Nedbank CIB Market Research did well last week to bring the world to Cape Town for a conference on fuel cells. Fuel cell technology and its link to South Africa’s platinum industry should be in the sights of local industry, commerce, banking and government, as should the globally emerging hydrogen.

We should not allow ourselves to be latecomers to the emerging world of platinum-group metals (PGMs), fuel cells, hydrogen and decarbonisation; their mixing and matching has the potential to go here, there and just about everywhere with a combined push.

Minerals Council South Africa, which have a leadership position in South Africa’s mining space, has had fuel cell electricity at its headquarters for years and its many members should do the same.

Rural areas not reached by State power utility Eskom should have fuel-cell-powered minigrids and all diesel-powered telecommunications towers should move off diesel power and install fuel cells as a clean electricity-supply replacement.

In the automotive field, a company like Toyota is not only well down the track of fuel cell vehicle manufacture but would also have no problem supplying fuel cell taxi fleets.

Moreover, as the automotive industry spreads from South Africa into Africa, it should leapfrog the internal combustion engine straight into fuel cell mobility.

Nissan warned earlier this month that unregulated Africa was becoming the planet’s fastest-growing polluter, confirming that the introduction of emissions-free fuel cell vehicles is neccessary throughout the continent.

The World Bank reports that Africa’s vehicle emissions menace soared 75% between 2000 and 2016. Moreover, the bank expects close to 137-million more light vehicles in Africa by 2040 than in 2015, which Nissan Group of Africa sales and operations director Jim Dando described as being “hugely problematic” from the air pollution and health risk viewpoints.

Mining Weekly’s message to Dando is that Nissan and all other vehicle manufacturers should solve the problem from the outset by introducing locally assembled fuel cell vehicles in Africa. They should also ensure that they use Africa’s PGMs, copper, iron-ore, vanadium, manganese and other metals and minerals.

Virtually every country in Africa has made it plain that companies are not going to get away with bypassing African manufacture, as they did in the colonial days. Local assembly in Africa, local manufacture of components and bringing an end to the large influx of second-hand vehicles and poor fuel quality must be the order of the day.

Stop polluting our continent with dumped vehicles and dirty fuel.

The indigenous solution to all this is the widespread use of Africa’s sun and wind power to produce clean electricity and the use of this clean electricity to produce hydrogen with the help of indigenous PGMs that catalyse the decarbonisation that the world is crying out for, through the introduction of hydrogen-using fuel cells – one of the most significant answers to the global climate crisis.