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By Dineo Faku 
16h ago
JOHANNESBURG – South Africa could become an efficient profitable green hydrogen exporter to the world, given its immense renewable energy potential, according to PwC’s inaugural hydrogen report released yesterday.
The report titled ‘Unlocking South Africa’s Hydrogen Potential’ said South Africa had one of the highest renewable power generation potentials in the world, citing the billions of rand committed to pumped, wind and solar storage projects across the country.
The report said that the Integrated Resource Plan, South Africa’s energy mix blueprint, released last year, provided clear guidance for renewables to account for a larger share of the country’s generating capacity.
“With so much effort committed to these renewable initiatives, there is a clear opportunity for South Africa for a renewable generation pair with hydrogen production through electrolysis. The added benefit of this was that an investment in electrolysis technology would also support the industry. platinum and subsequent benefit, as platinum is the main component in the electrode assembly, “the report says.
Pwc experts said the infrastructure required to export hydrogen was similar to existing natural gas networks and was already being tested in Australia and Japan.
“South Africa could leverage its existing port infrastructure to support this initiative and, in doing so, protect jobs and infrastructure that are declining as a result of the decline in global demand for coal exports,” the report said.
The report said that there would also be significant side benefits from increasing South Africa’s commitment to renewable energy and that the need to build so much renewable capacity would make it increasingly viable to manufacture various components domestically.
“Especially in the wind turbine sector, this could help support the need to implement carbon capture technology to produce blue hydrogen.”
He also said that given the deepwater discovery of French oil and gas giant Total offshore’s Brulpadda in South Africa and the existing gas-to-liquids facility operated by PetroSA, much of the infrastructure already existed to supply pure hydrogen. to national and international markets.
“The natural gas market can also provide another solution in the form of carbon storage. Many of the gas fields off the coast of South Africa are depleted, yet the infrastructure linking these fields to the coast still exists,” he said the report, adding that similarly to the solution being tested in the UK, hydrogen could be produced onshore by coal gasification or natural gas reforming and the carbon by-product pumped into depleted gas fields for storage.
“The transition of the weakened South African coal and natural gas sectors to blue hydrogen production could help protect the industry’s jobs and, if exported, generate critical foreign revenue for the country,” the report said.
BUSINESS REPORT
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