Hydrogen Discourse in the MENA Region: Powerful Actors and projections of opportunities and risks in the media discourse

The transition to a decarbonised economy and climate neutrality by 2050 is a top priority for the European Union (EU) and its Member States. Green hydrogen, an energy carrier produced by electrolysis of water using preferably renewable energy, is favoured as an important solution to facilitate this energy transition and to facilitate a sustainable global hydrogen economy. The prevailing discourses have generally focused on the EU's perspective on sustainability and energy needs, overlooking the crucial role of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in the development of this particular global hydrogen economy and how it is perceived in its discursive storylines and future projections. In order to best understand the discursive construction of this role, this article moves away from considering only the statements of MENA policymakers, due to the strong formal correlation with EU policies. Instead, this article analyses the media discourse on the MENA region's plans for a hydrogen economy, focusing on the key political, economic and social actors highlighted and the potential risks and opportunities discussed. It addresses two research gaps: first, the power dynamics at play in the discourses, and second, the need for a comprehensive assessment of how related storylines about risks and opportunities are constructed in the media discourse by powerful actors in light of past hydrogen economy initiatives and current policy support. The paper presents a discourse analysis of news articles published between 2019 and 2022 from a selection of countries with a sufficiently exploitable corpus of media sources from national news agencies and major online newspapers in English and French language and relevant hydrogen economy development plans in the countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates. The content analysis of these media sources is based on methods inspired by Foucauldian approaches to categorise the actors, objects and storylines about risks and opportunities that appear in them. The paper aims to identify the actors and their power dynamics in the MENA hydrogen economy discourse, while highlighting the associated risks and opportunities. It contributes insights to the sustainability and energy transition debates that will help policy makers, researchers and energy sector stakeholders to better understand different perceptions of a hydrogen economy.