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On-The-Air (25/09/2015)

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25th September 2015

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Bongi Gwala speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Gwala: Heat that’s been going waste for decades is now being turned into valuable electricity at a platinum smelter in Rustenburg.

Creamer: We have got a lot of heat at high temperature. For instance, this heat at the Anlgo American Platinum smelter at Waterval in Rustenburg has been going waste for decades. We are talking about temperatures of 240 0C, where we can turn this into electricity and it lasts. It has been done across a broader scale and we see the company Vuselela and H1 coming in with Investec Bank.

Also, the government is supporting this and it will be opened officially on Monday by Rob Davies, the Minister of Department of Trade and Industry, to highlight the fact that we have got to be energy efficient. We can point fingers at Eskom and we can point fingers at people not giving us electricity, but what about using the fuel that is available to turn this into electricity. We see a moderate amount of electricity, 5 MW, but if you add them all up we know that Metalloys close to Vereeniging also did a similar thing where they turned heat into electricity.

This is available and called co-generation and we see this coming in at a competitive tariff of 65 cents a kilowatt hour. This is now a business case because it is coming in below the level that the tariff states both the official tariff coming through from Eskom and the co-generation tariffs that you are allowed plus some of the other baseload independent power producer tariffs coming in.

This will beat it, so let’s get that efficiency going and make sure that the heat we have got in this many smelters around the country is turned to positive account, as they done at Anglo Platinum Waterval smelting complex, which will be officially opened by the Minister on Monday.

Gwala: BMW has unveiled the first charging station for electric cars at Melrose Arch in Johannesburg.

Creamer: This is the whole thing of the future on how we are going to get round. We are going to get round on electric cars. Will they be electric cars that are battery driven or will they be electric cars that are fuel cell driven. We see BMW opting for the battery type, putting in these public charging stations.

The first of them going in at Melrose Arch. Also signing a deal with Nissan so that there can be cooperation around the use of these. Planning more at Melrose Arch and around the country, putting their money on this battery driven electric vehicle and the hybrids. Elsewhere in the world people are putting their money on the fuel cell driven vehicle. We see in London, Tokyo and California the stations going in for fuel cell driven cars.

Which is going to win we don't know. Obviously some of our bets are on the fuel cell, because that helps us in South Africa and it is platinum driven to get that catalytic conversion, where you convert the chemical energy into electrical energy. You need that catalyst and it has got to be platinum. We see that there is a lot of attention around the world around the fuel cell and the Japanese particularly saying they are going to have thousands of these stations up soon.

We know that the range you can get from the fuel cell is also pretty hot, you can go more then 500 km and it only takes a couple of minutes to recharge. That will mean that we need some gas infrastructure. It is going to be interesting to see who wins out in this battle between the battery and the fuel cell. A lot of South African money, of course, will go on the fuel cell although we don't see these stations around here.

We actually see the battery driven vehicles getting the first stations right here in Melrose Arch as far as BMW is concerned.

Gwala: Japan is standing ready to invest big in South Africa if we re-establish a solid infrastructure platform.

Creamer: This was clear from the meeting this week by the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry they have met and soon after, of course, our Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was in Japan wanting to keep the momentum going. We see there that they offered training particularly for artisans, which is very important.

That was just a casual conversation, which seems to be firming up now into something definite. Also, offering training to masters graduates plus internships for 1 000 in Africa. What they are saying is that they have got 130 companies in South Africa already, employing 150 000 people in South Africa, if South Africa can put in proper energy infrastructure, transport infrastructure and water infrastructure, Japan will up its game big time.

Japan will come in on many more investments. They are also talking fuel cells and they are encouraging South Africa to go the fuel cell route because you can see that Japan has opted for fuel cells big time and that is why you see some of the companies have got investments in platinum mines, State-owned Japanese companies. Ramaphosa, when he was in Japan, he was driving around in a fuel cell driven car. That also gives us an indication of what’s coming in the future.

We know that the Japanese were very involved in our fuel cell, which works here in Johannesburg where the Chamber of Mines building is off grid. It does not use electricity from Eskom, the chambers electricity comes straight in from a large fuel cell and that got a lot of assistance from Japanese.

There is a mantra going out that the government should offer bids for 1 000 MW of fuel cells, which they have done with renewable energy, solar energy and all the other energies and perhaps that could introduce the starting point for something big in fuel cells in South Africa.

Gwala: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he’ll be back with us at the same time next week.

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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