GEORGE NEWS - The Petroleum Agency South Africa (Pasa) held a stakeholder information session at the Pacaltsdorp Community Hall on Wednesday 3 December, for any interested parties from the George area.
Similar sessions were held in Oudtshoorn and Mossel Bay, led by Caiphus Motsoaledi, a geoscientist tasked with stakeholder relations with Pasa, the regulator of oil and gas exploration and production activities.
Motsoaledi highlighted the advantages of exploration and production, saying that if the country is able to produce its own energy, it is able to influence the price of energy to the benefit of the economy and citizens. A diverse energy supply ensures reliability and security for the country, and creates employment.
The sessions were held in light of possible future exploitation of gas reserves in the Karoo Basin and the offshore gas wells off the Southern Cape coast.
In October, the Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, Gwede Mantashe, announced that geophysical surveys for shale gas in the Karoo Basin will be going ahead following the conclusion of a consultation process. A moratorium on shale gas exploration and production rights, imposed in 2011, is to be lifted once new regulations on shale gas are published, which will provide a framework to control environmental and safety concerns associated with hydraulic fracturing in the Karoo.
The moratorium had been implemented following court action by environmental groups concerned about ecological impacts.
The Karoo Basin is estimated to hold up to 209 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of exploitable gas, and Mantashe is of the opinion that the exploitation of such a large amount of indigenous gas could hold many benefits for South Africa in terms of energy security, economic growth and job creation.
According to a 2012 report by the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Department's working group on shale gas and hydraulic fracturing, the potential socio-economic impacts are little in the early phases when much of the work will be done by specialists brought in from other countries, but for longer-term operations, should production proceed, the establishment of additional gas turbine electricity generation installations or gas-to-liquids (GTL) plants may follow with associated employment opportunities 'potentially numbering in the thousands'.
As for the status of the two offshore gas wells in Block 11B/12B in the South Outeniqua Basin off the Mossel Bay coast, the operator, Africa Energy, recently announced that it has obtained an extension to the deadline for the submission of a new environmental and social impact assessment to 4 May 2026. The Canadian-based Africa Energy is invested in Main Street 1549 (Pty) Ltd, which holds an interest in Block 11B/12B. The proposed extraction has also been met with opposition from the environmentally conscious.
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