Zak Mir talks to Howard White, Interim Chairman, Hydrogen Utopia International

Zak's Traders Cafe spoke with Howard White, interim chairman of Hydrogen Utopia International, about a significant strategic pivot: moving from a focus on hydrogen for transportation to supplying ultra-low-cost, "super green" hydrogen to heavy industry in the GCC. 

What follows is a clear-eyed look at the technology, the economics, the environmental opportunity, and the commercial plan Daniel and I discussed with Howard.

Why the pivot from vehicles to industry?

Hydrogen for cars, trucks and buses has been promised for years but growth is still modest. As Howard pointed out, there are fewer than 100,000 hydrogen vehicles worldwide today, with roughly 70% of them in the Far East. At small scale, hydrogen is expensive—which makes it a weak competitor to petrol, diesel and even electricity for most road transport applications.

That reality prompted Hydrogen Utopia to take a fresh look at where hydrogen demand is both large and price-sensitive: heavy industry. Cement and steel plants are enormous energy consumers and major CO2 emitters. A typical, reasonably sized cement plant could take on the order of 100,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year. If hydrogen can be provided at a price close to natural gas, industry can decarbonize at scale.

The Inentech advantage: TRL9, modular and proven

Hydrogen Utopia has secured exclusive access to Inentech technology—a process with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 9 , meaning it is fully commercialized and proven. Importantly, the company is modularizing the technology to match the operational scale of industrial customers. Rather than building massive single plants, the approach is to deploy multiple modular facilities collocated with cement or steel plants.

""We have been running [this technology] for 20 years and fully operational for 13 years.""

That operational history is critical: it reduces deployment risk and allows Hydrogen Utopia to offer long-term offtake agreements and predictable pricing for industrial customers.

Target pricing: super green hydrogen at about 1.5 cents/kg

Perhaps the most striking claim Howard made is the target delivered hydrogen price: about 1.5 cents per kilogram (in certain GCC countries, supported by grants and interest-free loans). At that level, hydrogen becomes highly competitive with natural gas for many industrial uses.

Key enablers of this ultra-low cost are:

• Using non-recyclable mixed waste (including plastics, tyres and oil sludge) as feedstock.
• Modular, proven Inentech deployments co-located with customers—eliminating hydrogen transport costs.
• Financial support in the GCC for "super green" hydrogen projects (grants, favourable financing), which conventional renewables-to-electrolyser projects may not receive.

Waste-to-hydrogen: scale and environmental benefits

The process not only produces hydrogen, it also destroys problematic plastic additives and toxic contaminants that traditional recycling and incineration do not address. Howard highlighted several environmental advantages:

• Destruction of tens of thousands of pollutants added to plastics (PFAS and other additives).
• Ability to process large volumes—one facility could consume roughly 250,000 tonnes of mixed waste plastics per year . Four such facilities would process 1 million tonnes annually.
• Co-processing of tyres and oil sludge, addressing difficult waste streams (Howard referenced the large tyre stockpiles in Kuwait as an example).

""Plastic is fantastic and it is a material that they should be allowed to produce as much as they want as long as they do something about the destruction of it.""

Revenue model: hydrogen, CO2, fees and credits

Hydrogen Utopia expects multiple revenue streams from each deployment:

• Hydrogen sales —long-term offtake agreements with cement and steel plants (30-year contracts are the target).
• CO2 sales for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) —in the GCC, CO2 has market value for boosting production from mature fields.
• Management fees —Hydrogen Utopia plans to run each project as a special purpose vehicle (SPV) and earn fees/ownership percentages.
• Carbon credits —deployments will generate significant CO2 savings and may qualify for credits.

Howard expects each SPV to be comfortably profitable (internal rates of return in the high teens), even at the low hydrogen price point. The company will take a conservative, staged approach: secure non-binding offtake LOIs first, then raise project financing supported by LOIs and regional funders.

Market focus: GCC first, regulatory tailwinds

The GCC (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Ku