South Africa has set ambitious carbon emission reduction targets, but achieving these goals requires substantial support. The private sector, facing international pressure to reduce emissions, plays a crucial role in tackling economic challenges and developing the necessary technological solutions, many of which are at an early stage.

The challenge 

The British High Commission in South Africa set out four key objectives for the project.

• To foster collaboration between industry, academia, and government entities from South Africa and the UK in driving Net Zero emissions and decarbonisation efforts.
• To identify opportunities for innovative technological solutions and academic research partnerships.
• To leverage the collective expertise, resources to develop actionable plans and initiatives that will contribute to the transition to a sustainable, low-carbon future in both countries.
• To support a just transition for industry to achieve Net Zero, where society gets left behind.

The innovation

Energy Systems Catapult conducted scenario modelling, considering different pathways to Net Zero for the country then reviewed site-level decarbonisation routes. Taking a bottom-up approach and scaling it up to the industry level is an approach not commonly used in South Africa and provided a view on emissions reductions, costs, technologies, and employment pathways that support a just energy transition.

The solution

Working with a local partner the Catapult explored the complex landscape of South Africa to support the extensive engagements we had with key stakeholders and frame the modelling work we delivered.

We modelled different scenarios or routes to Net Zero for key hard-to-decarbonise industrial sectors of aluminium, cement, ammonia, ferro alloy, iron and steel, and titanium in South Africa. They currently account for 58Mt CO₂ every year.

Using South Africa’s current policies as and the country’s available resources, such as those supporting a hydrogen economy and Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage (CCUS) as inputs, the outputs considered were emissions reductions, capital requirements, hydrogen demand, CCUS demand and workforce requirements.

The five scenarios modelled were:

• • renewables push
  • infrastructure development
  • national hydrogen
  • regional hydrogen
  • Net Zero delay

Outputs

Each scenario provided a unique insight into how the overall strategy and pathway to Net Zero will impact individual industrial site decarbonisation. Achieving the highest decarbonisation requires grid decarbonisation in alignment with site-level decarbonisation, but still leaves residual emissions of at least 7Mt/year that need to be abated.

The Renewables Push scenario required the most capital, but also provided the largest workforce boost. The National Hydrogen scenario would cost the least for these industries to decarbonise, require the most hydrogen, and the smallest workforce requirement for the on-site interventions.

Industry-level impacts and requirements were also measured and reported.

Next steps

As part of this report, we have suggested several projects to improve collaboration between the countries as a way forward, including:

• Hydrogen Campus Southern Africa
• support for a first of a kind test and demonstration centre for Coal CO2-X on a coal powerplant
• rooftop solar and under-utilised energy assets.

We’ll continue to engage with key stakeholders to develop these opportunities, but they can be worked on by anyone interested in decarbonisation in South Africa.