It’s that time again on a Friday when Update At Noon presents another Update From The Coal-Face with Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.

Sakina: Green hydrogen received a massive boost this week.

Creamer: It was incredible. It was virtually around the world, but it began on Tuesday with our President at the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week in the UAE, and it was wonderful because Cyril Ramaphosa was on stage with the President of the UAE, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, at this sustainability event, where everybody was listening on. What our President, Cyril Ramaphosa, outlined to the UAE President, for everyone to hear, is that green hydrogen is tailor made for the continent of Africa, because green hydrogen, which can be the home-grown energy of our future, and a wonderful energy at that, relies on strong sunlight – and Africa’s got abundance of strong sunlight.

Not only that, he said, it also relies on prime wind, and we’ve got a lot of that as well, and our rivers are fast flowing. In addition, our continent is surrounded by vast volumes of sea, and you can get the hydrogen from the sea water as well. As if that’s not enough, we've also got a third of the planet’s critical minerals and metals, and one of the key ones, of course, is platinum, and we South Africans lead the world with platinum.

Then, in the United States, the day after our President was saying this, on Wednesday, another big fuel cell and hydrogen event was taking place and this one was organised by the Washington-based Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Energy Association, where it was revealed that there are certain tax benefits from business structures that are beckoning for people to move ahead strong with hydrogen production. Then, in the same week, we had this fantastic report coming from China, where the largest hydrogen refuelling station is being trialled that can take 300 vehicles a day – and the list could go on, because there were reports coming from India about hydrogen trains, from Germany, from Austria, from virtually every country in the world, world, all looking at green hydrogen as a clean, green energy solution, that can be locally generated.

Sakina: Africans now have a very distinctive opportunity to add value to their metals and minerals in Africa, by Africa.

Creamer: That is what we've been waiting for a long for a long time for Africa and now you can see banks emphasising it and consultants emphasising it. This week we saw our South African banking group, Absa CIB, come through with a thought leadership article in which they outlined how Africa working together and not separately, can create very reliable supply chains and we can cut down on our costs.

As an example for others to follow, they pointed to a joint African logistics corridor in central Africa called the Lobito Corridor, which cuts logistics from six weeks to get your product to the port, to eight days, and they’re saying that this model can be applied all over, and this model must be applied all over so that Africa can add value in Africa, by Africa, with Africa skills. They advise that in arranging offtake with the world, they should make sure that they look to adding value in Africa, because that has the potential to benefit the economies of African countries enormously, as well as the global market in general because the more value you add locally, the more you beneficiate your commodities ahead of exportation, the less transport costs generally are, which benefits the buyers of the processed African metal and mineral products.

Sakina: Platinum is being viewed by a growing number of global investors as a metal to have and to hold.

Creamer: We had the situation of the US administration threatening the county’s Federal Reserve, which is like a government sort of grabbing its Reserve Bank and saying, you will do what we say, and that sent nervousness around the world, and people started rushing to move out of the dollar and into metals. Of course, they rush for gold first, and they also went for silver, but platinum was not excluded, which is a very big thing for South Africa, because South Africa is by far the biggest supplier of platinum.

You can see that the price of platinum is rising, and de-dollarisation is making sure that people get hold of metals and minerals, and they hold on to them for fear that there might be a currency collapse, or the world reserve currency gets into trouble, so they want to have a hard and fast metal in their hands as a replacement.

Martin Creamer will be back at the Coal-Face at the same time next Friday.