South African petrochemicals company Sasol, mining group Anglo American and its diamond business De Beers entered into a joint development agreement on Tuesday to pilot the production of renewable diesel from vegetable oil.

Under the terms of the deal signed at the annual African Mining Indaba in Cape Town, the partners will assess the technical and commercial viability of feedstock production, company officials told reporters.

De Beers is providing the more than 20-hectare tracts of land on which the crops for the trial vegetable oil feedstock – initially the Solaris and Moringa plants – will be grown, Anglo American’s Director of Projects and Development Alison Atkinson said.

Atkinson said pre-feasibility studies have been approved and renewable diesel production trials have been initiated. The resulting fuel will be used at De Beers operations.

Biofuels, derived from plant material or animal waste, are among the alternative fuels promoted to reduce carbon emissions.

Although renewable diesel production in South Africa is not yet at a commercial scale, customer demand and decarbonisation targets indicate that the country’s renewable fuels market is promising, according to Sasol.

“Renewable diesel is transformative. It meets the technical standards of conventional diesel while significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Sarushen Pillay, executive vice president of Sasol’s Business Building, Strategy and Technology portfolio, said at the signing ceremony.

Reuters

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From the moment Mpho Putsoenyane’s daughter Hlompho was born in Zamdela, a South African township beside the smokestacks and gas flares of Sasol’s oldest coal-to-liquid refinery, the baby struggled to breathe.

Last year, when she was four months old, she turned purple and started gasping. Her parents rushed the baby to hospital, where medics only just revived her heart with a defibrillator, Putsoenyane recalls.

“We were terrified,” she told Reuters at her brick bungalow, pausing to wipe away tears. “We thought she was going to die.”

Sasolburg, as the petrochemical giant’s refinery town north of Zamdela is called, has been identified by government officials as one of several areas of South Africa in urgent need of cutting harmful air pollution from burning coal.

It also encapsulates a dilemma facing many coal-dependent nations: how to reduce emissions of toxic air pollutants without hurting strategic industries or killing low-skilled jobs.

Coal keeps 90,000 people in work and produces 80% of South Africa’s electricity and a third of its liquid fuel, a carbon-intensive and highly polluting process that Sasol pioneered during white minority rule.

When Reuters visited the town 80 km (50 miles) southwest of Johannesburg last month, it was cloaked in smog and pervaded by the stink of sulphur. Putsoenyane was among four families that Reuters spoke to with breathing problems they blamed on the air.

When Hlompho’s parents took her to a lung specialist in the nearest big city, Bloemfontein, the girl immediately improved.

As soon as they got home, though, she was rasping again. The doctor blamed air pollution and said she wouldn’t recover unless they moved, Putsoenyane said.

“But we can’t move,” Putsoenyane said. Her husband Joseph works for a firm providing services to Sasol. It has paid for their school fees, TV, stereo and microwave, among other trappings of modern life.

“So I took her to my father’s house in (neighbouring) Lesotho. Ever since, she’s been fine,” Putsoenyane said.

“But I only see her every six months.”

HEALTH PROBLEMS IN THE COAL BELT

A recently published government-sponsored study examined 700 school children aged 9 to 14 who had been exposed to high levels of pollution in the Highveld coal belt west of Johannesburg, where Sasol has a separate plant and where several coal-fired power stations also operate.

The study found “airway inflammation, abnormal lung function, and asthma symptoms”.

To attempt to address the problem, the government in 2010 set tougher, legally-binding minimum emissions standards for pollutants like sulphur dioxide.

“The Highveld and Sasolburg are among South Africa’s most polluted regions … to address this, the government declared these as priority areas to improve the air people breathe,” environment department spokesperson Peter Mbelengwa said.

But Sasol and other big air polluters have repeatedly – and successfully – sought temporary exemptions from pollution rules.

The company lobbied, in private letters to the environment department in October 2022 and March last year, for “less stringent emissions standards for older facilities” because of the cost of trying to retrofit pollution filters.

A Sasol spokesperson referred Reuters to an August 2023 statement saying that “various (clean air) technologies … were found to be practically infeasible to install in Sasol’s existing plants”.

The spokesperson did not respond to a further request for comment on the specific case of Hlompho and her family.

The private letters, seen by Reuters, were obtained by shareholder activist group Just Share under freedom of information laws.

The national air quality officer initially rejected Sasol’s plea, government documents show. But in April, then environment minister Barbara Creecy overruled the decision to grant Sasol its exemption.

“While Sasol … (has) been granted temporary reprieve from meeting certain emission limits, they must still implement pollution control measures” to meet license terms, Mbelengwa said.

Reuters

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On a tributary of the Hudson River, a tugboat powered by ammonia eased away from the shipyard dock and sailed for the first time to show how the maritime industry can slash planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.

The tugboat used to run on diesel fuel. The New York-based startup company Amogy bought the 67-year-old ship to switch it to cleanly-made ammonia, a new, carbon-free fuel.

The tugboat’s first sail on Sunday night is a milestone in a race to develop zero-emissions propulsion using renewable fuel. Emissions from shipping have increased over the last decade — to about 3% of the global total according to the United Nations — as vessels have gotten much bigger, delivering more cargo per trip and using immense amounts of fuel oil.CEO Seonghoon Woo said he launched Amogy with three friends to help the world solve a huge, pressing concern: This backbone of the global economy has not started to transition to clean energy yet.

“Without solving the problem, it’s not going to be possible to make the planet sustainable,” he said. “I don’t think this is the problem of the next generation. This is a really big problem for our generation.”

The friends met while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In their free time during the COVID-19 pandemic, they brainstormed how to power heavy industries cleanly. They launched their startup in November 2020 in a small space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The name Amogy comes from combining the words ammonia and energy.

They looked for a boat and found the tug in the Feeney Shipyard in Kingston, New York, languishing without a mission. It could break ice, but little to no ice has formed on that part of the Hudson River in recent years, so it was available for sale.

“It represents how serious the problem is when it comes to climate change,” Woo said. The project, he said, is “not just demonstrating our technology, it’s really going to be telling the story to the world that we have to fix this problem sooner than later.”

They named the tugboat NH3 Kraken, after the chemical formula for ammonia and their method of “cracking” it into hydrogen and nitrogen. Amogy’s system uses ammonia to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, making the tug an electric-powered ship. The International Maritime Organization set a target for international shipping to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by, or close to, 2050.

Shipping needs to cut emissions rapidly and there are no solutions widely available today to fully decarbonize deep-sea shipping, according to the Global Maritime Forum, a nonprofit that works closely with the industry. There is a lot of interest in ammonia as an alternative fuel because the molecule doesn’t contain carbon, said Jesse Fahnestock, who leads the forum’s decarbonization work.

Ammonia is widely used for fertilizer, so there is already infrastructure in place for handling and transporting it. Ton for ton, it can hold more energy than hydrogen, and it can be stored and distributed more easily.

“It certainly has the potential to be a main or even the main fuel,” Fahnestock said. “It has a potentially very friendly greenhouse gas footprint.”Ammonia does have drawbacks. It’s toxic. Nearly all of it currently is made from natural gas in a process that is harmful for the climate. And burning it has to be engineered carefully or it, too, yields traces of a powerful greenhouse gas.

Amogy’s technology is different.

The tugboat ran on green ammonia produced by renewable electricity. A 2,000-gallon tank fits in the old fuel tank space, for a 10-to 12-hour day at sea.

It splits liquid ammonia into its constituents, hydrogen and nitrogen, then funnels the hydrogen into a fuel cell that generates electricity for the vessel without carbon emissions. The process does not burn ammonia like a combustion engine would, so it primarily produces nitrogen in its elemental form and water as emissions. The company says there are trace amounts of nitrogen oxides that it’s working to completely eliminate.

Amogy first used ammonia to power a drone in 2021, then a tractor in 2022, a semi-truck in 2023, and now the tugboat to prove the technology. Woo said their system is designed to be used on vessels as small as the tugboat and as large as container ships, and could also make electricity on shore to replace diesel generators for data centers, mining and construction, or other heavy industries.

The company has raised about $220 million. Amazon, an enterprise with immense needs for shipping, is among the investors. Nick Ellis, principal of Amazon’s $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund, said the company is excited and impressed by what Amogy is doing. By investing, Amazon can show ship owners and builders it wants its goods delivered with zero emissions, he added.

“Many folks will now get a chance to see and understand how real and promising this technology is, and that it could actually be in container ships or tugboats in a matter of a few years,” he said. “If you would’ve asked five years ago, I think a lot of people would have thrown up their hands … And suddenly we have not only a compelling example, but a commercially-viable example. These types of things don’t come by every day.”

AP

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