The government can’t move on its fracking ambitions until it meets the court order requiring that there will be no environmental damage
Five years ago, Doug Stern and other Karoo landowners won their court fight against the department of mineral resources and energy when the Eastern Cape high court declared that the fracking regulations it had prepared were invalid.
“I think we won some very important battles,” said Stern, a sixth-generation livestock farmer from Graaff-Reinet. “We would never entertain fracking in the Karoo.”
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves drilling deep into the earth and then using small explosions and a mix of water, sand, and chemicals to break up shale rock that contains natural gas and oil. The risks include groundwater contamination, fracking-induced earthquakes, air pollution and methane pollution, worsening climate change.
While the government “keeps making threats” about its fracking ambitions, it has a “sword hanging over its head”, Stern said. “They can’t really do anything until such time as they fulfil what the court order requires of them … whereby the judge is going to be happy that they’re not going to contaminate and damage the fragile water of this country.”
In 2019, the supreme court of appeal set aside the department of mineral resources and energy’s regulations in their entirety because it found the department did not have the mandate to draft environmental regulations. It ordered the environment minister to draft regulations to protect the environment during unconventional oil and gas extraction.
Forestry, Fisheries and Environment Minister Barbara Creecy has gazetted proposed regulations for the exploration and production of onshore oil and gas requiring hydraulic fracturing in terms of the National Environmental Management Act, for public comment.
The purpose is to protect the environment during the different phases of oil and gas development, including exploration, hydraulic fracturing and production. The department also published a comment document specifying the minimum information requirements for oil and gas production licence applications.
An environmental authorisation is required for each phase of the process, including seismic surveys without hydraulic fracturing, hydraulic fracturing and the production phase. “This step-wise approach allows for information to be generated to support each phase of the process and will facilitate the consideration of cumulative impacts of the operation,” it said.
Challenging water supply
South Africa is extremely water scarce, noted Surina Esterhuyse, a geohydrologist at the University of the Free State. “Water supply will become more challenging in the future with the variable rainfall and more extreme and prolonged droughts that are expected because of climate change.”
Because the country’s available surface water resources are fully used, groundwater resources will become an ever more important water supply source. “With coal being depleted in South Africa, unconventional oil and gas [UOG] resources, which are often extracted via hydraulic fracturing, may be an important energy source to augment the energy supply,” Esterhuyse said.
UOG extraction and hydraulic fracturing can contaminate and deplete groundwater resources. “Groundwater can be contaminated if deep saline groundwater migrates to potable groundwater resources through potential hydraulic connections between deep and shallow geological formations.”
The chemicals used during fracking can contaminate groundwater and wastewater may infiltrate into groundwater through spills and leaks. “The hydraulic fracturing process also requires large volumes of water and groundwater is often a water supply target in water-scarce areas,” said Esterhuyse.
She said properly enforced regulations were vital to protecting South Africa’s groundwater resources during UOG extraction, adding: “Regulations can, for example, require water use licences that specify the way that developers may explore for and extract gas.” South Africa does not yet have regulations in place to regulate UOG extraction, Esterhuyse said.
“The [environment] department’s oil and gas extraction regulations were written in a similar vein to the 2015 fracking regulations produced by the department of mineral resources,” she said. “Both sets of regulations specify areas where fracking is prohibited, for example within certain distances from town water supply wellfields and waterworks. The department’s oil and gas regulations should now be scrutinised to see if environmental concerns related to oil and gas extraction and fracking are sufficiently addressed.”
‘Don’t take chances’
The Treasure the Karoo Action Group, together with civil rights organisation AfriForum, are reviewing the proposed regulations and “at first blush, we are not particularly impressed”, said Jonathan Deal, the chief executive of TKAG.
The proposed regulations stipulate, for example, that fracking is prohibited 2km from any government waterworks including dams with a safety risk, 2km from the edge of any existing or proposed municipal wellfield, 2km from the edge of any strategic water source area and 2km from the edge of a thermal or cold spring, including seismically active springs.
Deal cited how, in the 1960s, government-owned exploration firm Soekor drilled a well near Jansenville in the Eastern Cape. “At about 3 500 feet, the side of the well — the hole that they drilled — ruptured. And, they knew it happened because they lost drilling pressure,” he said.
“The chemicals they used in the drilling of that well appeared about six months later in a natural spring on a farmer’s property at Klipgat, 28km away … so 2km is not sufficient.” He said even 50km was not enough when it meant taking chances with the underground water in the Karoo which 90 small towns and villages rely on.
That fracking appears to have been put back on the table alarms Judy Bell, of Frack Free South Africa, who sees it as part of an “oil and gas grab” at play. “We’ve always, from the outset, been calling for a ban on fracking because that’s the only way to protect our life support system. I fear we’re going to have to go the legal route to get it banned once and for all but there are so many vested interests.”
According to hydrogeologist Stefan Cramer, the new regulations are required to give investors a clear path of the legal framework under which they can operate in the onshore environment and are required, too, to give competing water users of the country a clear signal that the government hears their overriding concerns for clean, affordable drinking water. “The regulations solve neither of these two competing tasks.”
“They do not address the particular risks of onshore oil and gas exploration and production to the scarce, sensitive groundwater resources of South Africa,” he said.
“With very few exceptions, the ‘new’ regulations are not new but mostly state the obvious … They try to look tough and caring but rather give a false sense of security and try to paint the department as being strict where it is not,” Cramer said.
He said some clauses were “outright nonsense” and showed the absence of geotechnical or hydrogeological input into them, adding: “In several places they are contradictory in themselves and will ultimately lead to legal challenges instead of clarity.”
Make an omelette, break the eggs
Gideon Groenewald, a geologist from Clarens in the Free State, referred to the phrase, “if you want to make an omelette — you have to break the eggs”. The question is, he said, “will the omelette — short-term, final gains — be a better option than the chickens — long-term permanent gains — from the eggs?”
South Africa urgently needs alternative sources of energy, Groenewald said. “If we drill boreholes that we fill with seawater and sand to extract the gas for our use to heat water to generate electricity for our cellphones and electric things, do we not also pollute the pristine groundwater of South Africa?”
For the need of gold to trade with the rest of the world, Johannesburg sits on some of the “deepest and most horrific mine dumps” in the world. “To make the omelette, we had to break the eggs. By mining for coal in Mpumalanga, we destroyed thousands of hectares of pristine Highveld landscape where we could have grown food. Is growing pristine food better than having access to the internet on the cellphone? You have to break the egg to have the omelette.”
Groenewald is not “hell-bent” against the patented fracking methodology. “But I am advocating for the use of this method in areas where the environment has already been changed to such an extent … where mining has been going on for hundreds of years … that, by using ‘fracking’ and bringing some monetary relief to areas where the poverty and environmental degradation is beyond repair.”
To introduce fracking to parts of the Karoo Supergroup outcrop of South Africa, where the environment is still in a historic pristine state and farming as well as rural living is still in a state of peace and productivity, will be a disaster.
“Fracking methodology will destroy the deep-seated groundwater aquifers of South Africa, the same way that no water underneath the city of Johannesburg is suitable for human consumption because we preferred the value of gold,” he said.
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