On-The-Air (05/02/2016)

5th February 2016

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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

Kamwendo: Platinum will be highlighted next week when the government announces support for a new fuel-cell manufacturing initiative.

Creamer: Fuel-cell is a device which generates electricity cleanly and quietly. The beauty of it is that it can not do this without platinum. That is really tailor made for South Africa and the world at this point and time.

It is good that the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is giving a lot of attention to this. We expect early next week that they will announce support for a new fuel-cell manufacturing project. One of the drawbacks of fuel cells is the capital cost. Every time you look at fuel cells you say operationally they are competitive, technically way ahead, the capital cost lets run from it.

So, what they want to do is to actually do a bankable feasibility study to try and bring this capital cost down so that we can actually start working with it. It comes against the background of the DTI again wanting to set-up a sort of a Platinum Valley.

They are calling it a special economic zone, looking to the Rustenburg area where the platinum is to try and get manufacturing going in an incentivised way. We are early movers in this and I say early movers, because first movement has been taken. The world is starting to go into this at quite a pace. It is definitely becoming more of the present as well as the future.

This is an important initiative to try and bring the capital cost down and see the value of the operational cost. From a maintenance point of view, fuel cells are well placed, with few moving parts.

Kamwendo: Anglo American Platinum is investing R60-million to lower the cost of using fuel cells.

Creamer: Again, these fuel cells are coming into focus. Anglo American Platinum has been relying for decades now on the use of platinum to clean the air of all the cities around. It does that by having itself in an exhaust pipe. It cleans the exhaust emissions.

That is a mature sector and you can see it coming under pressure because of the Volkswagen scandal in America, the Europeans are starting to retest and saying that there are a lot more of these nasties coming out then we expected. You need to have the next move, the move of these vehicles along a new path using fuel cells, which means zero emission.

They are now investing in trying to promote the economics again. The drawback of the electric vehicle not only from the battery driven one, but also from the fuel-cell electric vehicle, you will see that FCEV, is the infrastructure. Where do you go to refuel and what is the cost of that? This $4-million that they are giving to the American company is to bring down the cost owning a fuel-cell vehicle, because you will go in and get access to refuelling at a lower cost.

You will also encourage the development of refuelling centres. From a point of view of competing with the battery driven car, there is no doubt that the fuel-cell vehicle can win, because it has got a bigger range. We are used to getting in, filling our car and not worrying about range, because we will find another filling station, whereas with the electric vehicle, it has got a range problem.

You have got range anxiety saying where am I going to refill, because it needs overnight recharging. The economics of this they are also seeing potential for platinum as we go forward.

Kamwendo: Toyota has released thousands of fuel-cell patents free of charge to speed up the world’s adoption of fuel-cell technology.

Creamer: Toyota and a lot of other car companies, of course the car companies are involved, but you can use the fuel cell also for power generation, electricity in your home. People also see the vision of a power station in your kitchen the size of your washing machine.

But, Toyota is going along the road of letting these fuel cells power your car. They are interested in a lot more people getting involved in fuel cells, because they launched a very interesting fuel-cell car late last year. They projecting that they will sell 2 000 of them this year and by 2020 they want to sell 30 000 a year.

By 2050 they are saying they will probably be far away from producing petrol and diesel driven cars. By that stage we will be into the fuel-cell vehicle. So that is the pace at which it is moving. If you go to a place like Hamburg in Germany you will see that there are hydrogen fuel stations where you go and refill at this hydrogen.

Interesting that hydrogen is produced by wind energy. There is all sorts of sustainability development type of approaches being made. We see in California the government is providing $200-million for more then 100 fuel cell refuelling stations set up.

In Japan, we also see a lot of that and people living in apartments that are given power by fuel cells. So this is a great opportunity for South Africa and we see that the DTI is getting in boots and all.

Kamwendo: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.

 

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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