Why South Africa?
South Africa has a well-established hydrogen strategy supported by legislation, policies and a number of strategy documents. These various legislative instruments, policies and strategy documents align South Africa to the Sustainable Development Goals (“SDG’s”) in driving clean and sustainable energy development.
1998: The White Paper on Energy Policy’s had 5 overarching objectives which included diversifying South Africa’s energy systems by including renewable energy sources and hydrogen and fuel cell technologies within South Africa’s overall energy strategy.
2005: The Hydrogen Economy Indaba reinforced the White Paper on Energy Policy and created awareness among top South African decision makers on the potential impact of the Hydrogen Economy and emerging fuel cell technologies.
2008: The National Hydrogen and Fuel Technologies Research, Development and Innovation (“NHFCT RDI”) strategy, branded Hydrogen South Africa (“HYSA”), was officially launched. The vision of the strategy is to use local resources and existing knowledge to create expertise and human resource capacity, enabling the development of high-value commercial activities in hydrogen and fuel cell technologies. To implement the strategy, three Centres of Competence were established (HYSA Infrastructure, HYSA Catalysis and HYSA Systems) to promote proactive innovation and create the human resources required to develop future industries in the hydrogen and fuel cell technologies field.
2020: HYSA announced plans to drive the development of a National Hydrogen Roadmap that will lead South Africa towards a hydrogen society. The aim of this roadmap is among others, to put into perspective, the costs associated with rolling out green hydrogen technologies and to move towards large-scale adoption. The development of this roadmap coincides with an unprecedented increase in global activities and investments in green hydrogen technologies.
SOUTH AFRICAN PROJECTS - GREEN AMMONIA / HYDROGEN PRODUCTION.
The first thing we have to do is localise and bind specialists on the planning side of the business. Those have to be groups and organisations which are usually not on the forefront of the news articles as they are usually very practical and reality confirm technicians.
Together with them we have to find the right constellation of Green energy supply by wind, sun, hydropower or whatever energy can be produced by the means of green = no CO2 output at all.
In South Africa we are already engaged with this kind of structure and we have identified terrains with a perfect and economically feasible projection for the production of green hydrogen.
The first project is already in an advanced phase and envisioned to begin construction of an Hydrogen Power Hub by 2022 and to start production in 2025.