Every Friday, SAfm’s radio anchor Elvis Preslin speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Preslin: Using clean hydrogen fuel rather than diesel fuel is on the cards for 20 Gauteng buses.

Creamer: Yes, 20 of the 125 busses operated by the Gautrain Management Agency are now earmarked to switch from diesel to clean hydrogen. When we say green hydrogen we mean clean hydrogen that is produced from the sun or the wind. South Africa has great capacity in that, because we have superior sun and prime wind.

We are seen as one of the world’s hotspots for developing hydrogen, which is now viewed by the world as the counteraction to climate change. People don’t want to pollute the air any more with carbon, because it is melting the glaciers and you can see the protests all around the world. In South Africa, we are now looking to do the same movement and we have gone to the International Climate Initiative for funding for the initial busses and we are hoping that even taxis will consider this. Rea Vea is also being earmarked in the distance for change to hydrogen.

Preslin: Minerals Council South Africa is giving its full backing to the uptake of the hydrogen economy.

Creamer: It is a great pat on the back to Minerals Council South Africa, because they are always associated with coal, but they are seeing the long picture. They are also seeing that the way to get the competitive path for South Africa is to make sure that you do things cleanly. We also noted that already the world is saying that if you use dirty energy to produce your products then we don’t want those products.

So, it starts hitting your export volume. The need is to put up a roadmap and say that we are going to be using coal for a long time for our electricity, we have to do that. But, look at our roadmap, we are switching to renewable energy, clean energy to green hydrogen in order to drive our transport and also put the lights on. If we have got a Fourth Industrial Revolution here we are looking into also doing the rural areas. At the moment the rural areas do not have electricity, they are out of the grid. In order to include them you could have fuel cells put in there which use hydrogen and they turn that into electricity. Our cars on the road would not be putting out a speck of carbon if they switched to fuel cells.

The fuel cells use platinum, so that is also great for our platinum mining industry and the electrolysers that turn the sea water into hydrogen also use platinum group products. There are big benefits for South Africa so that is why the Minerals Council South Africa is also pushing this very hard to get us into the 21st Century and to make sure we don't pollute Mother Earth.

Preslin: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.