South Africa plans to lift a 13-year moratorium on shale gas exploration in the ecologically sensitive Karoo Basin, despite serious environmental and climate concerns raised by advocacy groups.
In 2011, the government imposed a ban on hydraulic fracturing in the Karoo, a semidesert region spanning more than 400,000 square kilometers (154,000 square miles) across northern South Africa and home to about 1 million people.
The ban was put in place to develop a regulatory framework for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial extraction method that involves drilling deep into the earth and injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals to fracture shale rock and release trapped natural gas. Research suggests that fracking operations negatively impact human health, consume large volumes of water, contaminate groundwater, and degrade soil and air quality.
In July this year, Gwede Mantashe, the petroleum minister, announced the government is making “concerted efforts” to lift the moratorium in the Karoo Basin. He added that environmental baseline studies are underway.
On Nov. 7, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) released its draft environmental regulations for onshore oil and gas extraction and fracking, which covers shale gas extraction. The draft is currently open for a 30-day public consultation period. “Once those regulations are gazetted, I lift the moratorium,” Mantashe told Reuters in October.
The move could pave the way for several companies, including Shell, to resume previously submitted applications for exploration.
“Lifting the moratorium prioritizes short-term economic gains over long-term environmental and socioeconomic well-being,” Paul Wani Lado, a lawyer at the South African NGO Centre for Environmental Rights, told Mongabay. Lado added the move follows a 2024 law aimed at fast-tracking oil and gas exploration and production, which is still pending presidential proclamation.
Earlier this year, Mantashe said at a conference that oil and gas are key components of the country’s economy and energy trajectory as it seeks to shift its energy mix away from coal.
Critics of oil and gas exploration in the region, however, argue that the push for fossil fuels contradicts South Africa’s international commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as its constitutional obligation to protect citizens from the impacts of climate change.
Lifting the moratorium “risks entrenching fossil fuel dependency, diverting investment from renewables, and undermining efforts to create sustainable jobs,” Lado said.
“The Karoo is an arid area, and the consequences for its scarce water resources will be disastrous,” added Jan Glazewski, a retired professor of law at the University of Cape Town, who has assessed South Africa’s technical readiness for a shale gas industry.
Neither the DFFE nor the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy responded to Mongabay’s requests for comments by the time this story was published.
Banner image: A hill in the main Karoo Basin, near the area where exploration would take place. Image by flowcomm via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
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