Advisory: Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe misrepresents EU policy to justify gasand nuclear expansion in South Africa
13 March 2024: Fossil Free South Africa (FFSA) notes that the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy last week badly misrepresented EU policy in making the case for new gas and nuclear energy in South Africa.
In fact, Minister Mantashe proposes that South Africa heads in the opposite direction to both European trends and our own lowest-cost energy options.
Speaking at the African Energy Indaba on 5 March, the Minister said: “In the same year [2022], the European Union taxonomy declared both nuclear and gas as sustainable and part of transitional activities.” He then implied that South Africa should therefore seize an emerging business opportunity by developing our own gas industry.
There are several problems with these assertions. Firstly, the amendment to the EU Taxonomy in fact only permits the “sustainable” use of gas and nuclear in the EU under very specific conditions – conditions that the Minister did not mention in his remarks. Those conditions are that:
EU fossil gas facilities deemed “sustainable” must after 31 December 2035 switch to “low-carbon gases”; and,
A state deploying nuclear energy must, inter alia, have a plan in place for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste. Since South Africa has no such plans in place, the application of these criteria to nuclear power in South Africa would disqualify even our current nuclear facilities, much less any future nuclear facilities.
The Minister’s remarks also omitted the following vital context:
The EU is far more dependent on fossil gas than South Africa, with per capita fossil gas consumption ranging from being 10-20 times higher in the EU than in South Africa;
And is committed to rapid phase-out of fossil gas in the interests of all citizens.
The taxonomy adjustment to include fossil gas was made under the immediate pressure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - events which have in fact accelerated European determination to phase out fossil gas and seek renewable alternatives.
His recommendations also ignore the global scientific consensus that no new fossil fuel infrastructure – including for gas – should be developed anywhere in the world, if humanity is to limit global temperature increases to 1.5C by the end of the century. This recommendation was made in the latest report, March 2022, from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC further said that all fossil fuels – gas, coal and oil – must be phased out urgently. (However, climate change is already so far out of control that the world passed the 1.5C threshold in 2023, 77 years earlier than planned.)
“In any case, the European gas demand context is largely irrelevant to South Africa, which has some of the world’s most abundant renewable energy resources,” said FFSA director David Le Page.
“Mantashe is attempting to phase in an outdated, expensive fossil-fuel technology to enrich vested interests. The EU’s plans are a stop-gap, not a great new business opportunity for SA gas – and increasing our reliance on fossil fuels will not create a new gas export market to Europe, but will also lead to our other industries being penalised by the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that will tax products according to the fossil-intensity of the electricity used to produce them.”
“Renewables, and the creation of green financial products, will continue to be the main focus for green investors in the EU taxonomy,” said Le Page.
South Africa’s latest draft Integrated Resource Plan (IRP 2023) proposes an extended energy system that would remain heavily dependent on gas and coal. This would increase the country’s greenhouse gas emissions rather than reduce them, as the Paris Agreement requires, and rejects the far cheaper option of full energy provision from renewable sources, as organisations including environmental groups and the Presidential Climate Commission have pointed out.
“When the Minister advocates for gas and other fossil fuels, he is advocating for outdated technologies with massive externalities,” said Le Page. “They will worsen inequality and impoverish South Africans through rent-seeking, corruption, price volatility and supply shocks, pollution, political instability and climate breakdown – while filtering outlandish profits to a small amoral elite, not least the foreign oil and gas interests openly masquerading as the ‘African Energy Chamber’.”
Background
FFSA is a non-profit organisation and network of South Africans lobbying for our collective human rights and prosperity through rapid decarbonisation, fossil fuel divestment and restorative reinvestment in sustainable energy:
In March 2022, we won our long-standing campaign with students for divestment by the University of Cape Town.
Our #InvestFossilFree campaign calls on South Africa’s top asset managers to give citizen investors the option of fossil-free funds.
Our Clean Creatives SA campaign, encouraging PR and advertising agencies to cut ties with fossil-fuel companies, recently won a Mail & Guardian Greening the Future award.
FFSA has developed a Climate Reporting Guide for SA Media, written by experienced journalists, which provides key information for journalists covering energy and climate-related issues.
In response to widespread and continued government failures to adequately regulate the fossil fuel industry in an accelerating climate emergency, the global divestment movement has expanded to over 1500 institutions with $39,88 trillion in assets under management, including universities and cities around the world. These include Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Harvard Universities, Ireland, and the cities of New York, London, Paris, Melbourne, Cape Town and eThekwini, amongst many others.
