Determining Social License to Operate: Design of Experiments, Uncertainty Characterization and Historical Consistency Assessment of a Hybrid Simulation Model for a LatAm Green Hydrogen Project

Uruguay’s largest green-hydrogen initiative—an integrated e-fuels complex proposed for the Department of Paysandú—is approaching its final investment decision amid a public debate centered on water use, land occupation and community acceptance. Building on a peer-reviewed formulation in which social acceptance acts as an operational moderator of the local economy, this article reports the experimental, uncertainty and corroboration program of a hybrid System Dynamics and agent-based territorial impact model: a replicated factorial design, two global sensitivity campaigns, a 1000-replication Monte Carlo campaign, policy isolation studies, a feasibility assessment under editable thresholds, and a 2010–2022 historical backcast. In the simulations, capacity raises income only jointly with external demand (interaction: 21.2% of variance), while employment responds primarily to the public-investment rate (55.1%). Two behavioral parameters—the rates at which community trust builds and erodes—rank highest for every output (PRCC 0.74–0.96); as these are judgment parameters, the quantitative conclusions are conditional on their declared ranges, and their empirical calibration through a longitudinal design is identified as the priority. Acceptance declines monotonically across the sampled capacity range and the outcome distribution is bimodal, so policy is read as shifting the probability of the favorable branch. The backcast reproduces observed income conservatively and the official human-development index to half a percent. A model-conditional feasible configuration emerges—one train, phased construction, labor peace, early cost decline—delivered as a decision tool with editable thresholds.