renewable energy sector, principally by furnishing foreign investors with sizable incentives for producing green energy in the country, including for export. Tunisian law—modified in 2019—even allows for the use of agricultural land for renewable projects. Inasmuch as the country suffers from acute food dependency (as was starkly revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the outbreak of war in Ukraine), the wisdom of such provisions is up for dispute.
Green colonialism
In the constructs of the world’s power brokers, the Arabian deserts (Sahara) are often described as vast and empty lands. Conceived within these frames, these territories are presented as Eldorados of renewable energy for a Europe in desperate need of cheap clean energy. Pervading prevailing discourses and policy plans when it comes to the energy transition in the region, then, is an unmissable ‘green colonial’ logic.
The emergence of green colonialism—or the extension of the colonial relations of plunder and dispossession to the green era of renewable energies, an extension which pushes costs onto peripheral countries and communities while prioritizing the energy and environmental needs (such as water) of one region of the world over another—should give us all pause. It threatens, after all, to reproduce the systems of production and consumption which have generated such profound inequality, impoverishment, and dispossession to date. Unsurprisingly, green colonial dynamics in the MENA are most discernible in the renewable projects being erected in occupied territories such as Palestine, the Golan Heights, and Western Sahara.
In Western Sahara, lands occupied illegally by the Moroccan Kingdom since 1975, there are currently three operational wind farms. A fourth is also under construction in Boujdour, while planning papers reveal a number of others in the works. Each of the operational wind farms in question is owned by Nareva, one of the many firms on the books of the Moroccan royal family’s holding company. Notably, also getting in on green colonial investment in occupied Western Sahara is Saudi Arabia. In the latter’s case, solar energy is the main play. Back in November 2016—at the time of the COP22 climate talks—Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power signed an agreement with Masen, the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy, to develop and operate a complex of three solar PV power stations. Two of the power stations that ultimately came online, today generating 100 MW of energy, are located in Western Sahara (in El Aaiún and Boujdour). Plans have also been issued for ACWA to construct a third solar plant in Western Sahara in El Argoub, near Dakhla. The coloniality of these ventures is difficult to miss: they entrench the occupation of Western Sahara by deepening Morocco’s capital deployments and extractive capacity, with the complicity of foreign capital and companies.
In occupied Palestine, similar if not more brutal dynamics are evinced. These iterate from a Zionist project which has long since rendered Palestine an empty and parched desert—and which has justified itself on the claim of making the desert bloom. As pertains to green colonialism in particular, Israel’s efforts expanded upon the signing of the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020. Thereafter, agreements for jointly implementing environmental projects concerning renewable energy, agri-business and water were signed in rapid succession. Eco-normalization—or the use of ‘environmentalism’ to normalize Israeli oppression and the ecological injustices resulting from it in the Arab region and beyond—has provided essential cover for green colonialism.[1]
Evidence of Israeli green colonialism are now abundant. During the climate talks in Sharm El Sheikh (COP27) in November 2022, Jordan and Israel signed a UAE-brokered Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The MoU bound the signatories to continue a feasibility study on two interlinked projects, Prosperity Blue and Prosperity Green, which together constitute Project Prosperity. In substance, the project stipulates that Jordan buy 200 million cubic metres of water annually from an Israeli water desalination station. Per the agreement, the latter is to be established on the Mediterranean coast, and to use power produced by a 600 megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic plant constructed in Jordan by Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s leading state-owned renewable energy company. A virtuous cycle it would seem—except for the fact of the water looting that is at the core of it all. Indeed, Mekorot, the Israeli entity managing the water desalination part of the scheme, is perhaps the main cog in Israeli water apartheid. The firm not only drains the Jordan River at its discretion but controls the vast majority of Palestine’s water resources in the West Bank—using its authority to keep settlement swimming pools full while Palestinian industry and agriculture is left in a permanently precarious state.
In addition, in August 2022, Jordan joined Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Oman in signing another MoU with two Israeli energy companies—Enlight Green Energy (ENLT) and NewMed Energy. This MoU concerned projects for wind and solar energy production and energy storage to be hosted within the countries of the Arab signatories. Like the Prosperity Blue and Green venture, these ones further boost Israel’s reputation as a hub for creative renewable energy technologies. Tacitly, they also enable Israel to continue its settler colonial project while entrenching its geopolitical power in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Gulf in Arab Green colonialism
The involvement of Gulf companies such as Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar in the green energy projects referenced speaks to hierarchies and unevenness structuring the state and class relations in the MENA region today. For a number of decades running, the Gulf monarchies have ascended to the position of a sub-imperial force. The ruling regimes and leading capitalists of the Gulf are not only richer than their Arab neighbours. They mediate the syphoning of surplus value at the regional level, reproducing core–periphery-like relations within the MENA via processes of extraction, marginalisation and accumulation by dispossession. What is more, their sub-imperial reach is swiftly expanding beyond the MENA and into eastern Africa. And one of the mechanisms being leveraged toward this end is a nominally green one: carbon offsets projects. Blue Carbon, a Dubai-based company owned by a member of the emirate’s royal family, for instance, has recently signed agreements with Kenya, Liberia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania to generate carbon credits (read pollution permits) from millions of hectares of forests. In Liberia, this amounts to 10% of the whole surface of the country while in Zimbabwe, it is equivalent to 20% of the country’s landmass. These carbon credits projects are central to the market-based solutions which have been promoted in international climate talks (and which were aggressively promoted at COP28 in Dubai) in 2023.
Hydrogen: the new energy frontier in North Africa
In recent years, states and firms of the global north have taken to promoting hydrogen as a ‘clean’ alternative fuel essential for the energy transition. Presently, most hydrogen production stems from the extraction of fossil fuels and is, as a result, tied up with significant carbon emissions. The process can be made cleaner by deploying carbon capture technologies. The best option when it comes to hydrogen, however, is to avoid fossil fuel extraction altogether and instead use electrolysers to split water molecules. As this can be done with electricity from renewable energy sources, the final yield is called green hydrogen.
The European Union, swayed by the lobbying of various interest groups, has shown itself especially keen on hydrogen. In 2020, it positioned the product at the center of the framework of the European Green Deal and named the scaling of green hydrogen production—through local extraction and the establishment of a steady supply from Africa—a priority. The Russian invasion of Ukraine only lifted hydrogen’s profile further. Thereafter, it became a key plank of REPowerEU, the European Commission’s plan to end dependence on Russian gas. Commission Vice President, Frans Timmermans, told the European Parliament in May 2022 “I strongly believe in green hydrogen as the driving force of our energy system of the future. […] and I also strongly believe that Europe is never going to be capable to produce its own hydrogen in sufficient quantities.”
In terms of numbers and figures, the European Commission has quadrupled its hydrogen production target for 2030 from 5 million tons to 20 million tons. Though recent studies have shown the EU’s objectives to be unrealistic, their designation has had the second order effect of promoting more fossil fuel exploration and exploitation. Apart from the green variety, after all, hydrogen production requires fossil fuel extraction. Indeed, it bears mentioning that major European oil and gas companies count amongst hydrogen’s biggest champions, recognizing it as a back door to the continuation of the fossil fuel operations.
Saliently, roughly half of the 20 million tons of hydrogen that Europe seeks is to be imported, with North Africa as the primary supplier. In 2020, the Moroccan government entered into a partnership with Germany to develop the first green hydrogen plant on the continent. According to certain estimates, the country can take up to 4 percent of the global Power-to-X market (production of ‘green molecules’) by 2030, given its ‘exceptional renewable resources and its successful track record in deploying large scale renewable plants’. French firms have moved into Morocco as well. France’s Total Eren launched a hybrid production project which is to combine solar energy, wind energy, hydrogen and green ammonia, with investments estimated at more than €9 billion. The project covers the entire green hydrogen value chain, from wind energy production and photovoltaic power to hydrogen export. Work on it is to commence in 2025, with hydrogen production expected to come online by 2027.
In the aggregate, Total Eren’s efforts will require a staggering 170,000 hectares of land, lands which just so happen to be in Guelmim-Oued Noun (some of the land is situated in occupied Western Sahara). The Moroccan state, claiming itself as sole proprietor of the lands in question, has ensured they will be available. Nor is Total Eren the only company angling for a hydrogen-powered land grab in Morocco and Western Sahara. Australian company CWP Global is also looking to sign an agreement with the Moroccan government to build a $20 billion mega green hydrogen and green ammonia project there.
Conclusion
The energy transition advancing in the Middle East and North Africa is premised on the assumption that any step towards renewable energy production is to be welcomed—that any shift away from fossil fuels production is worthwhile. It is organized, moreover, around export-oriented plans designed primarily to service the consumption needs of Europe. As such, this transition belies essential questions of ownership, winners and losers, costs and benefits, and power relations. In a macro sense, it is also inviting a new era of green colonialism.
The fight for climate justice and a just transition must take into account the differences in responsibilities and vulnerabilities between global North and South. Ecological and climate debt must be paid to countries in the global South, which happen to be the hardest hit by global warming, and which have been locked into a system of predatory extractivism by the workings of global capitalism. The green transition and talk about sustainability cannot become another façade for neocolonial schemes of plunder and domination.
In many ways, the climate crisis and the needed green transition offer a chance to reshape global politics. Coping with the dramatic transformation requires a break with existing militarist, colonial and neoliberal projects. Survival, never mind the flourishing of societies, demand the adoption of a truly democratized process of decision-making. Within this, communities poised to be most affected need to be granted their rightful weight. Universal rights must also be respected, and the needs of the collective have to be privileged.
Materially, the endpoint of the energy transition needs to be one in which everybody has enough energy as well as clean and safe environments to live in: To wit, a future with an ecosocialist horizon that is in harmony with the revolutionary demands of the African and Arab uprisings: popular sovereignty, bread, freedom and social justice.
[1] It is worth noting that normalisation between the Moroccan kingdom and Israel in December 2020 was secured by the imperial patron (the US under Trump) agreeing to recognise Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.