James Mnyupe

a thousand kilometers of coastline, we decided to come up with a blueprint that would help us manifest the socioeconomic outcomes we wanted, create new jobs, attract FDI and build new infrastructure.

We realized that our neighbors around us, there's 172 million of them, could actually really use this clean energy.

A lot of them have mineral endowments such as cobalt, platinum, iron ore and manganese.

And of course, we could use our transport networks in our country to transport these minerals to clients around the world in Japan, Europe and beyond.

Now, these clients are becoming more and more carbon-conscious, thanks to a lot of good TED Talks.

And they're saying they would like their goods to have lower carbon content, so the renewable energy will help.

But what if we could also decarbonize the transport routes?

And so between the president and myself, we crafted what we called the Green Industrialization Blueprint.

Armed with this particular blueprint, we embarked on a very targeted economic diplomatic mission, because for every glass of lemonade you make, you'd need a decent spoon to stir all these ingredients.

So what were we able to do?

Between 2021 and 2024, we came back with more than 80 million euros in grant funding.

And what did we do with this grant funding?

We built stuff like the first direct reduced-iron facility of its kind in the world.

is about a 25-megawatt solar array, 13.5 megawatts of battery.

There's 12 megawatts of electrolyzers, which of course is the largest electrolyzer array in Southern Africa today.

Now, those electrolyzers, they're two stacks of six megawatts each, and they weigh 46 tons apiece.

electrolyzers can take water and split it into its constituent molecules of oxygen and hydrogen.

The oxygen you can vent, doesn't harm the environment, and the hydrogen can be used as a reducing agent for iron ore, which has iron and oxygen.

So what you do is you take the hydrogen that you've now been powering with your renewable electricity, and you put it into the machine, which is a horizontal gas-tight kiln.

Now, under high temperatures, the hydrogen goes and reacts with the oxygen in the iron ore, because it's recently been separated from the oxygen from the water, and so it reacts with that oxygen from the iron ore,