Ramaphosa extols green hydrogen as future driver of Africa-wide growth
'Africa is uniquely positioned to become a major player in green hydrogen because it has abundant renewable resources that manifest themselves in high solar irradiation, strong winds and hydropower potential,' said President Cyril Ramaphosa.
He was speaking at what was once called the South Africa Green Hydrogen Summit, now positioned as the Africa Green Hydrogen Summit, in Cape Town on Thursday.
'The vast land of our continent lends itself to large-scale renewable energy projects. We are therefore perfectly placed to leverage the global shift towards cleaner energy sources for our collective advantage as the entire continent.
'Green hydrogen is a way to marry our continent's mineral riches with our renewable energy endowments to decarbonise particularly heavy industries, to create jobs, to stimulate investment and to unlock inclusive growth across the various borders,' said Ramaphosa.
Green hydrogen is produced by using renewable energy sources such as wind or solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen through a process called electrolysis.
This hydrogen can then be used as an emission-free energy source and carrier for applications such as fuel cells or industrial processes, and is seen as being key to decarbonising 'hard-to-abate' or 'hard-to-electrify' sectors such as long-haul transport, chemicals, and iron and steel.
Green hydrogen is of particular interest in South Africa because of the country's strategic advantages.
The independent non-profit economic research institution Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies says that 'South Africa's rich endowment of ideal weather conditions for solar and wind-power generation, technological capabilities around the Fischer-Tropsch process, and access to platinum resources place the country at an advantage for developing the hydrogen value chain and being a key supplier into the global hydrogen market.'
Ramaphosa noted that more than 52 large-scale green hydrogen projects had been launched across the continent, including in South Africa.
'To date, South Africa has invested more than R1.5-billion in our Hydrogen South Africa programme,' he said.
Yet despite the President's bullishness, the reality of green hydrogen projects in South Africa and beyond paints a more complex picture.
Daily Maverick reported in April that Namibia's HyIron Oshivela plant successfully produced green hydrogen for the first time, giving South Africa's neighbour to the northwest the lead in its implementation of its green hydrogen-related plans.
South Africa's Hydrogen Society Roadmap, adopted in 2021, outlines an ambitious vision. While the initiative — which includes plans for a Hydrogen Valley industrial cluster and the Boegoebaai project in the Northern Cape — is substantial on paper, its implementation has lagged significantly behind Namibia's.
Pilot project
A pilot project in Sasolburg is producing green hydrogen for domestic use, and the Koega green ammonia project in the Eastern Cape is 'at an advanced planning stage' for four additional flagship hydrogen projects, said Ramaphosa on Thursday.
Beyond suboptimal implementation, there are also complications, which Ramaphosa duly acknowledged.
Chief among them: cost.
'We are very much alive to the reality that green hydrogen production faces a number of challenges. There is the cost factor. Capital intensity and the high costs of financing are significant barriers, as is the cost of green hydrogen relative to other energy sources such as natural gas, for instance,' he said.
Earlier this year, Daily Maverick was told that the ambitious plan to produce 'green steel' in the Freeport Saldanha industrial zone had been shelved, with Sasol and ArcelorMittal citing high costs and shifting priorities.
Globally, the steel industry is responsible for roughly 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year, which is about 8% of global emissions.
When the conventional coal-fired blast furnaces are replaced with ones that run on carbon emission-free green hydrogen, the steel that is produced is, accordingly, considered green steel.
The difficulties in realising green hydrogen projects are shared internationally.
A study published in the journal Nature Energy earlier this year, which tracked 190 projects over three years, found that by 2023 only 7% of the announced green hydrogen production globally had been realised. A large part of the reason is renewable energy and electrolyser costs.
Lack of competitiveness
A Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research researcher and the lead author of that study, Adrian Odenweller, as well as co-author Falko Ueckerdt, said: 'Green hydrogen will continue to have difficulties meeting the high expectations in the future due to a lack of competitiveness.'
The Just Energy Transition Project Management Unit in the Presidency and the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa previously confirmed as much with Daily Maverick, explaining: 'Currently, grey hydrogen (from steam reformation of methane gas) costs $1.50/kg to produce. Green hydrogen produced via electrolysis of water using renewables-generated electricity costs $5 to $6/kg. Approximately 60% of this cost is for electricity, 30% for electrolysers and 10% for transport, storage and other externalities.
'So, a reduction in price depends very much on renewable electricity generating costs falling still further. Additionally, the appropriate pricing of carbon taxes is another factor that will contribute to project viability.
'The costs of green electricity and of electrolysers will reduce, but not overnight. Furthermore, penalties in key global markets on goods produced using non-green technologies are ramping up over the next decade. We can anticipate that the right price point will be reached within the next few years.
'Based on the downward price trajectory of renewable energy and electrolyser costs, it has been projected that South Africa will reach $1.50/kg by 2037.'
Speaking at the summit on Thursday, Energy and Electricity Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said, 'Africa's choice is whether to be a passive site of resource extraction or a proactive architect of the green energy economy.
'With the right policy framework, investment enablers and regional coordination, green hydrogen can and must be [the] backbone of a new African industrial era.
'South Africa's approach to green hydrogen is not aspirational, it is deliberate, structured and already under way. As a country, we have a clear choice to develop hydrogen not just as a climate response but as a catalyst for reindustrialisation, economic transformation, regional competitiveness and energy sovereignty,' said Ramokgopa. DM
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The contentious National Convention was flighted on all news channels, and the media was as invested as some South Africans in what the National Convention would achieve given the withdrawal of the legacy foundations and the crisis of legitimacy that exists around the role of the national government in the Cyril Ramaphosa, who delivered the keynote address, was supposed to convince South Africans about the value of the National Dialogue, given the crisis of legitimacy around it. What he did, instead, was confirm the concerns and criticisms that are being levelled against the process. Specifically, he confirmed what the EFF has been raising about the platform being an attempt by the government to rehabilitate itself under the guise of public consultation. Nowhere was this as aptly captured as in the part of his speech where, explaining what South Africans would have to cogitate on, said the following: 'We will need to have difficult conversations about many issues, including: Why do South African women have to live in fear of men? Why do so many people live in abject poverty and so few live lives of opulence? Why, after decades of democracy, are the prospects for a white child so much better than those of a black child? Why do women get paid less than men for the same work? Why, when we have a Bill of Rights, are LGBTQI+ people still discriminated against, stigmatised and harassed? Why do clinics run out of medicine? Why do taps run dry? These are some of the questions that we must be willing to ask and which we must prepared to answer'. It is unconscionable that in 2025, the president genuinely believes that these are issues that a National Dialogue must reflect upon. These issues are neither new – they are the very issues that South Africans have been dialoguing about for decades. More than that, solutions to these problems have been proposed by every stakeholder in the country – from the government itself to the private sector, civil society, unorganised people, the media and multilateral institutions. There is a copious amount of data, a lot of it scientifically rigorous, that engages with and answers these very questions. In public participation platforms such as ward meetings, presidential imbizos, planning processes including the Integrated Development Planning (IDP), labour surveys, data gathering processes for government reports, media platforms including social media, parliamentary committee hearings, and even protests, this data has been provided. How, in 2025, does the president stand before the nation and demand that we ask ourselves why service delivery is failing, why violence against women and children is rampant, why discriminatory attitudes towards the LGBTIQ+ community persist, and all other issues that South Africans have reflected upon, raised on many platforms, made recommendations on solutions for? Does he not read data collected from people by the very government that he leads? Does he not hear these issues at presidential imbizos and other public participation processes? Does the president not read newspapers, watch the news or listen to community radio stations? Why, for goodness' sake, would a president think issues that emerge largely from the failure of the state, a state that he was intentional to make clear at the beginning of his keynote address that he heads, must be preoccupy the minds of South Africans who are living with the consequences of this failure? The tone that the president set for the National Dialogue confirms the sentiments of Sinawo Tambo, the spokesperson of the EFF who once argued on this EWN platform that president Ramaphosa is attempting to make South Africans take collective responsibility for the failures of the party he leads and seeks to mask this scapegoating with the sentimentality of a National Dialogue. Nothing else explains why the president saw it sensible to ask of us why clinics run out of medicines, taps run dry, poverty continues to debilitate millions, and Black people remain on the receiving end of structural violence. The president knows answers to these questions – or at least, he should. I refuse to believe that a Head of State is not being furnished with the data that is constantly being churned out by his own government about these very issues. If that were the case, then there is absolutely no reason for him to remain in office because to not know such critical details about a country that one leads is nothing short of a dereliction of duty. I refuse to believe he does not know. That leaves us with one other possibility – that the National Dialogue is yet another theatre of the performance of democracy, and that the president himself is the main character in the play. If that is the case, then this multi-million Rand process is everything that critics are characterising it as – a rehabilitation centre for failed leadership. Malaika, a bestselling award-winning author, is a geographer and researcher at the Institute for Pan African Thought. She is a PhD in Geography candidate at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.
