South Africa

Energy Mix: Coal and Renewables

South Africa has abundant coal reserves, estimated at 48 gigatons, which represents 5.7 percent of global reserves. South Africa is the fifth-largest producer of saleable hard coal in the world, after China, the United States, India, and Australia. 60 percent of South Africa's coal goes to Europe, while the rest goes to countries in the Pacific Rim. Coal is South Africa's third-largest export earner.

In the 1950s, for political and strategic reasons, the government began a program of reducing dependence of crude oil imports. In 1954, Sasol established the Sasol 1 coal-to-liquid fuel plant in Sasolburg. The process involves breaking down the coal and gas into a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (called syngas) and then building these up through the Fischer–Tropsch process into hydrocarbons such as methane, petrol, diesel, paraffin, and polymers. Today, the synthetic fuel plants of Mossgas and Sasol supply about 35 percent of the final liquid fuel demand in the country, with the remaining supply coming from imported crude oil. South Africa now has the world's largest production of liquid fuels from coal and natural gas.

In 2004, South Africa began construction of the Medupi coal-fired power plant in the Limpopo province. The plant is the largest dry-cooled, supercritical, coal-fired power plant in the world and will add one-eighth to South Africa's current power generation, coming on line in 2012. Although dry-cooled plants are less efficient and more expensive to develop compared with water-cooled plants, constraints on water availability led [Page 1274]to the selection of supercritical, dry-cooled technology at Mendupi. A constraint on water resources is one of the factors leading to the promotion of more renewable energy technologies. Because of the environmental impacts of the Mendupi plant (including large CO2 emissions and high water usage), the national government and the World Bank (which are assisting to fund the plant) have received some criticism. The agreement to go ahead with the Mendupi facility was viewed to be contrary to the South African government's policy commitments to reduce CO2 emission levels.

A windmill near Johannesburg: Wind resources, largely untapped, could be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from generating electricity. Onshore wind has an estimated potential to meet 1 percent of South Africa's electrical generation needs.

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