South African green hydrogen first-movers given major boost

This audio is brought to you by Endress and Hauser, a global leader in process and laboratory measurement technology, offering a broad portfolio of instruments, solutions and services for industrial process measurement and automation. Enticing support for first movers into green hydrogen project development is on offer via a first-of-a-kind government-led framework designed to assess the readiness and bankability of green hydrogen and power-to-x (PtX) projects in South Africa. This follows South Africa's official launch of the PtX project development standard (PDS), which includes green hydrogen and PtX developers being invited to register their projects and complete the PtX PDS questionnaire, with the assurance that all information will be treated as confidential and shared only with authorised partner institutions. "The questionnaire takes less than 60 minutes to complete, in less time than it would take to prepare and drink a cappuccino, offering project developers a practical and efficient route to position their projects within a recognised national framework for investment readiness and investor engagement," Just Energy Transition Implementation Plan (JET-IP) Green Hydrogen Programme Management Office (GH-PMO) director Dr Rebecca Maserumule outlined in a media release to Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Readers will recall that at the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) conference in Vienna on April 8, Maserumule described South Africa as being at the same green hydrogen inflection point today that it was with renewable energy in 2009. "We've done it with renewables successfully. We moved from strategy and policy to execution very well and I think today we're standing here in 2026 because we had a great run of moving to renewables and getting projects on the ground. "This is what makes the next stage of just adding an electrolyser, moving the molecules, either for domestic or export, really enabling for South Africa. This is why I know, without any doubt in my mind, we can do it," Maserumule insisted, while emphasising the need to support first movers with funding to make things happen. In welcoming the launch, South Africa's Department of Electricity and Energy (DEE) hailed the PtX PDS as a key instrument to support a credible and investment-ready pipeline of green hydrogen and PtX projects. The department described green hydrogen as a strategic, cross-cutting sector linking electricity planning, industrial development, trade, infrastructure, permitting and finance. PtX embraces technologies that use renewable electricity to produce green hydrogen, which is then converted into sustainable fuels, chemicals, and raw materials and enables the decarbonisation of hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, shipping, and chemical manufacturing. "UNIDO remains firmly committed to advancing the hydrogen agenda in South Africa, including continued technical and partnership support to the Industrial Development Corporation's (IDC's) JET-IP GH-PMO and key stakeholders of the hydrogen economy in South Africa," UNIDO Climate and Technology Partnership Division chief Petra Schwager reported. The United Nations organisation has provided technical support to strengthen the scoring and weighting methodology of South Africa's South Africa's PtX PDS framework, convening international sectorial technical specialists and development partners. "Leveraging its mandate as an industrial development organisation, UNIDO – through its dedicated hydrogen expertise and platforms – stands ready to provide strategic and targeted technical assistance to accelerate project development toward investment readiness and operationalisation," Schwager added. Launched by the DEE and the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, the PtX PDS is being implemented by the JET-IP GH-PMO, which is hosted at the IDC. A strong endorsement of the PtX project development standard template was made by the IDC, which described it as a catalytic ...