Take a bow, Minerals Council South Africa. Your strong support for the development of a platinum-fuelled hydrogen economy has had to be sensitively balanced with your need to provide continued support for your coal mining members.
But this did not stop the council from being unequivocal in its stated belief that South Africa should be leading the global drive towards an environmentally cleaner world.
South Africans are forced to walk on two sides of the road currently. On the one side is the need to ensure that there is sufficient coal production to keep the lights on and on the other the essential need to bow to world investor pressure to ensure that climate change is mitigated and a low-carbon to no-carbon route is taken for the good of the planet.
As it all turns out, South Africa is in a unique position to assist the world in its advance towards the hydrogen economy, which has been a pipe dream since World War II.
South Africa is blessed with superior sunlight and prime wind that are now seen as the essential starting point to latch onto that “inexhaustible source of energy” that futurist Jules Verne wrote about in 1874.
Minerals Council South Africa CEO Roger Baxter is correct in saying that South should be leading the global drive towards a platinum-fuelled hydrogen economy.
Mining Weekly agrees 100% with that sentiment and that the South African government, at provincial and national level, needs to take steps to realise the benefits of a platinum-driven hydrogen economy to become globally competitive.
Hydrogen South Africa Infrastructure has been successfully producing clean hydrogen from solar power since 2013 and the organisation is also well versed in liquid organic hydrogen carrier technology, which Hydrogenious founder and CEO Dr Daniel Teichmann says has given hydrogen the potential to become the new universal energy carrier, in the same way as oil is today, but minus the environmental pollution baggage.
The reality is that hydrogen makes renewable energy transportable and tradable on a global scale at a time when oil producers are at war with one another and thousands of innocent men, women and children are being killed by the military strength that the oil economy has provided.
The uptake of hydrogen can start taking South Africa off its overwhelmingly fossil-fuel-based energy trajectory, which the world is refusing to accept.
The country cannot afford to do nothing, only to find out later that the world, which is fighting climate change, refuses to buy our exports because they come from a high-carbon source.
Let’s move with the world as it decarbonises and reap the benefits of doing so for all our citizens.
South Africa’s ability to supply the platinum for the fuel cell technology will benefit not only the country financially but also the world environmentally.