Machinery is only one part of the capability required to build a hydrogen industry. Behind the electrolysers, storage systems and other equipment sit the people expected to understand how those technologies work, install and operate them, and eventually make decisions about the projects in which they will be used.
“Hydrogen is not just a molecule the way people see it,” Nkunzi says. “It is a complex sector that involves multidisciplinary parts.”
She begins listing them: chemical and process engineers, electrical engineers and technicians, people working on hydrogen storage, water management and the environment. Yet when Nkunzi looks at the programmes available in many African universities, she sees a gap between some of the skills being taught and those beginning to emerge around hydrogen projects. “When you see their curriculum and what is really needed, it is totally different,” she says. “So there is really a gap in green hydrogen project skills in Africa.”
That gap eventually finds its way into the economics of a project. A developer unable to find particular expertise locally may have to bring specialists in from elsewhere, carrying the additional expense into a sector already trying to bring down the cost of what it produces. “This is adding the expenses to the company,” Nkunzi says, “which will come back to the cost of hydrogen derivative or hydrogen product.”
For Nkunzi, closing that gap does not mean rebuilding university education around hydrogen. She imagines something more practical: introducing parts of the emerging industry into engineering, renewable-energy and technical programmes that already exist, so that the people moving through them encounter the basic technologies and concepts they may later meet in the field. “They cannot totally change the curriculum,” she says, “but they can just have those basics.”
The same need for understanding reaches beyond the people who will work directly on a hydrogen plant. Nkunzi points to the ministries and national institutions that will receive applications from developers seeking permits and licences for technologies that are still unfamiliar in many places. If an application concerns green hydrogen, natural hydrogen or another emerging pathway, the people assessing it need enough knowledge to understand what is being proposed. She believes professionals already working in those institutions should also be supported to learn “the basics of those new concepts,” allowing their knowledge to develop alongside the technologies they are increasingly being asked to oversee.
A hydrogen project eventually has to arrive somewhere.
The land and resources that appear as inputs in a feasibility study may already sit within an economy of their own, supporting people who have spent years farming, fishing or building livelihoods around them. For Nkunzi, understanding what a project will create therefore begins with understanding what is already there.
She gives the example of an agricultural community whose livelihood has developed around a particular crop over generations. If a new energy project arrives and changes the community’s access to the land on which that livelihood depends, the consequences continue long after the construction crews have left. Jobs created during the building phase may provide income for a period, but the deeper question, as she sees it, is what kind of livelihood remains once construction is finished and the plant settles into decades of operation.
“If there is a job creation, but how long will it last?” she asks.
The question becomes particularly important for hydrogen because producing it can require significant quantities of water, bringing the physical needs of a project into the same landscape as the needs of people who were already there. https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Dec/Water-for-hydrogen-production Nkunzi believes understanding that relationship should begin while a project is still being imagined, before designs, financial assumptions and feasibility studies have narrowed what developers believe can be changed.
“I would suggest for developers or investors to contact the community before even doing a feasibility study,” she says, so that they can understand how people already use the land and resources around a proposed site, what they fear losing and what alternatives could realistically sustain them if a project changes an existing livelihood.
For her, local participation in the hydrogen industry also carries meaning here. A developer who comes from the same environment may recognise the value of a livelihood in ways that cannot always be captured in a project spreadsheet, because the lake being discussed as a water resource may also be the lake from which families have eaten for years.
“Imagine if you are a local company, you know that maybe your mother was eating because they were fishing from this lake,” she says. “And now this lake is going to be closed.”
What replaces that livelihood, and how long the replacement lasts, becomes part of the value a project leaves in the place where it is built.
Nkunzi carries that question of longevity into another part of the energy transition, what happens to the technologies themselves after years of use?
When the Technology Reaches the End of Its Life
Solar systems, batteries and electrolysers may remain in use for years, but eventually they too have to be replaced. Nkunzi looks ten or fifteen years ahead, when some of the equipment being installed as the energy transition expands begins reaching the end of its useful life and another generation of technology is needed in its place.
“I would say that one of the sustainable solutions is to do recycling,” she says.
Her reasoning returns to the minerals from which much of that equipment is made. As solar systems, batteries and electrolysers age and are replaced, manufacturing new equipment creates another demand for materials, while the mineral deposits supplying them have already been drawn down by what came before. If renewable-energy deployment continues to grow across the continent, Nkunzi expects that demand to grow with it.
“The best solution is to find the way, especially in Africa, to do recycling,” she says, “at least to use the maximum of what you have been using before, so that the demand could get in balance with the reserves that we have.”
It means that the industry Nkunzi imagines has a life beyond the moment a project begins producing hydrogen. The equipment being installed today will age, the materials used to make it will still carry value, and the question of what Africa builds around hydrogen will eventually include what it learns to recover from the technologies that have already served their first purpose.
Fifteen Years From Now
When Nkunzi imagines Africa’s hydrogen industry fifteen years from now, she does not begin with the number of projects that might appear on a map. She thinks about what those projects could allow African economies to produce for themselves.
Fertiliser is one of the examples she returns to. Fuels are another. For Nkunzi, producing hydrogen is one part of a much longer chain that can extend into the products and industries that economies already depend on.
“If we produce hydrogen, we should be able to produce the final product locally,” she says.
It is also why she is less interested in judging the future of the industry by the size of individual projects. A smaller project can still matter if other economic activity begins to develop around it, particularly where the hydrogen produced finds its way into products already needed within the country or region.
Fifteen years from now, that is what Nkunzi hopes will have changed. She wants to see African companies participating further along the value chain and more of the products that hydrogen can help produce being made on the continent.
Simply developing hydrogen projects, she says, “is not my final purpose.”
“What I want to see, whether the hydrogen projects are big or small, is the industry that will be created around them.”