South Africa should move forward with pilot projects to enable the green hydrogen economy to grow on a larger scale, says project integrator and technology provider Green Hydrogen Solutions founder and CEO Ebrahim Takolia.

“As more renewable energy comes online from Eskom and distributed energy sources, significant surplus renewable energy can be used with dedicated sources of renewable energy to produce hydrogen and its derivatives, and at the same time provide long duration storage, improving the business case for renewable energy.”

Thus, South Africa should consider enabling market efficiency in the trading of renewable electricity and enable hydrogen to be traded for domestic use and exports.

He adds that Green Hydrogen Solutions’ techno-economic modelling of its local projects indicates that using its technology and methodology can achieve a below-average hydrogen price for a pilot plant, compared with those of similar pilot projects.

Takolia adds that scaled-up models show that the company can produce hydrogen for $2/kg to $3/kg using existing technologies through economies of scale, which is comparable to a natural gas price of R211/GJ to R347/GJ.

“Once the costs of carbon taxes and proposed carbon border taxes are included, as well as the geopolitical uncertainty risk that will be priced into global markets for oil, gas and liquefied natural gas going forward, green hydrogen will be a cheaper alternative in the long term,” notes Takolia.

Benefits of Technology

Meanwhile, he mentions that technology can play an important role in the local hydrogen economy by ramping up project development time and lowering project development costs through optimising electricity supply, lowering electricity and capital costs and end-use integration.

“About 70% of the lifetime cost of green hydrogen is related to securing electricity at the lowest price for the most hours. Smart grid technology and time-of-use rates will allow for electricity to be procured from project-owned electricity supply and surplus electricity from other generators, lowering the average cost of electricity.”

Takolia adds that capital expenditure accounts for about 20% of the lifetime costs, followed by finance, operations and maintenance costs in equal measure.

“Ensuring the optimisation of the electrolyser and balance-of-plant system, based on the end-use case and project requirement, is key to project viability.”

Green Hydrogen Solutions focuses on innovation and applying technology to actual projects.

The company’s technology has global applicability, and Takolia says it is assessing pilot projects in South Africa and is in discussions with potential project partners.

The company has been Beta testing its application (app) – Green Hydrogen App Ecosystem – to facilitate the integration of variable renewable electricity into a green hydrogen ecosystem.

High energy prices and geopolitical uncertainty indicate the need to improve efficiency in energy supply and risk.

Therefore, Takolia says it is relevant to find more efficient ways of moving and trading energy, which means shifting distributed energy closer to customers to mitigate disruptions.

“We encourage project developers to use our app, under development, which can be used to trade and transact in a green hydrogen ecosystem. “This will ensure an efficient pricing mechanism that incorporates carbon markets to subsidise the cost of green hydrogen,” he says.

The company’s app can be downloaded from Google Play and the App Store and enables project developers to load their electricity, hydrogen or end-use product onto the app, which will, consequently, enable Green Hydrogen Solutions to engage in legal assessments to establish the mechanisms to allow for global trading and transacting processes.

He says a globally integrated green hydrogen trading and transacting platform will allow for market efficiency, transparency and price certainty, which will, in turn, facilitate the development of green hydrogen.

Current ambiguity surrounding local energy supply will see future energy supply dominated by distributed, small-scale renewable and low-carbon systems integrated with end-use markets.

“If green hydrogen displaces only 20% of oil and gas by 2050, this will require more than 2.5-million projects.”

Research and development (R&D) funding for the green hydrogen industry has expanded and aims to reduce electrolysis, renewable electricity, storage and dispensing costs through technology selection, system integration and optimisation.

Technologies have been introduced for electricity to allow for better integration of smart grids and time-of-day forecasting which lowers hydrogen production costs through the supply of cheap electricity for a long period.

Further, R&D is underway on the production of hydrogen in South Africa, and globally, to increase efficiency to improve hydrogen production rates and lower the costs of electrolyser components.

Meanwhile, Green Hydrogen Solutions and its project partners were awarded a maritime innovation award by government agency UK Innovation in September last year to assess the feasibility of a green hydrogen platform for marine use applications in Poole Harbour, in the UK.

This project was also recognised for its innovation at the United Nations Climate Conference in November last year. The feasibility study will be completed this month and the company is assessing various locations to deploy this solution on a commercial scale globally.

The project scales from about 1.4 MW to 2 MW.

“Apart from our own pilot projects, we are collaborating on green hydrogen and other innovation projects, notably combining green hydrogen with carbon capture, on five continents. Many of these projects will reach commercial operation from 2025 onwards,” concludes Takolia.