South Africa is continuing to gather top-tier insight into fuel cell technology as it navigates the electric-vehicle (EV) market’s growing links to this country’s globally unparalleled platinum group metals (PGMs) industry.

Expert after expert at last week’s Nedbank CIB’s Market Research conference outlined the significant domestic and foreign steps that are being taken to unlock the innovative sector far sooner than expected.

The notion of fuel cell technology being a 2040/50 global strategy is fast giving way to the growing global sale of fuel cell cars, trucks, buses and trains, with ships offering new openings.

“There are very important and big strategic decisions to be made over the next few years on this topic,” Nedbank CIB mining analyst Arnold van Graan told the conference attended by Mining Weekly.

E4tech director Dr David Hart, of Switzerland, who has been in the fuel cell and hydrogen sector for 25 years, said the forever-five-years-away technology was no longer five years way.

“Things are happening very, very fast at the moment,” Hart told the conference.

The big push towards EVs has resulted in major advances not only in battery technology but also in fuel cells as a complementary technology for the automotive, power generation and heat- requiring sectors.

The illustrious line-up of global experts made it clear that the now widely accepted hydrogen economy was opening up doors right, left and centre for PGMs, sun and wind energy and South Africa’s manufacturing sector.

Pamphlets distributed at the conference showed South Africa to be well abreast of commercial solar-to-hydrogen production and that South Africa’s HySA Infrastructure Centre had been successfully operating the first-of-its kind solar-to-hydrogen system in South Africa since 2013.

South Africa, the HySA pamphlet confirms, is also well versed in electrochemical hydrogen compression, which promises the use of PGM as electrocatalysts in the compression of hydrogen to reduce hydrogen storage costs.

Moreover, HySA Infrastructure is well ahead in the liquid organic hydrogen carrier know-how required for hydrogen fuel cell applications.

Strong support is being given to fuel cell technology by Nedbank, which advertises itself as a green bank, and the platform it provided last week identified a far-reaching range of government incentives and private-sector venture capital involvement in the emerging local fuel cell business.

Hart described June’s G20 meetings in Japan as being hydrogen focused and drew attention to the accelerated effort of the private sector through the Hydrogen Council, which was created two years ago in Davos with about ten companies.

It now has more than 50 members, including very large corporations like Shell, Toyota, Air Liquide, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi and South African PGMs producer Anglo American.

There now is top-level acknowledgement that hydrogen is an essential part of the energy system glue that would stick things together.

PGM-catalysed fuel cells are, in turn, tightly linked to hydrogen and, in all instances, the twinned technologies are being driven by national policy interests.

Coming together through policy are sustainability through climate change mitigation, industrial development and energy generation and exportation.

“There is the recognition that one of the ways to improve air quality, which is very high on the policy agenda, is by introducing zero-emissions vehicles in city centres and banning anything that isn’t a zero-emissions vehicle in the most extreme cases and, to do that, you don’t just need batteries – you need fuel cells,” Hart said.

In the South African context, this was not just about platinum beneficiation but also about how the energy system as a whole should be improved.

The hydrogen produced had the potential either to be used directly to produce electricity, to run transport and to decarbonise heat, or to be used in steelmaking, cement manufacturing and many other areas that were difficult to decarbonise.

Carbon dioxide could also be added back to hydrogen for the production of high- quality synthetic fuels.

“There are also many looking at ways of decarbonising, perhaps, shipping or aviation, with all the initiatives leading back to an interest in fuel cells,” he said.

While for a long time hydrogen was a bit ethereal, the arrival of low-cost renewables has stimulated the production of low-cost hydrogen.

Some of the latest bids for renewable-energy projects are at the level of one cent per kilowatt hour produced, “incredibly cheap, very competitive against all of the fossil alternatives”.

In areas of the world where wind energy and a solar farm combined to provide round-the-clock energy, utilisation would ensure that capital invested in hydrogen-producing electrolysers would be recovered.

Producing hydrogen from renewables on electrolysis is competitive and opens the way for the production of gigawatts of the material, which is attracting the attention of very large corporates.

“The questions that we, as a consultancy, are now being asked by our clients are not ‘Where can I put three-million in a little project just to show that I’m being green?’ but ‘Where can I invest one-, two-, three-hundred-million so that I can develop this value chain – where can I put my money in order to be a participant in this hydrogen fuel cell sector?’” he added.

Strong calls were made to Nedbank CIB last week to hold a fuel cell conference every year to measure South Africa’s uptake of the colossal opportunity that awaits it in the hydrogen economy, which is accelerating globally, in keeping with the imperative to mitigate climate change.