In December 16, 2011, Mining Weekly’s cover picture was of South Africa’s former President, Kgalema Motlanthe, next to an Anglo American fuel cell generator, which was being shown off at the United Nations climate change convention’s seventeenth Conference of the Parties, in Durban.
Delegates were able to inspect the 150 kW hydrogen fuel cell that was generating zero-emission electricity and, looking on, were Ballard Power Systems director Karim Kassam and, on the right, Anglo American Platinum engineering head Krish Pillay.
At the same convention, the then Anglo American CEO, Cynthia Carroll, proclaimed platinum-catalysed hydrogen fuel cells as efficient, versatile and scaleable and representing a proven technology that ensured clean, reliable and cost-effective power. It was a powerful endorsement of the long-studied fuel-cell technology.
Carroll drew on an abundance of old and new research to champion the fuel cell’s cause in the presence of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and the International Chamber of Commerce.
She described the window of opportunity as being “wide open” for South Africa to create “hundreds of thousands of new jobs and simultaneously obtain a source of clean zero-emission electricity”.
It was a huge opportunity that has since become a no-brainer, owing to global hydrogen adoption now itself driving the process and China creating a storm by changing its five-year plan from battery electric vehicles to fuel cell electric vehicles.
“With platinum at its heart, a fuel cell industry would support South Africa’s drive for jobs,” Carroll said at the time. She was able to do so with great confidence, after putting a think-tank to work – the UK’s Carbon Trust – which found correctly that
hydrogen fuel cells had the potential to drive development of a new industrial sector in South Africa and provide the country with the opportunity to become a major player in the global green economy.
The trust came to the conclusion that, with the appropriate levels of deployment of investment in manufacturing, insulation and maintenance activities, “hundreds of thousands of new jobs” could be created. What is more, it found that the fuel cells produced could simultaneously help to meet South Africa’s energy security challenges and provide rural communities with energy, without any major expansion to the national electricity grid.
The position has since strengthened for South Africa, as it has progressed from being a low-carbon opportunity to being a no- carbon opportunity, with potential to export knowledge and products to the global market.
South Africa has superior sun power and prime wind power to use even more platinum- group metals in electrolysers as well as fuel cells at a time when the hydrogen fuel cell industry has advanced from a time of slow adoption and technical frustration.
Are South Africans going to sit back and allow the rest of the world to seize this moment? Surely not.