Megaprojects usually make news with groundbreakings. The more informative announcements come near the end, and the one Abdulaziz Al-Arifi, governor of the National Development Fund, delivered at the WPC Energy Congress in Riyadh this week belongs to that class: the NEOM green hydrogen project is 96 percent complete and scheduled to begin commercial operations in 2027. For a facility the Kingdom describes as the largest of its kind in the world, the percentage matters less than what it retires. Construction risk, the reason most announced hydrogen projects never reach steel, is nearly spent.
The project’s dimensions have been stable since its financing closed: more than SR31 billion ($8.3 billion) of investment in a plant designed to produce up to 600 tonnes of green hydrogen a day, converted to green ammonia for export and powered by dedicated wind and solar capacity in the Kingdom’s northwest. Al-Arifi added the labor ledger, more than 16,000 jobs across construction and operations with local supply chains strengthened along the way, speaking at a session on development institutions in energy, as reported by Arab News.
His argument was about the financing architecture rather than the plant. The National Development Fund sits over 12 government funds and banks, and two of them, the National Infrastructure Fund and the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, anchored the hydrogen project’s financing alongside local and international lenders; the fund system disclosed a combined SR10.3 billion commitment when the package was arranged in 2023. Al-Arifi described the plant as evidence of what becomes possible when, in his words, “ambitious vision, developmental finance, and private capital come together.” The structure is the same one that carried this month’s Rabigh 2 power financing to a roughly 34-year tenor: state-adjacent lenders absorb the early risk and duration that commercial banks hesitate to price, and the commercial tranche follows.
Ninety-six percent is a construction number, and the remaining four points are not the easy ones; commissioning an electrolysis plant at a scale no one has operated, synchronizing it with its own dedicated grid, and ramping ammonia conversion are the phases where dated schedules meet chemistry. Still, the project’s risk now changes category. The questions that matter from here are commercial: ramp curves, conversion efficiency, shipping logistics from the Red Sea coast, and the performance of a 30-year offtake structure under which the plant’s output is committed to a single buyer for onward sale. None of those risks requires a crane.
The date is the asset. Green hydrogen as an industry has spent the decade announcing more capacity than it builds, and final investment decisions have slipped worldwide as offtakers hesitate. A plant that enters commercial operations in 2027 with its output already sold would give the Kingdom something scarcer than scale: an operating reference case, with real cost and delivery data, in a market still trading mostly on projections. That standing has commercial uses beyond ammonia, from anchoring the hydrogen-pipe manufacturing announced this week at King Salman Energy Park to pricing whatever the Energy Ministry commissions next in the fuel.
The forward markers are concrete. Commissioning milestones through 2027 will test whether the date holds; the first ammonia shipments will put a flow rate against the design figure; and the National Development Fund’s next energy allocations will show where the development-finance stack points after hydrogen. Al-Arifi’s session asked what development institutions do in energy. The percentage he brought answered it: they get projects to the part where the market takes over.