Here is another article on this matter some good reading in it.
CAPE TOWN (miningweekly.com) – The study being conducted by South Africa’s Council for Geosciences (CGS) into the country’s coal resources and reserves was being finalised for release in the first half of this year, Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu said on Thursday.
Shabangu told the IHS McCloskey South African Coal Exports Conference in Cape Town that she was hopeful that the report would present an opportunity for stakeholders to discuss the future of the industry and help inform government’s long-range planning in terms of security of local supplies.
“Also, the study could provide opportunities for the growth and expansion of the industry,” the Minister said.
Speaking on the 22nd anniversary of the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC), a precurser to the release from prison of former South African President Nelson Mandela on February 11, Shabangu refused to be drawn on Mining Weekly Online’s questions relating to a leaking of the outcome of a study commissioned by South Africa's ruling ANC, which reportedly strongly rejects calls for mine nationalisation as being unconstitutional but comes out in favour of higher Australia-type taxes.
In what appeared to be a reference to the document that has given nationalisation the thumbs down, Shabangu said in her prepared speech that it could be presumed that ANC deliberations that would take place during the course of 2012 would have an important bearing on South Africa’s mining industry.
The Minister said that it was imperative that the mining industry, working together with government, should continuously explore ways of improving its performance and raising its contribution to the South African economy.
She told Mining Weekly Online that she did not believe that coal should be singled out for explicit policy-making, but should rather be dealt with as part of a total national energy mix, which the completed CGS study would help to clarify.
The Department of Mineral Resources, working through the Mining Growth, Development and Employment Task Team (Migdett), had identified job creation, skills shortage, infrastructural constraints and access to rail and port facilities for junior miners as coal industry challenges.
To meet the challenges, Migdett had resolved to form a coal sector subcommittee, which would devise a strategy for coal’s survival and prosperity.
In so doing, stakeholders hoped to speed up the resolution of problems facing the sector while accelerating the implementation of the agenda to address the national developmental challenges.
“Government will continue to ensure that the coal industry thrives,” Shabangu promised.
In that regard, the government’s role was removing infrastructural constraints in a co-ordinated fashion through the highest possible Presidential Integrated Infrastructure Planning Committee level.
“This is an opportunity for the industry to participate and contribute to the country’s long-term developmental plans,” Shabangu pointed out.
Although the coal-mining industry benefited the country in many ways, it could impact negatively on the environment through polluting water into acid mine drainage (AMD) and providing a product that released climate-change-inducing greenhouse gases.
Advances in science were providing more accurate feedback on the environmental impact of fossil fuels, which was guiding international and local industries on how to mitigate the negative impacts resulting from exploitation of this energy source.
To ameliorate AMD’s impact in the coal-mining sector, the CGS was conducting focused research to quantify the extent of the problem and identify possible rehabilitation measures.
While South Africa had made clear its commitment to reduce its carbon footprint through various programmes including the diversification of its energy mix, coal still had a vital role to play in the country’s energy generation, which South Africa had told the United Nation’s seventeenth Conference of the Parties COP 17) in Durban did not mean the abandonment of coal.
Important resolutions had been adopted at COP 17 in response to the climate change debate, which pointed to the need for coal to be repositioned.
“In this regard, the industry needs to raise the level of investment in clean coal technologies research programmes. This is likely to present the country with opportunities to continue exploiting this vast resource without the risk of raising further the carbon intensity of its economy,” Shabangu said.
Continued reliance of the sector on the previously advantaged 20% of the population, “obsessed with a bottom line approach at the expense of national objectives”, had undermined transformational objectives.
“We need to use the wilfully excluded vast human capital to devise a truly South African solution to the challenges facing this sector,” she said.
More disappointing, Shabangu added, was the habit of most black economic-empowered (BEE) companies merely to buy mining assets and yet still perpetuate the pre-1994 trend.
The coal sector needed to take stock of the problems being experienced by small producers and aspirant exporters to gain access to the export markets through the privately-owned and -operated Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT).
Certain elements seemed determined to deny junior miners allocations through the charging of exorbitant prices for RBCT access.
Shabangu hoped the coal sector would do something tangible to alleviate the plight of the junior operators, who found it difficult to access funding for their exploration and mining activities, which led to premature sale that defeated the objective of raising levels of participation of BEEs in coal.
The safety performance of the coal industry, which had only been “good in parts”, had already suffered three 2012 fatalities.
“There are signs that the dark clouds of complacency are creeping in at a time when we can least afford them to do so,” she added.
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