In North Africa, IGB is committed in the area of sustainable green chemistry. Hereby, it places the core statements of a sustainable bioeconomy at the center of developments, i.e. the transformation of the oil-based economy into a market in which fossil resources are replaced by a variety of renewable raw materials.

To this end, a joint research project was started in November 2018 on the topic ”Synthesis of green hydrogen and green ammonia”. Partners in this ambitious approach, which, in the future, might even replace the Haber-Bosch process that has been in common use for 100 years, are the Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructure of Materials and Systems IMWS in Halle (Saale) in Germany, the Green Energy Park and the Institut de Recherche en Energie Solaire et Energies Nouvelles, the Université Mohammed VI Politechnique and the OCP Group in Morocco. The aim is to establish technology that can be used to sustainably synthesize ammonia: using nitrogen from the air and hydrogen that is obtained through electrolysis of water using regenerative energy. The kick-off meeting took place in Morocco on November 1 and 2, 2018 with Dr. Lénárd-Istvan Csepei as representative of IGB.

In March 2019, a partnership agreement was signed between OCP Group and Fraunhofer IMWS for the creation of the Fraunhofer Mazagan lab, a world-class research center based in the Mazagan Urban Pole (PUMA), dedicated to the development of sustainable solutions – the first of its kind in Morocco.