JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Bullish hydrogen sentiment re-surfaced at the PGMs Industry Day on Thursday, March 19.

“I’m actually pretty bullish on hydrogen,” said Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Dr Richard Stewart at the event covered by Mining Weekly.

“I think hydrogen’s got the inside track,” said Implats CEO Nico Muller.

This followed PGMs Industry Day chairperson Bernard Swanepoel putting this question to Minerals Council South Africa president Paul Dunne, who is also the CEO of Northam Platinum, which recently visited China where the company experienced fast-growing use of hydrogen to power trucks.

Swanepoel: Your road to Damascus, you went to China, you came back believing in hydrogen.

Dunne: Our belief in hydrogen comes about from a number of revelations that we've seen on our travels in China. I do think it’s important to travel to see what's happening in important nodes of activity in China. Northern China, in particular, is very relevant here. You can't mine coal in China just for thermal purposes these days. It must be beneficiated or improved, and, a la Sasol, splitting the hydrocarbon is taking place. When you do that, you release grey hydrogen as a by-product for free, effectively, and certainly that’s happening. We visited one very large coking coal company, I think possibly the largest coking coal company in the world, or of that order. They have 20 000 trucks already powered by grey hydrogen, with an ambition in the one single company to move to over 200 000 trucks. In this case, they're using a Toyota fuel cell, which has 100 g of platinum per cell, and it's completely commercialised and industrialised. In some ways, it's happened below the radar. It's not been entirely visible to us. One of our colleagues, Hurbey Geldenhuys, had the temerity on a subsequent visit to Shanghai to meet the head of the SOE, a PhD, Chinese lady, and Hurbey remarked that we'd been hearing about green hydrogen now for many decades and, frankly, we don't believe you. It was very bad of him to say that in a Chinese setting, but he meant it well. The lady professor then stood up and lectured him in Chinese for half an hour through the translator, who was a young student and the message was very, very clear. It's in [China's] Five-Year Plan. It's supported by local government, it’s supported by provincial government, it’s supported by national government, it will happen. So, we have the view that electrolysers and green hydrogen will proceed from here, and on the other side of the hydrogen equation, it's already happening through grey hydrogen.

FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Stewart remarked that what had reinforced his belief in hydrogen was the Chinese Five-Year Plan.

“Green energy's in there, and green hydrogen is specifically mentioned and there’s a strategy that can give real legs to it. We’ve seen China do it with solar panels. They've done it in EVs. They're going to do it in hydrogen. That, to me, is a real indication that this is now seriously going to get legs,” said Stewart.

Much mention was also made of the new multi-year research and development partnership that Valterra Platinum and Sibanye-Stillwater have concluded with Johnson Matthey and to accelerate the next generation of PGM-enabled technologies.

“To secure the future of PGM demand, we must actively create it – through partnership, shared investment, and a wide portfolio approach that continually brings new applications into the pipeline,” Valterra Platinum, headed by CEO Craig Miller – who also addressed the PGMs Industry Day event – outlined in a recent LinkedIn post.

“By combining Johnson Matthey's industrial technology leadership with a growing base of aligned partner capital, we can fast-track impactful new PGM applications and help shape the demand of tomorrow,” the Valterra note added.

METALS AND TECHNOLOGIES

The PGMs Industry Day’s in-person and online audience were told that the rate at which new technologies can be found with new metals has quickened to unprecedented levels.

“What used to take us ten years to test - a new concept or technology - for PGMs now takes less than six months,” Stewart reported.

“This is the relationship we’ve started with Johnson Matthey. It's about saying, take those 100 different things you looked at in the past but that you couldn't ever spend time on because all you were worried about was thrifting out of autocats.”

Autocatalysis provided huge demand for PGMs in the past and received intense, ongoing, attention from the likes of Johnson Matthey, which has had decades-long South African connection from premises in Wadeville, Germiston. Autocatalysts, which are fitted into the exhaust pipes of vehicles, prevent air pollution.

“Let's now take those many things that received very little attention, put them through a process. I cannot believe we aren't going to find those new demands going forward, but it's going to take a bit of time, and there's a bit of risk, and we need to take that into account in our long-term planning.

‘The PGM industry’s in structural change but this structural change is not happening overnight, though,” Stewart emphasised.

“It’s going to be a gradual shift. But the world is electrifying. PGMs have historically been focused on autocats. It's been a palladium/rhodium story, particularly the last few years, that's shifting.

“It's shifting to a clean energy, a green economy. That means more platinum, iridium, ruthenium.

“There's a structural shift that's going to happen. And yes, there's all sorts of substitutions you can talk about in there, but, but that shift is coming.

“I think hydrogen's going to play a big role, but we’ve got a lot to do on the demand side.

“If you just go back to the 1990s and let's look at it as a huge shift, an eight, nine-million-ounce market, those are the days before autocats becoming dominant.

“So, what does multiple different industrial uses mean?  Well, that's what it was back then, put on 2% or 3% per annum for global growth, talking a 12-million to 13-million-ounce market without autocats, that's what we're looking at.

“We peaked at 19-million. We’re back down at 18-million. Where the cycle could go beyond in the next 15 years is what we’ve got to be looking at. That's sort of the gap in the risk that we face,” said Stewart, who expects short-term volatility and medium-term robustness while the industry sets itself up for the good longer-term optionality that appears to be on the way.