27/01/2012 (On-The-Air)

Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Xolani Gwala speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Excerpt from the transcript:

Gwala: Staying with matters surrounding energy, the US government is now offering South Africa’s free insights into the money-making shale-gas business.

Creamer: This is the second part of the dialogue with the US. It began in Washington last year, when the energy bodies of South Africa and US had a dialogue and now its continued this month in South Africa. The Americans are saying are saying that they have gone through the whole know-how process of shale-gas, they are a developed economy and they know the sort of environmental safeguards that are needed, the health standard etc.

We have got shale gas in the Karoo and they understand that the environmentalists are upset and they are stopping the process at the moment. The US Department of Energy, they have got a whole lot of know-how and recommendations how to overcome these environmental issues and they are prepared to share those with us.

This is something that South Africa should take up, because a developed world country like America has gone from zero to hero in shale gas in 12 years. At the turn of the century there was hardly any shale gas, because there wasn’t the technology to do it.

With the technological breakthrough, the fracking, of course, America has now 30% of its natural gas coming from shale gas. We can see a tremendous potential. We are sitting in the Karoo here they are talking about one of the biggest deposits of shale gas possibly 485-trillion cubic feet.

That has to be firmed up. Now we have got this helping hand saying let us give you a start on this, because we have gone through the process already and we know how valuable this. It is a miracle story, could make a lot of money for South Africa, and, of course, we also have to satisfy the environmental imperatives and hopefully with the help of the Department of Energy of the United States we can do so painlessly.