RANDJESFONTEIN (miningweekly.com) – South Africa is well placed to be taking advantage of the climate-positive hydrogen fuel economy, Environment, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Barbara Creecy said on Tuesday.

“We’re richly endowed with platinum, so I think that it’s very important that we need to be thinking laterally.

“It’s absolutely not possible to be moving away from coal overnight, either as a source of foreign export earnings or as a source of power generation.

“But we are looking forward in the Integrated Resource Plan to see a bigger component of renewables, while still accepting that coal and nuclear will provide a substantive section of our energy security,” Creecy told Mining Weekly on the sidelines of the tenth Oppenheimer Research Conference, at which former mining luminary Nicky Oppenheimer described the mineral endowment on which South Africa had been built as a "wasting resource", and the environment on which major job-creating tourism could be built as a resource with an infinite horizon.

“So, while we definitely, in the medium term, I think, are going to be facing challenges in relation to coal…we must also start to understand some of the new opportunities,” said Creecy.

In implementing a just transition from a high-carbon economy to a low-carbon economy, decisions needed to be made, she said, on alternative employment for workers at coal-fired power stations that may be due for retirement.

“We understand that in a place like Mpumalanga huge numbers of people are dependent on the upstream and downstream industries associated with coal production and coal-fired electricity generation.

“Clearly, there would be opportunities in Medupi and Kusile for those skilled workers and one of my understandings is that many of them might be moved from some of the older power stations to the new power stations as they come on line. But I think we’ve also got to be looking at what alternative sectors of the economy can we be developing.

“There has been quite a lot of work already done through the National Development Plan on the issue of the just transition…what we’re trying to understand is how we protect workers and communities. The traditional International Labour Organisation understanding of the just transition is that you look at the workers, but what we have to understand is the question of service providers that would be dependent on those enterprises. So, that is something that is moving to top of the agenda as a very important question that we need to be looking at and you can’t have any shift without answering the just transition question,” Creecy added.