Despite South Africa’s significant potential to become a major global player in green hydrogen production, platinum group metals producer Anglo American Platinum CEO Natascha Viljoen has voiced concern over how the country’s significant social and political challenges are undermining the ability to get hydrogen projects off the ground. 

“If we consider everything that is required for us to build capital projects, to have access to land, to deliver on these projects, crime and corruption and our ability to generate the skills are concerns,” she said during the second yearly Hydrogen Economy Discussion conference, held in Johannesburg on September 6. 

Viljoen pointed out that industry only needed about 1% of South Africa's land, without making any impact on land that is required for farming, to generate up to ten-million tonnes a year of green hydrogen.  

For perspective, this is what the entire European Union has set as its ambitious hydrogen import target for 2030. 

“So we have the land and we have the yields in terms of renewables for us to generate that kind of hydrogen capacity – to not only decarbonise our own industries and to get reliability in terms of energy, but also to become a potential exporter,” she said. 

Viljoen added that it was clear that there was no shortage of money globally to invest in renewables.  

“What concerns me is our ability to harness this potential, through regulation, through our ability to invest . . . to get projects through feasibility and to a bankable feasibility stage.  

“Everybody I talk to tells me that we don't have bankable feasible projects to invest money into,” she said. 

Viljoen said the challenge going forward would revolve around implementing projects rather than merely taking about it. 

“I think we've already seen government coming to the table in a big way with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa’s announcement lifting the limitation on self-generation,” she noted.  

However, she said more needed to be done in terms of government contributing to the kind of infrastructure needed to support industrial growth – the kind needed to support large-scale hydrogen production investments – with investment in infrastructure and the upkeep of infrastructure increasinbly becoming the responsibility of the private sector. 

Viljoen said government would have to differentiate between politics and the technical solutions that would be needed to make it possible to enable South Africa to fully take advantage of the hydrogen potential.