Explainer: unpacking the issues around fracking in South Africa

South Africa’s Karoo has shale gas and could be the location for fracking exploration.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings

South Africa has been considering shale gas development in the Karoo – an arid part of the country that spans more than 400 000 square kilometres – to add to its energy mix. The possibility of “fracking” in the region has provoked heated debate. The Conversation Africa’s Ozayr Patel asked Robert Scholes and Greg Schreiner to unpack the issues.

What’s happening in terms of shale gas development in South Africa?

The Scientific Assessment for Shale Gas Development in the Central Karoo was published in October 2016. So far no decisions on the current exploration right applications have been made, despite reports to the contrary. If rights are granted, exploration activities could start within the next 3-5 years, conditional on the results of site-specific environmental impact assessments.

If it’s found that gas from deep shale layers can be liberated at commercially viable flow rates, the Karoo could be the location of a domestic gas industry within the next 20 years, lasting for several decades.

The public and the regulators have had lots of questions about the potential development of shale gas in the Karoo. The scientific assessment assembled a team of over 140 experts to evaluate these questions, clustered under 17 broad issues raised by the stakeholders. It is perhaps the most comprehensive study of its kind undertaken in South Africa.

Is there gas under the Karoo?

Definitely. The deep boreholes drilled in the 1970s revealed traces of gas, especially in the shales of the Whitehill Formation at the bottom of the Karoo geological sequence, several kilometres below the surface. At the time it was deemed non-recoverable because it is “tight” gas, reluctantly yielded by the rock. Technical advances, especially horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking), now make it possible to extract tight shale gas.

This does not mean that it’s economically viable to do so in the Karoo. Large volumes of gas have been claimed to be present based on sparse data, but the economically recoverable resource is much, much smaller. Best current estimates put it in the range 5 to 20 trillion cubic feet (tcf). By global standards, even the top end would be relatively small. For example, the proven reserves of conventional gas in the Mozambique Channel are 75 tcf. But by local standards, even the low end would be helpful; the offshore Mossgas field, now almost depleted, was less than 1 tcf.

What are the benefits of shale gas development?

Why use gas at all when there is abundant cheap solar and wind energy? Because adding quick-to-respond gas turbines into the South African energy mix increases the ability of the power generation system to use intermittent renewable energy sources in a way which slow-to-respond power sources like coal and nuclear cannot.

This technical policy decision has already been taken, as reflected in the country’s integrated resources plan; the only question is where to source the gas.

Cartoon demonstrating the difference between ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ gas reserves.
adapted from
http://worldinfo.org/2012/01/point-of-view-unconventional-natural-gas-drilling

Relative to the use of imported gas, a viable Karoo shale gas find would save foreign exchange, accrue tax and employment benefits and improve national energy security. The number of jobs provided is quite small, especially for the low-skilled unemployed (a few hundred). The size of a shale gas industry in financial turnover terms is of the same order of magnitude as the existing Karoo farming and tourism industries. So it would make little sense to promote shale gas if it were to the significant detriment of existing, longer-term sectors.

What are the main concerns?

Fracking has been shown to increase the frequency of small earth tremors. But the Karoo is exceptionally seismically stable, and the increased risk of dangerously large earthquakes was judged by the scientific assessment to be small.

The risk to water resources is the biggest concern to all those involved. Each production well needs about 15 million litres of fluid to frack. The fluid is mostly water (it doesn’t have to be fresh), sand and a small quantity of potentially harmful chemicals. After fracking, the fluid is pumped back to the surface and stored for fracking the next well. Eventually the contaminated water must be purified, the hazardous material sent to a licensed disposal facility (currently there are none in the Karoo), and the clean water returned to the environment.

The greatest risk is that the fracking fluid leaks into the surface water and shallow aquifers used by people, livestock and the ecosystem, due to inadequate sealing of the upper parts of the borehole, or following a spill on the surface. These risks can be reduced, but not eliminated, by good engineering.

Current potable water resources in the Karoo are already fully allocated. The additional water requirements for shale gas development would either need to use water from local non-potable sources, such as deep saline groundwater, or water imported from outside the region.

The impact of shale gas development on the unique Karoo fauna and flora would mainly come from the accompanying habitat fragmentation and disturbance, rather than physical destruction. Each well-pad occupies just over a hectare, and the number per well-field is about 50. A small gas find may be one well-field, a big find may be five. So the area directly affected is a tiny fraction of the Karoo land area, even once the connecting roads and pipelines are considered. The exact location of the well-pads is quite flexible, which reduces the potential impact on both the rich Karoo cultural heritage resources and particular plant or animal populations.

The biggest and least tractable impact is likely to be social: the introduction of noise, traffic, lights, workers, work-seekers and their dependants into a formerly quiet environment, already struggling to service the resident population.

What questions remain?

Fracking in the Karoo has been presented as a “yes-no” decision that will be taken by government. In reality, the choices are more nuanced, far in the future, and not solely governmental. The scientific assessment asked “under what circumstances and under what regulations would it be sensible?’” It found no reason to completely eliminate shale gas as an option – if best practice is followed. The question that will determine if development proceeds is whether the resource is sufficiently attractive for the private sector to invest the billions of rand needed. Only exploration can answer that.

Robert Scholes, Professor Bob Scholes is a Systems Ecologist at the Global Change Institute (GCI), University of the Witwatersrand and Greg Schreiner, Sustainability scientist, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

If Racism Is the Sin of White America, Irresponsibility Is the Sin of Black America

There is always a sense of safety when we blame someone even if we are the ones on the wrong. Blame game is usually a self-protective response which is normally aimed at protecting our under-performance. Humans use it to shield themselves from repercussion. Considering the above definition, will I be justified to say that one of the plagues eating America is blame game? The whites are pointing their fingers at blacks while blacks are pointing at whites. Because of this counterproductive approach to sensitive matters, the bridge between white and black Americans continue to widen every other day. Surely, if racism is the sin of White America, irresponsibility is the sin of Black America.

The Revolutionary war in 1770s gave the nation a chance to reach for independence and freedom.

The reason why we went to war in the 1770s was to fight injustice, unfairness and oppression. Britain passed laws which gave them power to milk money from their colonists including America. In 1763 the French and Indian war which was fought North America left a huge financial dent on Great Britain. They demanded taxes from America so as to cover the debts. This led to discontent among Americans who felt that the reason why Britain went to war was to strengthen its empire. Anyway, America's victory during this war led to independence and freedom. But, would you really rate America as a free country? Aren't some of our laws aimed at benefiting the elite few?

The civil war in the 1860s gave the nation a chance to rid itself of slavery and racism.

During the civil war America was divided. States which supported slave trade went against Abraham Lincoln while those who valued human life stood by him. This was a grant opportunity for America to rid itself of racism and slavery. It seemed as if we learnt our lessons during that time. But did we? Could it be correct to say that the war was won but the ideologies behind the war are still tacked somewhere in people's minds? Could that be the reason why there is so much insecurity and mistrust towards whites by blacks. Would I be justified to say that this is the reason why whites feel superior to blacks?

America keeps trying to forget what it is, without changing from what it is.

But really, what is the pink elephant in the room? The American dream is citizens' (whether black or white) ability to achieve success through hard work and willpower. There has to be a level playing field. We have to deal with the real issues if we want a change. After all, you can't change what you don't see.

America a house divided against itself cannot stand.

The American people are one. For a long time we have been separated by race, background, and skin color instead of being unified by our same nationality as well as citizenry. Racial discrimination and ethnic isolation are toxic and should be avoided by all means.

We need to accept that we are all to blame for what our country has turned out to become. We need to agree that, if racism is the sin of White America, irresponsibility is the sin of Black America. Let us take our country back from disunity and division. It can be done. Remember, black or white, we are each others' brothers keeper and strength.

Ranches Lee Hall is a pastor. He's been online now for several years operating different blogs and online businesses and providing helpful information. He enjoy songwriting, reading the bible, playing the keyboard or piano he currently runs http://stopracialprofiling.org

Connecting The Dots: Speculation, Wishful Thinking, Or Accurate Interpretation?

This year, we have witnessed, nearly every day, some sort of report/ reports, questioning particular behaviors, actions, motivations, influences, and/ or reasons, certain elected officials, have done something! If you review almost any of these reports, from a variety of different media, you might believe you are reading about totally different events. For example, here, in New York, I read four newspapers, daily. The NY Post often emphasizes and/ or reports, far differently than, either Newsday, the NY Times, or, even, The Wall Street Journal (although the Journal and Post, share the same ownership). How can someone know, what's actually going on, and differentiate between speculation, wishful thinking, or accurate interpretation?

1. Speculation: How is the connecting the dots, being done? Is it based on digging deeply, discovering additional facts, pursuing leads, etc, or is it mere speculation? How much does the specific media's position, conform to the political views and preferences of the editors, etc? How extreme is the connection? Is there only one situation, being cited, or are there, a variety of related circumstances? In a courtroom, unsupported speculation, is referred to as Circumstantial Evidence! How much effort is made, to discover additional facts, that bring more light, to the matter? Is this speculation, somewhat innocent, and based on a degree of journalistic laziness and/ or convenience, or on a particular political position?

2. Wishful thinking: Does the source of the information, follow the leads, and discover information, or, is it, based on wishful thinking, wish supports your desired perspective and view? Is the reporter delving deeply, or simply, trying to support a specific, preconceived notion, idea and/ or perspective? Is this reporting based on journalistic integrity, or irresponsible skewing of facts, to distort certain positions?

3. Accurate judgment: If a reporter follows the facts, without trying to interpret prematurely, and gathers enough information, to be able to develop a fair and accurate judgment, he or she, is the rare, principled political reporter! Rather than jump to conclusions, we should all carefully review the source of the information, examine the record, and whether, they have previously, let their personal, political philosophy, direct their reporting!

Beware when someone connects the dots! Examine the thoroughness, objectivity, fairness, and accuracy of their information - gathering procedure!

Richard has owned businesses, COO, CEO, Director of Development, consultant, professionally run events, worked on political campaigns, consulted to thousands, and conducted personal development seminars, for 4 decades. Rich has written three books and thousands of articles. Website: http://plan2lead.net and LIKE the Facebook page for common sense politics: http://facebook.com/commonsense4all

More secrets of human ancestry emerge from South African caves

“Neo” skull of Homo naledi from the Lesedi Chamber.
John Hawks/Wits University

Africa’s richest fossil hominin site has revealed more of its treasure. It’s been a year and a half since scientists announced that a new hominin species, which they called Homo naledi, had been discovered in the Rising Star Cave outside Johannesburg.

Now they say they have established and published the age of the original naledi fossils that garnered global headlines in 2015. Homo naledi lived sometime between 335 and 236 thousand years ago, making it relatively young.

They’ve also announced the discovery of a second chamber in the Rising Star cave system, which contained additional Homo naledi specimens. These include a child and the partial skeleton of an adult male with a well-preserved skull. They have named the skeleton “Neo” – a Sesotho word meaning “a gift”.

The Conversation Africa’s Science Editor Natasha Joseph asked Professor John Hawks, a member of the team, to explain the story behind these finds.

To an ordinary person, 236 000 years is a very long time ago. Why does the team suggest that in fact, Homo naledi is a “young” species?

The course of human evolution has taken the last seven million years since our ancestors diverged from those of chimpanzees and bonobos. The first two-thirds of that long history, called australopiths, were apelike creatures who developed the trick of walking upright on two legs.

Around two million years ago some varieties of hominins took the first real steps in a human direction. They’re the earliest clear members of our genus, Homo, and belong to species like Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo rudolfensis.

Homo naledi looks in many ways like these first members of Homo. It’s even more primitive than these species in many ways, and has a smaller brain than any of them. People outside our team who have studied the fossils mostly thought they should be around the same age. A few had the radical idea that H. naledi might have lived more recently, maybe around 900,000 years ago.

Nobody thought that these fossils could actually have come from the same recent time interval when modern humans were evolving, a mere 236 to 335 thousand years ago.

How do you figure out a fossil’s age?

We applied six different methods. The most valuable of these were electron spin resonance (ESR) dating, and uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating. ESR relies on the fact that teeth contain tiny crystals, and the electron energy in these crystals is affected by natural radiation in the ground over long periods of time after fossils are buried.

U-Th relies on the fact that water drips into caves and forms layers of calcite, which contain traces of uranium. The radioactive fraction of uranium decays into thorium slowly over time. So the proportion of thorium compared to uranium gives an estimate of the time since the calcite layers formed. One of these calcite deposits, called a flowstone, formed above the H. naledi fossils in the Dinaledi Chamber. That flowstone helps to establish the minimum age: the fossils must be older than the flowstone above them.

For these two methods, our team engaged two separate labs and asked them to process and analyse samples without talking to each other. Their processes produced the same results. This gives us great confidence that the results are reliable.

What does the discovery of Homo naledi’s age mean for our understanding of human history and evolution?

For at least the past 100 years, anthropologists have assumed that most of the evolution of Homo was a story of progress: brains got bigger over time, technology became more sophisticated and teeth got smaller as people relied more upon cleverness to get better food and prepare it by cooking.

We thought that once culture really got started, our evolution was driven by a feedback loop – better food allowed bigger brains, more clever adaptations, more sophisticated communication. That enabled better technology, which yielded more food, and so on like a snowball rolling downhill.

No other hominin species could compete with this human juggernaut. You would never see more than one form of human in a single part of the world, because the competition would be too intense. Other forms, like Neanderthals, existed within regions of the world apart from the mainstream leading to modern humans in Africa. But even they were basically human with large brains.

That thinking was wrong.

Africa south of the equator is the core of human evolutionary history. That’s where today’s human populations were most genetically diverse, and that diversity is just a small part of what once existed there. Different lineages of archaic humans once lived in this region. Anthropologists have found a few fossil remnants of these archaic populations. They’ve tried to connect those remnants in a straight line. But the genetic evidence suggests that they were much more complex, with deep divisions that occasionally intertwined.

H. naledi shows a lineage that existed for probably more than a million years, maybe two million years, from the time it branched from our family tree up to the last 300,000 years. During all this time, it lived in Africa with archaic lineages of humans, with the ancestors of modern humans, maybe with early modern humans themselves. It’s strikingly different from any of these other human forms, so primitive in many aspects. It represents a lost hominin community within which our species evolved.

I think we have to reexamine much of what we thought we knew about our shared evolutionary past in Africa. We know a lot of information from a few very tiny geographic areas. But the largest parts of the continent are unknown – they have no fossil record at all.

Explorers Mathabela Tsikoane, Maropeng Ramalepa, Dirk van Rooyen, Steven Tucker (seated), and Rick Hunter (seated) inside the Rising Star cave system.
Wits University/Marina Elliott

We’re working to change that, and as our team and others make new discoveries, I’m pretty sure we are going to find more lineages that have been hidden to us. H. naledi will not be the last.

The first Homo naledi discoveries were made in the Dinaledi Chamber. What led researchers to the second chamber? And what did you find there?

The Dinaledi Chamber is one of the most significant fossil finds in history. After excavating only a very tiny part of this chamber, the sample of hominin specimens is already larger than any other single assemblage in Africa.

The explorers who first found these bones, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, saw what the team was doing when they were excavating in the chamber. The pair realised that they might have seen a similar occurrence in another part of the cave system. The Rising Star system has more than two kilometres of mapped passages underground. In another deep chamber, accessed again through very tight underground squeezes, there were hominin bones exposed on the surface.

Our team first began systematic survey of this chamber, which we named the Lesedi Chamber, in 2014. For two years Marina Elliott led excavations, joined at times by most of the team’s other experienced underground excavators. They were working in a situation where bones are jammed into a tight blind tunnel. Only one excavator can fit at a time, belly-down, feet sticking out. It is an incredibly challenging excavation circumstance.

Geologist Dr Hannah Hilbert-Wolf studying difficult to reach flowstones in a small side passage in the Dinaledi Chamber.
Wits University

The most significant discovery is a partial skeleton of H. naledi, with parts of the arms, legs, a lot of the spine and many other pieces, as well as a beautifully complete skull and jaw. We named this skeleton “Neo”. We also recovered fragments of at least one other adult individual, and one child, although we suspect these bones may come from one or two more individuals.

Is there a way for people to view these discoveries in person?

On May 25 – Africa Day – Maropeng at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site outside Johannesburg will open a new exhibit with the discoveries from the Lesedi Chamber and the Dinaledi Chamber together for the first time.

For people outside South Africa, the data from our three-dimensional scans of the new Lesedi fossils are available online.

Anyone can download the 3D models, and people with access to a 3D printer can print their own physical copies of the new fossils, as well as the fossils from the Dinaledi Chamber. It’s a great way for people to see the evidence for themselves.

John Hawks, Paleoanthropologist, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Families in the dark waiting for Eskom

Many Wallacedene residents have been without electricity because of faulty installation

By Vincent Lali
13 July 2017

Electrification has been completed at Wallacedene temporary relocation area, but many residents say the Eskom-installed boxes are faulty. Photo: Vincent Lali

Residents in a temporary relocation area (TRA) in Wallacedene, Kraaifontein, have been without electricity for months because of faulty electricity boxes installed by Eskom.

Some residents have returned to candles and paraffin, while others connect to their neighbours if they have electricity. In some cases, residents have electricity boxes that work, but they have not been getting their free electricity allocation since the boxes were installed. The City provides poor households with 25 or 60 free kilowatt hours per month depending on total usage (less than 250 kWh or less than 450 kWh on average per month).

Community leader Sibusiso Gibson says he has reported the problem numerous times to the manager in charge of electrification.

According to Eskom, the overall electrification of the TRA is complete and the last 38 customers were connected on 30 April. Eskom says it is in the the process of rectifying the problem “and could only attend to the problem once the customers brought it to our attention”.

But Gibson says he has been calling the manager in charge for months. “He always promises to come and sort out these problems, or says electricians are already on their way … In the end, nobody ever comes to help us.”

Resident Xolani Dimanda said his electricity box was installed in February and it has never worked. The electricians who installed it said it still needed a meter box to be attached. They said they were waiting for meter boxes from the City of Cape Town.

Resident Busisiwe Siganga also said that the electricians who installed her box told her they had run out of meter boxes. They promised to return but did not.

Sibanga then connected to her neighbour, but after the recent rains there was a short and she is now without electricity. Sibanga had waited six years for the electrification of Wallacedene. “I want the electricity box to work so that I can cook and boil water to wash my kids and keep my place warm,” she said. Siganga has two children, aged two and 11. “My kids’ grant money is not enough to buy electricity, so I desperately need free electricity,” she said. GroundUp spoke to several other residents with similar problems.

The City of Cape Town referred GroundUp to Eskom.

Provincial communication manager at Eskom, Jolene Henn, said, “We have found some meters were in fact installed faulty and we have taken this up directly with the supplier.”

She said, “A contractor has been appointed to correct the faulty meters and we are anticipating all work to be done by 16 July 2017.”

Busisiwe Siganga, 28, says the electricians never finished the installation in her shack. Photo: Vincent Lali

---

Published originally on GroundUp .

---