Moeve Breaks Ground on a One-Billion-Euro Electrolysis Project
Onuba in southern Spain is the first phase of a 2 GW electrolysis target, and its CEO says high gas prices have made green hydrogen competitive with grey.
Moeve has broken ground in southern Spain on Onuba, described as one of Europe's largest green hydrogen initiatives. The project was approved in March and requires more than €1 billion of investment, including over €300 million in EU subsidies, as the first phase of a development targeting 2 GW of electrolysis capacity. Moeve holds 51 percent, with France's Hy24 and Spain's COFIDES taking the rest. A parallel biofuel facility brings cumulative investment to €2.4 billion.
CEO Maarten Wetselaar's argument is about the market rather than the technology: high natural gas prices have made green hydrogen competitive with grey. Moeve — formerly Cepsa, rebranded in 2024 as part of an €8 billion low-carbon transformation, and owned by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala and the Carlyle Group — has divested most of its upstream oil assets since 2022 and has been in merger discussions with Portugal's Galp since January.
Groundbreaking is the detail that separates this from the long list of announced hydrogen projects. Announcements do not generate instrumentation, control and monitoring procurement; construction does.
The control problem at 2 GW is genuinely different from the pilot-scale work that most electrolysis experience rests on. Stack-level control, power electronics management and grid interaction dominate, and conventional process control approaches do not transfer cleanly to a plant whose main equipment is a very large, fast, non-linear electrical load. Wetselaar's own economics make the point sharper: if the project is viable because gas is expensive, then operating strategy has to respond to real-time energy price signals, which turns plant scheduling into an optimisation problem running against a market rather than a setpoint.