When days are dark and times are hard, it is pleasant to divert oneself with daydreams about what life would be like if you had millions and could live in the lap of luxury.
Cyril Ramaphosa does this routinely in his speeches, when he waxes lyrical about how South Africa will have bullet trains and smart cities, while the grim reality is one of uncontrolled crime, rising xenophobia, grinding poverty, economic stagnation, untouchable gangs, fleeing taxpayers, pit latrines, unemployable matriculants, rape and domestic violence, daily unrest, and widespread failure of even the most basic of services like water and electricity.
When your boat is leaking, you bail. You don’t sit around thinking of the wonderful new boat you’re going to buy with money you haven’t got and probably will never earn.
South Africa is a smoking ruin. Taking responsibility would entail giving up the state’s stranglehold on the private sector to allow South Africans the freedom to rebuild their shattered economy. Instead, the president is holding up artist’s impressions in glorious green and gold, of a future to which he promises he will lead the people as long as they believe in him and continue to vote ANC. He is selling pipe dreams to anaesthetise South Africans to the brutal reality of living under ANC misrule.
Coloured hydrogen
One of the things that gets Squirrel gushing is green hydrogen.
Green hydrogen is produced by the electrolysis of water using energy generated from so-called ‘zero-emission’ power sources such as wind and solar. (Emissions produced in the mining, manufacture and construction of solar panels and wind farms are not counted, nor are their massive land use requirements, nor are their end-of-life toxic waste products).
It stands distinct from ‘turquoise hydrogen’, which is produced by pyrolysis of methane to produce hydrogen and solid carbon; ‘pink/purple hydrogen’, produced by nuclear powered electrolysis; ‘blue hydrogen’, produced using fossil fuels with carbon capture technology; and ‘grey hydrogen’, produced using fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas to power water electrolysis.
At last year’s Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium South Africa, Ramaphosa waxed lyrical about the Northern Cape Green Hydrogen Strategy.
A special economic zone is to be developed at the remote Boegoebaai, with Sasol as an anchor investor, which Ramaphosa said is a major step towards realising South Africa’s potential to be a global leader in green hydrogen exports.
Talking about being a global leader when there is literally nothing at Boegoebaai – about 60km north of Port Nolloth and 20km south of Alexander Bay – and the name Boegoebaai isn’t even on the map, seems a little premature.
‘We stand ready to be a major exporter in this market – to use hydrogen to rapidly decarbonise our existing industries, and attract industrial investment from across the globe seeking to meet new standards of green power in the production process,’ President Ramaphosa gushed, visions of future glory in his eyes.
Sasol, a third of which is directly or indirectly owned by the government, will be supported by finance from the Industrial Development Corporation, in addition to being exempt from taxes. Taxpayers will be on the hook for this project.
Critical
When Anglo American unveiled a prototype of the world’s largest hydrogen-powered mine haul truck for use in its platinum mines, Ramaphosa was on hand to deliver the keynote speech, beaming like a proud baby-father.
‘Developing the hydrogen economy is a strategic priority for our country,’ he said. ‘Not only will it be a valuable driver of economic growth and employment; it will also contribute to our decarbonisation efforts.’
Ramaphosa called it ‘a critical component of the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, which we launched in 2020 to rebuild our economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’.
Everything you need to know about green technology in 2022
Fixing Eskom is critical. That should be this country’s primary, and perhaps only, strategic priority. The country will not survive long enough to enjoy the fruits of a hydrogen economy if Eskom can only power the country half of the time. Eskom is on the brink of collapse, with several power stations failing per day, and newly made repairs failing again, because it is redlining every electricity plant it has and doesn’t have the supply headroom, or skilled staff, or budget, to fix or maintain anything.
But no, just wait until we have hydrogen, folks!
Roadmap
Not having anything else with which to occupy their days, the Department of Science and Technology, headed by the national chairperson of the South African Communist Party, Blade Nzimande, has developed a 100-page South African Hydrogen Society Roadmap.
Exactly how out of touch the government is becomes evident when one reads the foreword written by the communist in charge. It starts:
‘We are holding this important launch of the Hydrogen Society Roadmap (HSRM) at a time when the world and our country are faced with four major challenges: The Covid 19 pandemic; Persisting and stubborn economic crises, and its associated challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment; The crises facing poor families, households and communities to make ends meet – the struggle to sustain life and livelihood; Climate Change.’
Not a word about Eskom’s catastrophic failure to provide enough electricity to keep the lights on and the factories running.
In chapter one, which is an overview of the current energy landscape, it says: ‘South Africa is facing the challenge of securing clean, affordable and sustainable energy to power its economy and to contribute to the transition to a climate-neutral society.’
No, South Africa is facing the challenge of securing energy to power its economy. Those adjectives – clean, affordable, sustainable – are entirely superfluous. They are nice-to-haves, once the country actually does have enough energy to power the economy.
The entire document does not mention load-shedding once, and mentions power outages only three times, and then only in passing.
Bleeding edge
The problem with green hydrogen is that it is an expensive, bleeding-edge technology that will take decades to mature, and even then may not be useful for much more than niche applications.
The government isn’t even able to keep coal-fired power stations running, or build new ones that actually work, or get renewable energy independent power producers on the grid in a hurry, or rope in gas power ships without endless legal wrangling.
It has no hope whatsoever of starting and sustaining a world-leading energy revolution and produce as much as 4% of the world’s hydrogen, which is the stated intention.
One problem with green hydrogen is the efficiency losses throughout the production, transport and storage chain. A typical 100MW solar or wind farm operates at a 30% capacity factor. Ideally, only excess capacity will be directed towards water hydrolysis, but let’s assume for a moment all of it is.
This 30MW of electricity will produce the equivalent of 21MW of hydrogen gas. The gas needs to be liquefied for storage, which is a very energy-intensive process, leaving only 13,5MW worth of usable hydrogen. Shipping costs energy, leaving 12MW. Storage reduces this to 10MW, and by the time it is used to fuel vehicles or generate electricity, only 6MW is left of the original 30MW.
With 100kWh of electricity, you could charge a small battery-electric vehicle and drive 600km. With 100kWh converted into hydrogen, you could fuel a small fuel-cell-electric vehicle and drive 200km.
Inefficient
The ‘round-trip efficiency’ to convert electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity or heat ranges between 18% and 46%, depending on circumstances such as transport and storage requirements.
Alternative power storage technologies perform much better. Pumped-storage schemes have round-trip efficiencies of 70% to 80%, while compressed air storage can achieve 42% to 67%. Flow batteries, an emerging technology that isn’t yet mature, promise round-trip efficiency of 60% to 80%.
Hydrogen will have to become much, much cheaper to justify its low energy density (not much more than a third of the energy density of methane) and efficiency losses in the supply chain. At present, it costs between $3 and $7 per kilo to produce. Ten years from now, improved technology might reduce this to $1 or $1,50, but that still does not make it cost-competitive, even with other expensive, low-emission fuels.
Hard problems
From a technical perspective, moving and storing hydrogen is a hard engineering problem. In its liquid form, it is as cold as 20 Kelvin, or -253°C. That sort of bitter cold makes everything it touches brittle, and requires highly sophisticated infrastructure. Boil-off losses will be significant.
Designing hydrogen transport ships will be another challenge. They will have to be 2.6 times larger than comparable liquid natural gas carriers, just to carry the same amount of energy equivalent.
Hydrogen can be converted to methane or ammonia, which solves a lot of the transport and storage challenges, but that adds yet another step, with concomitant losses, into the power-to-power trip, potentially reducing round-trip efficiency to a mere 15%.
Both methane and ammonia are abundantly available from far less expensive sources than converting hydrogen. Turning hydrogen into methane adds carbon back into the equation, producing half the CO2 of burning coal. Ammonia is a relatively poor fuel that is hard to burn, and usually requires an admixture of other fuels to promote combustion.
Billing green hydrogen as the solution to all South Africa’s employment and reindustrialisation challenges, and throwing billions from a rapidly shrinking fiscus at it, is more than just foolish. It is irresponsible.
Let the private sector pioneer it, by all means. Let them design the expensive vehicles and build out the infrastructure required to make hydrogen useful in transport or industrial applications. Let them take the risk, and prove it in niche applications. In twenty or thirty years, hydrogen might turn into a useful addition to the national energy mix, if ever.
Government ought to have nothing to do with it. Government needs to devote all its energy and budget to resolving the real-world crisis in generating electricity from conventional sources, including coal, gas, solar, wind and nuclear power.
South Africa needs lots more electricity right now, not glowing artist’s impressions of the sci-fi future in Squirrel’s opium dreams.
