Mungo Soggot went to Ogies to visit the man who looks after the world’s largest oil storage facility, apartheid’s oil stash
IT is difficult to believe Frikkie Cloete when he points across a bleak mielie field in the middle of Mpumalanga and says “all this is oil – for 6km that way”.
But Cloete, manager of the Strategic Fuel Fund’s mammoth underground oil storage facility at Ogies, about 100km east of Johannesburg, is not bluffing. Beneath the rows of mielie husks in the disused Klippoortjie coal mine are millions of barrels of oil.
The oil covers an area roughly the size of the Knysna lagoon, but the only things that give away its presence are unexceptional, shiny metal turrets which, to the agriculturally ignorant, could be mistaken for fancy watering devices. The turrets, one of which is just a few metres from the road linking Ogies and Bethal, are there to allow natural gas to escape from the oil stash below.
Klippoortjie is one of four mines in the Ogies area bought by the apartheid government from 1967 onwards and converted into the world’s largest oil storage operation. It is a project which stands as a brilliant exposition of the saying “n Boer maak `n plan”.
The operation – at which Cloete, who endearingly refers to himself as the “Shah of Ogies”, has worked since its inception – was the lynchpin of the “total onslaught” oil strategy. With its better-known sister tanks at Saldanha Bay, north of Cape Town, South Africa had an 18-month supply of oil that boycott-busting businessmen helped navigate through the sanctions maze.
The Saldanha tanks, which cover an area equivalent to 48 rugby pitches, can house about half the oil Ogies can. While they cost about R110-million to build in 1987, the Ogies operation, which costs the government just under R1-million a year to run, came much cheaper. It was literally a case of pouring oil down four old mines.
The notion that the government had an oil stash down a mine was one of the more exotic urban legends that circulated during the apartheid years. But it never graduated from urban legend status thanks to tight security legislation that accompanied government oil procurement.
Although, since the secrecy legislation was removed two years ago, the lid has been lifted on Ogies , the staggering scale and nature of the operations are largely unknown.
In its heyday the Ogies mines housed 118- million barrels of oil – enough to keep South Africa moving for a year. The enormous reserves are linked by a pipeline to a fenced-in building on a dirt road just outside Ogies, the nerve centre of the operation.
The security at this four-room building and at the three mines themselves is surprisingly low-key. There is no surveillance equipment to monitor ambitious cadres inserting matches down the gas escape turrets above each of the mines – only high, unelectrified fences.
The most striking reminders of the paranoia that sustained apartheid fuel policies are the bulletproof glass windows of the control room at the back of the main building. The windows do actually have bullet craters in them. But they are on the inside, serving not as a reminder of a battle between Umkhonto weSizwe cadres and defenders of apartheid’s total onslaught oil policies, but rather of a technician’s efforts to relieve the boredom of a lazy afternoon by firing at the glass from his swivel chair.
Apart from a personal computer in the control room the entire operation is notably antiquated and spotlessly clean. Cloete proudly presented a stack of accountants’ books which showed when each oil stash had been poured in – right back to the first entry in 1968.
Pieter Coetzee, a deputy general manager at the Strategic Fuel Fund (SFF) who monitors Ogies and Saldanha, worked on one of the mines in the area until 1990. He used to drive past the control centre every day. He said that as late as 1989 he had no idea of the building’s function or that most of the roads leading from Ogies ran over South Africa’s only oil fields.
Everyone who worked there had to have top- level security clearance and the only civilians let in on the secret were the farmers who agreed to give the SFF access over their land to the holes into which oil was poured.
Cloete explains that the oil was poured straight into the mines after being piped up from Durban. The first three mines, Alpha, Beta, and Ogies were disused. Thirty kilometres away, Klippoortjie, the fourth and largest, was still operating when SFF bought it from Transnatal, the coal mining company that is now part of mining giant Gencor.
He says the oil is kept within the mine walls by the water in the earth, which means the only requirement for an oil-bearing mine is an adequate water table. Cloete says the United States pioneered the idea when they stored oil in salt mines. Contractors from the United States, which led the oil boycott against South Africa, helped set up the Ogies operation in the late 1960s.
Cloete says the mines were not thoroughly cleared of equipment before the oil was poured in, so there is still some machinery down there coated in crude oil. He insists the environmental impact has been minimal – there has been only a little seepage at Klippoortjie.
Over the past few years the SFF has been winding down the Ogies stock and now both Alpha and Beta are almost empty. The last remaining 27-million barrels are all in Klippoortjie, where the stock will be reduced to 10-million barrels over the next year. The oil, most of which is from Iran, will be sold to Natref, an oil refinery in Sasolburg, jointly owned by local synthetic fuel company Sasol and French oil company Total.
Cloete says that because the mine floors are uneven, about 5,5-million barrels of oil remain in Alpha and Beta. He suspects improvements in pumping technology will allow SFF to pump out the oil which will prevent it from becoming a monument to the wastefulness of apartheid.
With the winding down to 10-million barrels – the strategic stockpile recommended by the International Energy Agency – the 41-strong staff at Ogies will be reduced.
The role of the SFF itself has become increasingly controversial with the passing of its sanctions-busting days. Some argue it should be sold off. Others, like general manager Kobus van Zyl, dismiss such an idea. He says SFF’s oil trading operations, that developed parallel to its sanctions busting, can be a valuable cash generator for the government. He has a point – last year the SFF handed a R2-billion cheque to the treasury, R275-million of which was from trading profits, and the rest from the sale of strategic stocks. Cynics, however, ask what would happen if it were to make a loss.
In Ogies, the Shah, who is very proud of the immaculate roses which surround his headquarters, appears accepting of his diminishing role. He has a mielie and dairy farm nearby.
It is nevertheless impossible not to detect a note of nostalgia in the air as he and his colleagues treat the first journalist ever to visit them to a lunchtime braai.