Oman targets 3rd GH2 auction round by April-end

MUSCAT: The much-anticipated third round of Oman’s auction of land blocks for large-scale, integrated green hydrogen projects is expected to be launched before the end of this month, a key representative of Hydrom – the orchestrator and master-planner of this sector – has revealed.

Rumaitha al Busaidi, Business and ICV Development Manager – Hydrom, said the third auction round would be modelled largely on the lines of the successful first two rounds, which have led to the award of eight land blocks to date, with a total green hydrogen production commitment of around 1 million tonnes per annum starting from 2030.

“It is confirmed that we will be going to the market with another round of auctions by the end of this month,” said Al Busaidi. “The timeline is around 7 to 8 months usually, but that will be much more clear once we actually move to the market. It’ll be divided into two phases – the RFQ stage, and then you have the RFP stage, as is usually the process. We're aiming to award the next round of projects hopefully by the first quarter of 2026.”

The official made the revelations in a presentation at the Oman Water Week 2025 forum, which concluded at Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre last week. Her talk focused on the Capacities, R&D and ICV aspects of Oman’s green hydrogen ecosystem.

Significantly, Hydrom is also weighing a separate auction platform to help secure a market for green hydrogen for local industries and applications within Oman. “We are exploring different forms of auctions to create and build the market (for green hydrogen) in Oman,” Rumaitha noted. “(This) will target specific industries that will be developing in Oman, like green steel, fertilizers and others. And we will also have a double-sided auction, which is more of a government support mechanism, where at the moment we know that the price of green hydrogen is quite high, so what can we do to bridge that price gap between the developer or the supplier and the one that requires the offtake of the green hydrogen. So these are things that we are still working on. We'll have more clarity by the end of the year.”

In addition to its principal role as sector orchestrator, Hydrom is also overseeing the roll-out of shared infrastructure – encompassing desalinated water, green electricity grids, hydrogen pipeline networks, and so on – to support the green hydrogen projects.

This shared infrastructure, Rumaitha said, lies at the heart of Oman’s investment appeal to international green hydrogen developers. “The shared infrastructure is a big element as to why you are having a lot of international players coming in. This is because we are taking on the risk along with the developer, while they're building the things they're really good at. We're also building things that we're really good at and maximizing value creation rather than just let the developer build their own desalination capacity, do their own pipelines and so on. So we are shouldering this risk in order for the industry to also grow together.”

Going forward, Hydrom also envisions a role for itself as the aggregator and shipper of green hydrogen, replicating the role wholly state-owned Integrated Gas Company (IGC) currently performs with regard to natural gas supply. That additional responsibility is foreseen around 2030, when the production of green hydrogen is set to become a commercial reality.

“We know that once production starts by 2030, there will be some green hydrogen production demand for Oman. So we are envisaging a role that we can incubate a process very similar to how IGC, the Integrated Gas Company, works where all the requests for green hydrogen demand comes to one centralized entity to be able to process and honour those requests once they come in,” she added.