Kinetiko Energy (ASX:KKO) announced on Tuesday that it’s the first company to produce power in South Africa using an onshore gas source.
The company “successfully demonstrated power production” from a solitary gas well at Amersfoort alongside partner entity FFS Refiners.
A gas train was constructed on-site to feed a 1.2MW gas generator – relatively small as far as what grid-scale projects can otherwise boast as a nameplate, but, significant enough to suggest further success could represent commercial value.
That commercial value would be unlocked alongside the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) of South Africa, with which Kinetiko intends to develop an LNG production cluster of around 30 wells in total.
The well that produced the gas fed into the 1.2MW generator was just one among a cluster of 5 wells at Amersfoot, located in the boundary of permit ER271.
Kinetiko is hopeful that a 2C reserve estimate of no less than six trillion cubic feet of gas (6Tcf) can be extracted in full – at a time when the company reports South Africa’s need for energy as “desperate.”
“We have spent the last few months working hard to demonstrate the Company’s ability to generate power from our natural gas at its Amersfoort project in Mpumalanga,” Kinetiko CEO Nick de Blocq said.
“We obtained respected, professional engineering and equipment suppliers to support this project and we are absolutely thrilled to have become the pioneers of onshore Gas To Power (GTP) from a local, conventional source.
“[This] represents another significant milestone for the Company, establishing it as a proven solution within the energy mix planned to alleviate South Africa’s energy crisis.”
KKO last traded at 8cps.