Essay by Eric Worrall
Perhaps they should take it slow with this “opportunity”.
Focus on South Africa’s own green hydrogen market first, Air Products recommends
JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly) – South Africa should initially focus intently on its local green hydrogen market rather than the global market, and progress at its own pace, which has the potential to give it a global lead.
Air Products MD Charles Dos Santos makes this point strongly in a sponsored post that is currently being videod on the website of Mining Weekly’s associate Engineering News publication, within the context of the Green Hydrogen Summit in Cape Town, where Toyota, Valterra Platinum and Air Products showcased together.
“We have an opportunity to develop our own green hydrogen economy without a dependency on the global dynamics,” Dos Santos points out in the video interview, “so let’s focus on our own market, and as those global markets look to diversify the risk of their supply chain, we will participate in it. It’s inevitable.
“But in the short term, the focus should be on our own localised requirements rather than relying on international demand to create a justification for the multiple projects that we’re looking at in the region,” Dos Santos advocates.
…
GREEN HYDROGEN VISION
South Africa identifies green hydrogen as an essential component of its energy transition plan and the global commitment to decarbonise its economy, as outlined in this country’s Hydrogen Society Roadmap.
…
Read more: https://www.miningweekly.com/article/focus-on-south-africas-own-green-hydrogen-market-first-air-products-recommends-2025-06-19
Unfortunately there is no genuine demand for green hydrogen. “… The economics don’t make a lot of sense yet … the global demand … is almost non-existent …” (Charles Dos Santos speaking in the video below).
Even if the economics made sense, producing green hydrogen requires lots of electricity, a commodity South Africa has been struggling with lately.
It’s not just South Africa. President Biden was a fan of green hydrogen, though Biden upset entrepreneurs who answered his call by insisting the electricity used to produce the hydrogen actually has to be green.
Australian leaders are also pushing green hydrogen, even though nobody has any idea who will buy this product.
If green hydrogen has no market, why are some political leaders getting excited about it?
The obvious explanation is political green hydrogen advocates are confusing enthusiasm for demand. Enthusiasm doesn’t pay the bills, people paying you money is what pays the bills. If there is no genuine demand for the product, nobody is going to pay you money – no matter how many words of encouragement other leaders shower on your effort to bring a product to a market which does not exist.
Update (EW) 1. Added the “GREEN HYDROGEN VISION” part of the quoted article (above). 2. Keynote speech by President Cyril Ramaphosa at South Africa’s inaugural green hydrogen summit held 12th June this year. From the speech “… Our beloved continent Africa, the cradle of humanity, is uniquely positioned to become a major player in green hydrogen because it has abundant renewable resources manifested in high solar irradiance, strong winds and hydropower potential. … Hydrogen is a bridge to a new export industry for African countries. It is an enabler for Africa’s energy independence and climate resilience. More importantly hydrogen is an anchor for industrial transformation and infrastructure investment. …“.
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Green hydrogen amounts to a religious observance, on the order of snake handling Pentecostals. They are showing their faith in renewables, and rejecting evil capitalist economics.
In exactly what way is “green” hydrogen “green”?
It consumes more energy than it can usefully produce.
Another beatup. Air Products makes hydrogen, green and (mostly) otherwise. So of course they would like do business with SA. But putting an ad on the mining weekly website is hardly big news.
I think you miss the point of the article Nick – the Air Products managing director, who as you say stands to gain from any expansion of green hydrogen use, is saying there is no international demand.
Eric,
So how does this relate to your headline:
“South Africa Embraces Green Hydrogen Exports as the Solution to their Economic Woes”
Where did that come from?
But SA has for now no hydrogen production, and they haven’t embraced exports, or even future production. So for Air Products to recomment production for the local market first is just looking for new business.
”But SA has for now no hydrogen production…”
Maybe they learnt a lesson from Twiggy… hey Nick.
You don’t seem to understand that there are no technology development investments which can possbly affect South Africa right now. Its infrastructure is disintegrating from neglect and under-investment. Its government is openly corrupt and stealing farmland from its owners. Any previous high tech investment in South Africa died an immediate death from government malfeasance among many other things. The country is now in a permanent deep depression with GDP growth of much less than 1%. Anyone with education or skilled trades is fleeing the country.
In short, SA is slowly turning itself into Africa’s latest version of Zimbabwe. The rand has shed at least 1/3rd of its value in the last five years.
“You don’t seem to understand”
Where do you get that from. I just said that SA has no hydrogen production. True or not?
It was Eric who trumpeted the headline, with no basis in fact:
“South Africa Embraces Green Hydrogen Exports as the Solution to their Economic Woes”.
“JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – In a step to accelerate South Africa’s just energy transition and establish the country as a global green hydrogen leader, R656-million has been committed to a green hydrogen fund.
South Africa’s State-owned Public Investment Corporation (PIC) asset manager, the State-owned Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa (IDC), and the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) have committed the equivalent of $37-million to South Africa’s SA-H2 green hydrogen fund, also known as CI3 South Africa.”
https://www.miningweekly.com/article/south-africas-green-hydrogen-sector-boosted-by-big-ticket-funding-commitments-2025-06-12
Maybe you should check things yourself. 😉
“Maybe you should check things yourself.”
That is how it goes here. A dramatic headline, with no facts in the article to support it. I point that out. So people go scrambling for some kind of support, but it just doesn’t match. Here “embracing” is said to mean where a consortium put together an explratory fund of $37M. That isn’t embracing – it is toe in the water, barely. But Eric tried another tack, where the president waxes lyrical about hydrogen. But the president is about as relevant as King Charles, and wears another hat – president of the ANC. And so he actually isn’t talking about South Africa, but Africa.
Then David below tries to pin it on a commercial firm making a pitch, and so it goes.
But dramatic headlines articles are the standard for every msm story about global warming / climate change, Nick.
Do you write to the editors of the msm about every agw headline they publish?
Where did that come from? Its right in the article Nick:
“so let’s focus on our own market, and as those global markets look to diversify the risk of their supply chain, we will participate in it. It’s inevitable.
The message here is invest (read subsidize) our hydrogen plants for domestic use and its inevitable that an international market will ( read magically) appear and South Africa (read “we”) will get wealthy from exporting it.
How will they export it? All the silly applications for hydrogen rely on low pressure. The largest tanker ships in the world wouldn’t be able to haul enough hydrogen to fuel themselves across the ocean. High pressure? Go ahead and try. Far, far away from any humans please.
But the most insane things is, what gives anyone any idea that they can gain an economic advantage by investing in green hydrogen? If (read heavy sigh dripping with sarcasm) hydrogen were to become a viable fuel, what stops ANY country from building their own hydrogen generation using the exact same products? Low cost energy for production combined with local use will trump the economics of a far away supply every single time. These guys aren’t even selling snake oil. They’re saying hey, help us (read subsidize) our bottle makers, the snake oil market (read coloured water) will magically appear and and you can make money producing the coloured water (oops I meant snake oil) because no one else in the world will have figured out how to do it with the exact same equipment we’re selling you here.
This is the exact same argument that Big Wind and Big Solar used to get their subsidy farms off the ground. Invest now and you too can be a world leader in green energy (read made in China).
“Where did that come from? Its right in the article Nick:”
That isn’t South Africa saying they embrace green hrdrogen. It is a commercial company making a pitch. And it isn’t even a pitch to export green hydrogen; quite the contrary, Eric says.
There is absolutely nothing that says:
“South Africa Embraces Green Hydrogen Exports as the Solution to their Economic Woes”.
And, of course, it just isn’t true. SA has not done that.
So the government giving funding in no way indicates support. OK 😉
It actually isn’t government funding. But $37M won’t go far.
So despite them being Government entities they are using other funds? lol
Who do you think you’re fooling with your idiotic lies?
The message here is invest (read subsidize) our hydrogen plants for domestic use and its inevitable that an international market will ( read magically) appear and South Africa (read “we”) will get wealthy from exporting it.
_______________________________________________________________
(read “we”)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
First chuckle of my day (-:
It comes from ridiculing the claims being made.
So long as the US isn’t mixed up in it I don’t care.
“President Biden was a fan of green hydrogen, …”
It is hard to know if Joe knew the difference between green hydrogen and Pistachio ice cream. 🤠
Pistachio-ice-cream-hero-06-1024×1024.jpg (1024×1024)
So who’ll pay for this fantasy?
The South African people who put financial and sweat equity into this fiasco are the ones who will pay the most when the venture inevitably collapses like a castle of matchsticks.
I am disgusted. I watched the people of SA suffering and held down under Apartheid when I worked there in the 70s, and I had hope when they emerged from it into independence. They’ve been struggling. Now some slicks in polyester suits and silk ties again want to take advantage of them again, this by binding them economically to a secular false religion of “green hydrogen.” South Africa has great economic potential and once again it’s being hijacked. These charlatans are f***g evil.
They waited just long enough for Nelson to die before Winnie and the Stalinists took over and SA became a One-Party state headed in totalitarian directions.
Reminds me a lot of the Carpetbaggers and Reconstruction following the South’s failed attempt at secession and independence (aka the American Civil War).
This is a repeat strategy. We’ve heard this story before.
Invest in solar! Your country will become a leader in solar power create millions of jobs!
Outcome => Solar panels made in China
Invest in windmills! Your country will become a leader in wind power and create millions of jobs!
Outcome => Windmills made in China
Invest in hydrogen! Your country will become a leader in hydrogen production and create millions of jobs!
Outcome => Do I have to spell it out?
You missed out …
Invest in Electric Cars !
Your country will become a leader in EV production & create millions of ‘Green’ jobs!
Outcome = majority of EVs made in China
And sitting in ports or, if they make it that far, dealer lots because nobody wants them.
Or sinking into the depths of the Pacific ocean (and other places).
O.M.G. this is sad to read. A country with many problems, including it’s failing electrical grid, with it’s head bent, and on it’s knees before the green overseers.
Nowhere does it explicitly say that the energy required to make the stuff must be green electricity. The paper contains this line:
“The implementation of the hydrogen roadmap is in line to tackle electricity supply issues and support inclusive growth and assist government to reduce unemployment, poverty, and inequality.”
It’s DEI again and they don’t have the electricity yet, or do they have it back to front? I predict a spectacular fail.
Well the whole idea of “green energy” is a farce anyway.
All you need do is consider the answer to the question “What are all energy inputs into making, transporting, erecting, maintain, demolishing and transporting windmills and solar panels to landfills, and what are the sources of all of those energy inputs?”
The answer being coal, oil and gas. And their short (mostly not) “working” life means serial manufacturing.
Funny. Electricity is shades of blue to bright white.
Socialism again – assist government to reduce unemployment. Usually achieved by mass-producing gizmos that no one wants. Hydrogen is very attractive in this context, as it is very easy to get rid of.
Here’s another money grab.I’ll translate some parts of the article.
Belgian start-up Coosha is committed to helping Africa break an unhealthy habit that is harmful to nature and the environment: cooking on wood. For an estimated 2 billion people on earth, this is currently the only way to heat food, says Johan Moyersoen, CEO of Coosha.Coosha’s ambition is to have a hundred thousand families in Africa cooking on green hydrogen at atmospheric pressure by 2030. They can buy that gas in bags from a local company that produces hydrogen with solar panels developed in Belgium. Coosha is developing this in Namibia, where King Filip came to see it last week, and also has plans to do this in Uganda and Rwanda.
If you look at the website from Coosha is has all the buzzword, another money grab. Africans need cheap and reliable energy for themselves first.
One has to hope those bags of H2 are labeled with NO SMOKING.
Hydrogen, here on Earth, is not an energy “source,” it is an energy SINK. It will always take more energy to produce than will ever be gotten by burning it.
It has always been and will always be a colossally STUPID idea.
One cannot virtue signal by relying on facts.
This the Country that cannot maintain an adequate supply of electricity?
South Africa has no gas grid, and a decrepit, limited electricity grid.
Bottled gas is the current market in South Africa. Imagine all those little green hydrogen bombs in people’s homes throughout the land, and on the back of trucks bouncing along dirt tracks.
Somewhere in that You Tube first making ammonia and shipping it to Europe where hydrogen would be cracked out and distributed to consumers there. Huh?
A fool and his money are soon parted.
— Thomas Tusser
There’s a sucker born every minute.
— P.T. Barnum
This is just another step in the decline and fall of SA.
Maybe SA needs to become GREEN FARMERS first before worrying about energy.
Advocates of “green” hydrogen avoid taking a total systems approach encompassing the infrastructure required to generate the “renewable” electricity, the hydrogen production and storage, and its use to generate electricity for dispatch to the consumer or in transport.
Unfortunately for them, when taking full account of firstly the capacity factor of renewable generation, and secondly the efficiencies (or inefficiencies if you prefer) of grid transmission losses sending electricity to the hydrogen production facility, hydrogen production (whatever technology is used), compression and storage of the hydrogen, electricity generation from hydrogen and grid losses delivering the hydrogen generated electricity to the consumer, the amount of energy delivered to the consumer would only be 6% or less of the nominal nameplate capacity of the renewable generation devoted to its production.
Insane.