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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the everyday futurities produced around Hyrasia One, focusing on the 10 largest green hydrogen projects. It follows socio-material and spatial transformations and shows how different views of the international projects dwell on the land and water and interact with one another.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores one of the 10 largest projects of green hydrogen production in the world–Hyrasia One, located in the Mangystau region in Kazakhstan. As planned, the project will produce two million tons of green hydrogen by 2032, which will supply Europe as well. The project involves building an electrolysis plant with desalination technology to source water from the Caspian Sea. Focusing on a specific technology, the production of green hydrogen, and socio-materialities that shape it, the paper examines the future through the lens of everyday futurities (De Coss-Corzo 2025) and questions how multiple actors participate in producing the future through, around, and with green hydrogen. In this sense, the future is embedded in the present and connected to the everyday, as it does not stop at plans and schemes but is produced through concrete bureaucratic, political, and material actions.

Looking at the ongoing changes initiated by the Hyrasia One in the Mangystau region, this paper speaks to the studies of water and land as a system of relationships (e.g., Calarco 2024), and pays particular attention to the more-than-human relations that shape it (Rusca et al. 2025). In this context, land is a system of relations involving dwelling on it, exploiting it, caring for it, and imagining its future. Exploring the situatedness of an international project and stressing its nature 'in-the-making', this paper shows how different views on land and water futures intersect and clash with each other. Future, then, becomes transformed but not pre-defined by the green hydrogen.