23 Jan Where’s the water for GH2 plan in Namib Desert?
John Grobler travels to the Daures Green Hydrogen Village pilot project in Namibia to find some answers
Desert dream: The Daures Green Hydrogen Village is currently under construction at a location about 90km west of the tin-mining town of Uis. This is a pilot project for what is intended to become a 15,000ha vegetable farm and 350,000 tons per annum ammonia production plant. Photos: John Grobler
Like a mirage, the Daures Green Hydrogen Village’s solar panels flicker in and out of sight from 30km away in the shimmering, searing midday heat of the rocky Namib Desert between the Brandberg massif and the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is only after the last sharp curve in the road through the desolate landscape that it reveals itself as no mirage: a large array of solar panels in a fenced-off compound of four newly built houses and various other buildings, including two large warehouses and the aluminium skeletons of several rows of agricultural warehouses under construction.
Building anything here is no mean feat: Daures is a four to five-hour drive from the nearest source of supplies, set on a desolate plain close to the border of the Skeleton Coast Park, about 50km as the crow flies from the Atlantic coastline. Its remote location in the primordial landscape make it seem like a Martian colony under construction.
Despite the heat, it is a hive of activity of mostly sub-contractors’ workers bustling about in the thin haze of fine dust churned by heavy trucks and two excavators digging trenches in the hard, sun-baked soil in what is promised to be Namibia’s first net-zero village upon completion.
This is just the pilot site; in its final scaled-up form, the Daures Green Hydrogen Village (DGHV) will be enormous: a 15,000ha tunnel-farming facility employing 3,000 people to produce 350,000 tons of ammonia a year, and tomatoes and carrots for the European and Asian export markets.
But while there is no lack of sunlight and wind, there is an obvious problem: a lack of potable water. In December 2023 DGHV was pumping five boreholes into four shallow, plastic-lined ponds for construction purposes.
But the water was mineralised before it could be used for construction and washing purposes. Drinking water for the staff was still a problem, and had to be trucked in from Henties Bay, about 150km away; Uis, which is closer at 100km away, no longer had any water to spare, explained site manager Request Haraseb.
Waterless mining wonder: the area around the Brandberg, a 500-million-year old extinct volcano, is rich with mineral deposits, but the arid Namib Desert and lack of water has been the single biggest obstacle to developing these resources. In spite of these challenges, a small community of informal miners have been scratching a hard living from the earth with amethyst and crystal mining. The area is also home to rare and endemic species of fauna and flora, such as the Welwitchia mirabilis and critically endangered southwestern black rhinos. Photos: John Grobler
Mining exploration
Since the announcement of Namibia’s ambitious, US$190-billion green hydrogen-based development plan in 2021, the area around the Brandberg has experienced a surge in mining exploration.
Ten kilometres north of the DGHV, down the road towards the Ugab River, Australian-owned Andrada Mining’s exploration team is hunting for copper in the former state-owned Brandberg West tin and tungsten mine, closed down in 1991.
Like the DGHV, Andrada was also relying on the same aquifer for water – but in an area with an annual rainfall of 20mm, signs were that this resource was being depleted rapidly, judging by the build-up of salt around Andrada’s borehole drilled less than three months ago.
The Ministry of Mines and Energy’s cadastre shows more than 50 current or pending mining and exclusive prospecting licences around the Brandberg, for lithium, niobium, tin and tantalum, rare earth minerals, gold and uranium.
Two of those are pending applications are from Enersense Energy Namibia, the holding company for the DGHV project, for uranium fuel – an unusual step for a clean energy company to take.
So, who is behind this plan?
Company documents show Enersense Energy Namibia was registered in July 2021 by Jerome Namaseb, Martin Nambundunga and Anastacia Imbili, in the month after the Requests for Proposals for green hydrogen and fertiliser projects were issued by the Namibia Investment Promotions and Development Board as the presidential implementing agency.
Imbili is the grand-daughter of founding president Sam Nujoma, while Nambundunga is the son of a struggle-era stalwart and former chief of staff of the Namibian Defence Force. Imbili reportedly told The Namibian that she had since resigned from the project, and her initial shareholding appears to have been taken over by German consulting engineering firm Fichtner GmbH of Stuttgart as lead designer.
Asked if was it not unusual or irregular for a consultant to become a partner in the project, Namaseb declined to comment: this was all related to the intellectual property of the Daures plans and the new technology that they intend utilising, he said.
Thomas Prosy, executive director for Fichtner’s African business development branch, confirmed the relationship with Enersense. Although he did not respond at the time of writing to this specific question, the shareholding appeared related to the German Ministry of Education and Research’s role in conducting research at Daures into the use of hydrolysis in producing green ammonia.
As with Hyphen Hydrogen Energy (see Question marks over Namibia’s green hydrogen plans), the Daures timeline showed a distinct pattern of close coordination between other official developments such as the decision to proceed with the development of the Kudu Gas field in 2021, the creation of the Namibia Investment Promotions and Development Board in the Office of the President and the creation of the Harare-based regional secretariat of all the Electricity Control Boards in the SADC region.
Back in Windhoek, DGHV’s Jerome Namaseb was evasive about why a green energy project would also be interested in obtaining uranium rights. “It’s just to secure land tenure rights”, intended to keep other competitors in the green hydrogen sphere away from their designated area. Many commercial farmers do in order to keep mineral prospectors off their land, he said.
Mining fossil water to produce green hydrogen: Daures Green Hydrogen Village has sunk at least five new boreholes in the small aquifer underneath their concession area that they say produce enough water for their construction needs. The high salinity level – as can be seen in another new borehole their neighbours Andrada Mining sunk further along the same aquifer – requires extensive filtering by reverse osmosis, a process that typically loses 40% to waste. Despite this, the company is confident it has enough water to meet its pilot project phase needs. Photos: John Grobler
Where is the water?
As for the most obvious problem for any large-scale project in the Namib Desert – a glaring lack of water – Daures was in negotiations with the French electricity utility Orana for supplies from the Wlotzkasbaken desalination plant, Namaseb confirmed, but declined to provide any details.
This presented a major cost factor, as a new pipeline of more than 200km would potentially cost billions, Namaseb admitted, but he was confident that the boreholes they had drilled on site would be adequate to meet the pilot project’s initial needs.
The DGHV’s initial targets were modest: producing 31 tons of ammonia to cultivate 500 tons of carrots and tomatoes in their new tunnels, which would require no more than 10 cubic metres of water a day, according to Namaseb.
How many vegetables would they need to repay about R240-million in capital outlay in the form of a German grant? Namaseb dismissed that as an unfair and irrelevant question: the idea of the pilot project phase was just to establish what output was possible.
However, water remains a major problem: according to sources among the Daures sub-contractors (who had all been required to sign non-disclosure agreements), the current five boreholes, all sunk in same small aquifer, are already showing signs of declining output and increasing salinity.
A growing water crisis: The surge in lithium mining in and around the Brandberg has led to a major drop in the water table, causing the small lake that had welled up in the old tin-mining quarry to dry up, and the demise of a fish-farming enterprise. The increased pumping of the aquifer has caused many boreholes to become too saline for human or animal use, leading to the abandonment of small subsistence farms as people move to Uis instead.
Uis itself has major water problems as well: the 50-year-old pipeline is so calcified it can only deliver a fraction of the water from the town’s only supply of fresh water from a form of a borehole in the Omaruru River, located about 40km south of the town of about 13,000 inhabitants. Photos: John Grobler
Dry Uis
This is no surprise in the mineral-rich but water-poor area: in Uis, about 90km away, the surge in mining activity has seen the former tin-mining town run out of water every day of late. The 50-year-old Namwater pipeline supplying the town has become so calcified that it has reduced supply to less than a third of original capacity, said local lodge operator Basil Calitz.
After Uis ran dry for several months in 2017, Calitz sunk his own boreholes, but the water is not suitable for drinking. “We only get a trickle during the day, but at night the supply improves,” he said.
Many in Uis suspect the village council was secretly selling the only fresh supplies to the new Chinese and Australian-owned lithium mines as this pipeline was the only source of fresh water in the entire area between Uis and Daures.
Eric Xaweb, manager of the local Tsiseb Conservancy that also holds a small share in Enersense, was clearly surprised to hear that producing hydrogen and ammonia would require up to 45 litres of fresh water to produce one litre of ammonia.
But what shocked him more was the fact that ammonia is highly poisonous, a basic fact that does not appear to have been shared with the affected local community. That was something he needed to address urgently with the village council, Xaweb said.
The chances of this making a difference to the Daures project’s management appeared slim: Uis has not had a town manager for several years now, and the village council was run by the local chief who was firmly behind the project, local residents said.
The water shortage was reaching crisis proportions in the informal Gobobos amethyst mining camp, halfway between Uis and Daures. A small community of 60 informal miners and including some women and children, they had for more than a month not received their regular supply of 5,000 litres, trucked in by an Uis supplier at a cost of R1 per litre. The implication was that someone else was paying more per litre for an increasingly limited supply of the most precious commodity of all, the miners complained.
Informal miner Wallace Lukas, like others in the small miners’ camp, had heard of the DGHV project, but said no one had informed them of any job opportunities. Getting a job there would be a dream, but he wasn’t very hopeful of his chances.
Waiting under a flimsy sheet of plastic in the searing sun for the buyer of his supply of crystals that took him a month to mine by hand, he saw no other way out of his grinding poverty.
Of late, the new lithium mining companies were pushing the small miners off their mining claims, issued to powerful people in the government and their friends, he said. “We are dying here, but the government doesn’t care about us.”
John Grobler is a Namibia-based associate at Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism. This investigation is part of a #PowerTracker series on green hydrogen, supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Find the Oxpeckers #PowerTracker tool and investigations here