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Petroleum / Mining in South Africa

  • Russian firm seals energy exploration deal to drill South African shelf

    CHINA, 2017/09/07 Russia’s geological research company Rosgeo and South African national oil company PetroSA have signed an offshore drilling agreement on the sidelines of the of the BRICS Summit in Xiamen, China. The transaction is worth an estimated $400 million over the next 10 years. Rosgeo aims to start exploring two blocks off the country's south coast. The agreement covers a huge all of geological exploration work, inclunding drilling exploratory wells.
  • Union Ready to Fight Retrenchments at South African Gold Mine

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2017/08/07 The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is shocked and disgusted next it received Section 189 notice today from Sibanye Gold to retrench 7 400 permanent employees at Beatrix West and Cooke Operations. The number excludes close to 3 000 contractors who are as well facing these retrenchments.
  • Africa rejects Europe's 'dirty diesel'

    BOTSWANA, 2017/05/04 Ghana and Nigeria are the first countries to respond to reports of European companies exploiting weak fuel standards in Africa. Stricter limits on the sulfur content of diesel will come into force on July 1. Governments in West Africa are taking action to stop the import of fuel with dangerously high levels of sulfur and other toxins. Much of the so-called "dirty diesel" originates in Europe, according to a report published by Public Eye, a Swiss NGO, last year. The report exposed what Public Eye calls the "illegitimate business" of European oil companies and commodities traders selling low quality fuel to Africa. While European standards prohibit the use of diesel with a sulfur content higher than 10 parts per million (ppm), diesel with as much as 3,000 ppm is regularly exported to Africa.
  • South Africa Seeks Proposals for Liquid-Fuels Terminal in Durban

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2016/07/27 South Africa issued a request for proposals to design, finance, build and operate a liquid-bulk terminal to handle petroleum products at the country’s biggest port. Bidders must be at least 51 % owned by black citizens to qualify to participate in the 25-year concession at the Durban port, Transnet SOC Ltd., the national-owned rail and ports operator, said in a document posted on a National Treasury’s website. Bids need to be submitted by Jan. 27.
  • Beyond Commodities: How African Multinationals Are Transforming

    BOTSWANA, 2016/05/11 Oil, gold, diamonds, palm oil, cocoa, timber: raw materials have long been linked to Africa in a lot of businesspeople’s minds. And in fact the continent is highly dependent on commodities: they constitute as much as 95% of some nations’ export revenues, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. But propping a country’s entire economy on commodities is risky business, like building a mountainside home on stilts. You can’t be sure about the weather, or in this case the commodities market. The current free-fall of oil prices to less than $40 a barrel is a glaring example. “The commodities cycle has tanked out,” says Austin Okere, founder of Computer Warehouse Group (CWG), a Nigerian emerging multinational financial services company. “And this time it looks additional structural than cyclical, so it’s not a matter of waiting it out. Something has to give.”
  • Will Gold Miners Get Justice in South Africa

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2015/10/10 In King Leopold's Ghost, the historian Adam Hochschild uncovers the horrors committed in the Belgian Congo in the years before and next 1900. It is a history of slavery, murder and mutilation - anyone who's seen the pictures of piles of cut-off hands cannot but be horrified by it. Rather than just focussing on 'the horror', Hochschild zooms in on the courageous individuals who stood up against this cruelty. These are people like George Washington Williams, a black American journalist who travelled to the Congo in the late 1880s, and E. D. Morel, who dedicated much of his life to exposing the atrocities to the British public and to changing public opinion.
  • Mining Sector in Crisis - Sangqu South Africa

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2014/08/17 The mining sector needs to acknowledge it has a crisis on its hands, Chamber of Mines state intervention in the minerals sector (Sims) committee chairman Andile Sangqu said on Wednesday. "The tensions in mining right now means the stakes are high and the need for resolution is urgent," he said at the mining lekgotla in Midrand. "This quite frankly is very serious." However, with cool heads and calm deliberation the industry could reassess where it came from. Sangqu said he was hopeful that things could change if everyone worked together.
  • South Africa: Seifsa Concerned by Shrinking Economy

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2014/07/07 The Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of SA (Seifsa) on Tuesday said it was concerned by the country's shrinking economy caused by strike action. CEO of Seifsa, Kaizer Nyatsumba, said he was worried about what damage the Numsa strike would have given that each day employees spent away from work cost the industry additional than R300 million. "Ours is a very strategic sector with both upstream and downstream impacts on other significant industries like mining, construction and auto manufacturing," said Nyatsumba.
  • Coal 3 - the Choke Point in South Africa's Energy System

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2013/10/03 You would think we would\'ve learnt a lesson or two from total dependence on coal. 90% of South Africa\'s electricity comes from coal in addition to 40% of our liquid fuels. Despite our coal abundance, the move towards its better use for our energy system comes up against several constraints. These include environmental concerns, the carbon tax, the question of poor quality coal, the economics of coal mining and the logistics surrounding the extraction and distribution of coal. In August this year, Cabinet authorised what most would consider an irrational lock-in. Whilst the Medupi Power Station\'s delayed completion and cost overruns are widely disdained, Cabinet has authorised the development of an extra large coal-fired power station dubbed \"Coal 3\".
  • Coal strikes; South Africa power supply

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2013/04/25 IOL reported that the wildcat strike at Exxaro Resources was continuing at 5 operations the coal producer confirmed. 5 out of 8 coal operations at the diversified mining company ground to a halt as workers demanded the payment of performance bonuses. Employees were not paid the bonuses because the mines did not achieve performance goals. About 3 500 out of 8 000 Exxaro employees had downed tools in a strike that started at the Arnot and Matla collieries in Mpumalanga last week. The strike again spread to the Grootegeluk mine in Limpopo and the Inyanda and Leeuwpan mines in Mpumalanga.