Every Friday, SAfm’s radio anchor Sakina Kamwendo speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:
Kamwendo: South Africa’s State-owned IDC is providing kick-start funding for a copper mining project in the Northern Cape.
Creamer: This is fantastic public-private partnership. The IDC and Orion Minerals are going to go ahead and dewater an old mine and get it going again in January. It’s the way to do it. You go to these brownfield sites and you turn them to account. It happens quickly. This money that is coming in is not only South African money but the investors are also from Australia and abroad. It is a combined effort of public and private sector action and it will be great for the area of the Northern Cape, which is so prospective.
Kamwendo: The Department of Science and Innovation wants green hydrogen to be a formal part of South Africa’s economic recovery plan.
Creamer: South Africa’s economic reconstruction and recovery plan is a formal plan and what the Department of Science and Innovation is doing is going to the Cabinet with a formal structure. They have also been in touch with the United Nations, because this whole idea of green hydrogen is sweeping the world. It can give us energy independence and creation of wealth and creation of a lot of jobs. So they are hoping that will be formally put into place in South Africa to ensure that the best economic result emerges from green hydrogen, which is made with the help of the sun, the wind and water..
Kamwendo: The green hydrogen economy in the US is calculated to be a potential $10-trillion-a-year business opportunity.
Creamer: It is huge, as they were saying in the United States. The company that is pushing green hydrogen, Plug Power, is fantastic for South Africa, because what it uses is platinum-based technology, and platinum is a South African wonder metal. If you are looking at green hydrogen in $10-trillion a year just in the United States alone, you can imagine what that will do for platinum demand that is linked directly to South Africa. Promoting platinum-based PEM electrolysis and platinum-based PEM fuel cells, is actually promoting the South African economy, and that is what has begun to happen around the world. Green hydrogen has enormous promise and South Africa is well placed to take part in a development that is sweeping across the world
Kamwendo: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly.