Bottom-up Hydrogen has arrived in South Africa
Dear Elon
You are a son of the soil who continues to suffer unfair treatment in your homeland. But as much as I lament that, and rue the day that you emigrated, I need to do a reality check for you.
In North America, electricity is cheap, clean and plentiful. With so much water and high elevations like Niagara Falls, plenty of hydro-electric power can be generated. What a contrast from South Africa which has to burn coal to generate electricity, polluting the air.
When it comes to fossil fuel, North America is blessed again with plenty of crude oil and natural gas reserves. On a farm near Calgary, there is a field called “Hell’s Half Acre”. If you just light a match and throw it down, it will ignite the ground, which is literally oozing with crude oil. Whereas South Africa has to import all its crude from abroad. We refine it, but it is imported.
Liquid natural gas is cleaner than burning coal or diesel – by about 50 percent. So it’s a step in the right direction. But South Africa’s reserves are offshore and the tree-huggers are opposing its development.
As a result, we are short of electricity. What power we do have is “dirty energy”. So I don’t see a bright future in South Africa for EVs. Sorry, Elon. What works in North America will not work in South Africa. EVs only consume more power, and dirty energy at that, in our case.
Whereas hydrogen power is clean energy. South African scientists were among the first to discover how to make hydrogen from coal, but it is a dangerously volatile process. Somewhere in the future, that is on South Africa’s Hydrogen Society Roadmap. That sounds like a marriage made in heaven for South Africa – making clean energy from coal! But when people remember the hydrogen bomb and the Hindenburg disaster, they get cold feet.
Meanwhile hydrogen is already being bottled and used on a grand scale. For example, the huge diesel trucks carrying coal or ore up out of the depths of open pit mines use bottled hydrogen for their engine combustion. This gives the trucks more power and it lowers their fuel consumption. Why? Because the internal combustion is more complete, inside the cylinders. This means lower carbon emissions and complete elimination of sulpher dioxide, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide and carbon verticulates.
Oddly enough in a country that imports both crude oil and natural gas, hydrogen extracted from abundant coal is not yet widely present. Some cars do run with bottled hydrogen for more complete combustion, but you have to fill up your hydrogen tank periodically too, just like your fuel tank. Some cars come with “on-board hydrogen” meaning electrical reactors producing hydrogen on the go. It’s sometimes called “on-demand hydrogen”. Usually you have to specify this as an optional extra when ordering a car – at a huge price for already expensive vehicles.
But aftermarket kits are now available for retrofit installation on diesel and petrol vehicles. Adding hydrogen-on-demand to your vehicle is like a miniature refinery on board. It’s sort of like adding a solar water heater on your roof to pre-heat the water entering your electrical geyser. Thus reducing your household’s electricity bill. Not to mention reducing the amount of coal burned to keep the water in your geyser hot! The knock-on effects of this “hydrogen hybrid” are amazing!
First you get far more power out of the same engine. It’s like going from regular to premium fuel.
Second, your fuel consumption will drop significantly.
Third and best of all in the light of South Africa’s pledges to COP protocols, carbon emissions are reduced.
These kits can now be ordered online and delivered strait to the vehicle owner. For example:
So fourth, you get extended engine life. (Your engine is cleaned of all its carbon residues.)
The obvious missing ingredient in South Africa is a cadre of qualified “hydrogen installers” who know what they are doing. The Desmond Tutu Centre for Leadership (commonly known as C4L) has begun training poor and unemployed youth as “hydrogen installers”. This began in April 2024 with basic classroom instruction in Renewable Energy. Fifty learners are starting practicums this month including how to retrofit these kits. Visit www.C4L.org
This is thanks to this Canadian missionary who is celebrating thirty years in South Africa this month. Fifteen years ago, he began to promote renewable energy in general as a solution to youth unemployment. Solar in particular. At first it was “solar-thermal” for domestic water heating. Then the focus enlarged to include “photo-voltaic”. To practice what he preaches about renewable energy, he disconnected his own home from Eskom electricity and installed solar panels. This month, the focus in enlarging again to include aftermarket “hydrogen hybrid” – not for homes but for automobiles.
C4L’s ambition is that by 2030, fifty percent of all vehicles on South Africa’s roads will have either a hydrogen hybrid or else an electric hybrid – or both.
OK, it’s not space travel or landing mankind on Mars. But when you left South Africa in 1988, the Berlin Wall was still standing. By then this Canadian missionary was in the front-line states, active in rural development. After the first free and fair elections in South Africa in 1994, he moved to the Lowveld.
On top of on-board, he is now promoting a model of EV that is off-grid. The electric hybrid is not uncommon, but it is usually fitted on the assembly line at the factory. C4L will be introducing aftermarket electric hybrid kits in 2025. This technology is complementary to the hydrogen hybrid. So if you already have an electric hybrid, that does not preclude you from adding a hydrogen hybrid as well. Double your savings by running on both!
In fact, the hydrogen hybrid runs so clean that you can remove your catalytic converter. Testing will show that emissions are still cleaner than before, even with more power, less fuel consumption and longer engine life!
Let’s be honest, an 48-volt electric hybrid combines with on-board hydrogen is not just eliminating carbon to zero and reducing fuel consumption by up to 50 percent – it can also charge a second battery in your car that allows you to have a backstop for your load-shedding moments at home. Your car becomes your generator, not with “dirty energy” from the mains to charge your backstop battery, but by your car’s engine burning hydrogen-rich air.
South Africa’s carbon footprint is far too serious to leave in the hands of government, awaiting capital-intensive top-down solutions. Citizens are doing their bottom-up part. Adding a hydrogen hybrid to your vehicle should be seen as patriotism. It is labour-intensive and thus a no-brainer for solving youth unemployment.
It also opens doors to biofuels. In Germany, most big trucks run on biodiesel, which is extracted from rapeseed or canola. Hydrogen hybrids burn fuels so completely in the combustion chambers that it is viable for farmers to use large proportions of “homegrown additives” in their home-brewed fuel mix.
The same commercial farmers who are installing solar power to reduce dependency on the unreliable Eskom grid (and to save money in the long run given rising electricity rates) should be able to also reduce their purchases of diesel and petrol by growing their own fuel crops. Like sunflowers. Extract your own oil from sunflower seeds with an oil press and then mix it with diesel an a little petrol. To power your farm tractors and trucks.
C4L will also provide come basic instruction to its learners in mixing biofuels. It is important to get the right viscosity, to avoid plugging up diesel injectors, etc. But adaptation is the order of the day.
In Canada, some vehicles are even running on recycled motor oil! They use a centrifuge to spin it clean, then mix it – as an additive – with diesel and petrol, and away they go. This saves dumping the old engine oil, which in itself is a hazardous waste.
Aftermarket hydrogen hybrid has arrived. No refillable bottles on board. Just a self-generated flow of hydrogen and oxygen into your intake manifold so the engine breathes in hydrogen-rich air.
The possibilities to connect this new technology to youth unemployment were not missed by a Canadian missionary who knows both countries well. This is a bottom-up approach, after decades of hydrogen languishing in top-down solutions. Here is what South Africa’s Hydrogen Society’s Roadmap says about skills gaps for bottom-up solutions like this:
“7.2 TVET SKILLS GAP
“The TVET college system does not cater for skills that are specifically relevant to the hydrogen economy. Some level of training involving hydrogen currently happens in local TVETs located close to SASOL facilities in the form of chemical technical training and for maintenance, fitting and other mechanical technical requirements.”
Wrong! C4L is already mentoring 50 youth who have completed their basic electrical engineering training in 2024 how to get ordinary vehicles to produce hydrogen in motion, with a stack of benefits.
“Studies are being conducted on how the TVET system could be leveraged to develop skills for the hydrogen economy, while addressing the high unemployment rate among the TVET graduates. This would also mean a shift in focus from steam methane reforming (SMR) to electrolyser-based production, resulting in the production of green hydrogen and green ammonia.”
C4L is not conducting studies. We are LEARNING BY DOING, in practicums. It is not a talk shop. C4L is walking the talk. Check out https://casatutu.org
Hey Elon, have a nice trip to Mars. We are staying at home to keep up our social innovation!