They belch hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year, but South Africa’s coal-fired power stations will remain the major suppliers of the country’s energy needs for years to come, Eskom said on Wednesday.
”We need to be very clear: coal will remain a major, major part of our [energy] supply,” Eskom transmission division managing director Jacob Maroga told the Cape Town Press Club.
He was responding to a question on the huge volumes of carbon dioxide gas produced by the parastatal’s 10 coal-fired plants, located mainly in Mpumalanga, and whether plans to bring three more mothballed power stations back on line would worsen the problem.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and one considered by scientists to be the major cause of climate change and global warming.
According to Eskom’s latest annual report, the utility’s coal-fired stations pumped out 203,7-million tons of carbon dioxide in the 12 months to the end of March this year.
Maroga said it was clear the more coal used, the more greenhouse gases produced. However, South Africa’s options in terms of electricity generation ”are going to continue to be largely coal”. The country had huge deposits of coal.
”We’ve got a huge technology base to deal with coal, so up front we need to say coal remains a big part of our plans going forward.”
However, Eskom wants to introduce diversity into its energy plan so that it could minimise greenhouse gas emissions.
Among strategies being looked at were gas and hydro-electric power. Nuclear power is also part of this mix.
Maroga said there were ”clean-coal technologies” to minimise greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations that were being examined by Eskom, but was not immediately able to say at which plants these had been installed. — Sapa