Barbara Creecy, the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, says coal will still be a big part of South Africa’s energy mix well into the 2040’s. File: ANA
African countries, including South Africa, cannot follow any one agenda to achieve their net zero carbon emissions targets, despite the prescripts of developed countries, they need to do it their own way, Crispian Olver, the executive director of the South Africa Climate Commission said yesterday.
Speaking at an intergovernmental summit at the African Mining Indaba, Olver said while African governments needed to work to maximise job creation and livelihoods, if they moved too fast on the energy transition they risked shutting down industries and sectors still dependent on the fossil fuel economy, and if they moved too slow, they risked falling behind on economic opportunities and being shut out of the global economy.
Barbara Creecy, the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, said South Africa had never advocated a “sudden” move towards a low carbon economy, and the building of a low carbon economy also “won’t happen overnight.”
She said coal would still be a big part of South Africa’s energy mix well into the 2040’s and improving the coal availability to the power stations remained a priority.
However, she said, this did not mean the country’s goal of net zero emission by 2050 should be ignored.
She cited China and India as examples of large countries still using large amounts of coal to fuel power stations, while at the same time these countries had among the biggest renewable energy build programmes in the world.
She said there were economic risks in ignoring the net zero transition. For example, the European Union is considering carbon intensity-based import tariffs.
The EU in December struck a political deal among their member countries to impose carbon dioxide emissions tariffs on imports of polluting goods such as steel and cement.
Mineral Resources and Energy Deputy Minister Dr Nobuhle Nkabane said that as a developmental state, a priority on government’s agenda is solving “energy poverty”, while at the same time the country had to embark on an energy transition to meet its commitments on climate change.
Creecy said there were also opportunities in the energy transition for South Africa, as the country is on the list of top five countries in terms of sunshine and wind availability, while it also holds the largest reserves of platinum group metals.
“There is no physical reason why we should not take advantage of these resources,” she said.
Silas Olan’g, Africa Energy Transition Advisor for the National Resource Governance Institute, said the road to decarbonisation needed to be just and fair, especially considering 900 million Africans currently did not have access to electricity,
Olan’g said renewable energy development on the continent also needed to take into account that electricity demand was relatively low compared with in developed countries, and private sector developers of renewable energy projects would not invest where demand was low.
Themba Mkhwanazi, the CEO Global Bulk Commodities at Anglo American, said Africa’s growing demographic resources would create demand for the minerals that needed to be mined on the continent for the global drive to decarbonisation over the next few decades.
He said it could take up to 20 years to get a new mine up and running, and African countries needed to work so that permitting and other authorisations, although necessary, could be completed faster; there was a shortage of the “right skills” in mining on the continent, and fiscal incentives needed to be put in place to “ensure we can have bankable feasibility studies,” prior to investing in new mines and expansions.
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