The South African government has notified Saudi energy company, ACWA, contracted to build a 306-megawatt Khanyisa coal-fired power plant in the country, that its environmental authorization for the project has expired.
The Department of Environment, Fisheries, and Forestry, which passed the judgment stated that any further activities the company undertakes on the project would be illegal. The news was announced by lawyers who have been actively kicking against the project for climate reasons.
According to a statement made by a Cape Town-based legal organization, Centre for Environmental Rights, without valid environmental authorization, ACWA cannot legally commence building the power plant. The group further stated that ACWA “cannot reach commercial or financial close” without additional environmental authorization.
The authorization for the plant lapsed on 31, October 2018. However, ACWA has recently opposed the ruling in South Africa’s High Court in Cape Town.
In October 2016, an ACWA Power-led consortium was announced as the preferred bidder for the Khanyisa Coal-Fired Project by Tina Joemat-Pettersson, the country’s former Minister for Energy. The project, which is located in Mpumalanga Province, the country’s coal hub, was launched as part of the first round of a coal base-load Independent Power Producers Programme and was unique for its Circulating Fluidised-Bed (CFB) technology to be used for the first time in South Africa.
The Khanyisa power project was ACWA’s first attempt on coal-fired energy in the country and it primarily recycled discarded coal piled-up as waste in the nearby Anglo American coal mining companies. The mining sector is a key foreign earner for South Africa. This accounts for the presence of coal mining collieries and an increase in coal waste.
A recent study shows that mining produces large mountains of solid waste. Coal heaps are prone to spontaneous combustion. Leachate from waste heaps is often acidic, adding to the general and large scale acid mine drainage impact and interferes with underground and surface water for a country that is water-scare. This produces air pollution, water quality issues, biodiversity effects, climate change effects, among other things.
This made ACWA employ the CFB technology with aims to comply with the country’s strict environmental standards, the Equator Principles, and the World Bank standards. It is a relatively new technology that generates lower emission of pollutants. Extensive research has been conducted on it in the past decade due to increasing concerns over pollution caused by traditional methods of combusting coal and its climate effects.
Notwithstanding, climate activists have criticized the use of coal-fire altogether as a means of generating power in the country due to its volume of greenhouse emissions.
Last year, Nedbank Group Ltd., a South African financial institution, withdrew funding for the project. This move, which dealt a heavy blow on the Arabian company, came as a result of changes in the bank’s commitment to ‘green’ funding.
The significance of CFB has grown recently because of tightened environmental regulations for pollutant emissions. The government had initially employed this technology to curb the problem of coal waste but the role of climate activists plus the country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement would not let the coal power plant project see the light of day.
