Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Tim Modise speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Modise: Martin, a pleasure to have you with us this morning.  A new R2-billion telecommunications satellite will be dedicated exclusively to Africa, is set for launch in 2010.

Creamer: That’s right, South Africa has been making use of about 25 different satellites of IntelSat alone, but now South Africa will have a dedicated African satellite for telecommunications.

Telecommunications are just burgeoning in Africa and telecommunications from a satellite point of view are ideal, because Africa has these vast spaces and not great people density.  Using a satellite is ideal.  Good news is that South Africans are deeply involved in this satellite, which will be called New Dawn.

It will be launched towards the last quarter of 2010 and become operational in 2011.  Ninety percent of the finance is coming from South Africa and we see that Nedbank are backing it and also the State-owned Industrial Development Corporation.

More the half of the capacity has already been taken up with firm contracts worth about R3-billion.  So, we see a very viable project going in with a lot of South African involvement and a growing telecommunications offtake.

Already there are 339-million cellphone subscribers in Africa.  There is very limited use of the internet, so a lot more broadband can come into the picture.

Coming in there is this international global IntelSat which is prepared to move in with this big investment and operate a new satellite, which will be used exclusively for Africa.

Modise: What about the carbon storage atlas that has been developed in South Africa.  Apparently this in a bid to help quell the global climate change problem.

Creamer: We are coal economy, we are energised by coal.  We not only get 90% of our electricity from coal, we even drive on coal, even our aircraft fly on coal.  So, we are a carbon economy, but the downside these days is the emissions into the atmosphere.

How do you capture that CO2, which is causing a lot of climate change not only in the world but in Africa, then store it permanently?  This is the big challenge, so the South African government has given Saneri the backing to go in and create an atlas where the possible sites could be where we could inject the CO2 that is emitted by the burnt coal into geological areas where it will either be absorbed into the rock or it will be safe and sealed.

Saneri is drawing up this atlas.  The big concern is that it may be the Karoo basin and may be offshore of Mossel Bay that will provide these storage areas, where you can store the carbon.  How far these sites are from the actual emissions and what will it cost to actually pipe the carbon dioxide, there will be issues.

So, there is a lot of scepticism around this carbon capture and storage, particularly the cost, but the UN is pushing it.  We just had this meeting in Poland where the UN Climate Change committee is looking to carbon capture and storage to be one of the solutions, and the International Energy Agency wants 20 of these to be developed around the world, but it is still very novel.

South Africa is thus going to keep watching and be ‘climate-change ready’, but without actually investing too much at the moment.

Modise: What about the public infrastructure of R600-billion.  Is it still intact given the global financial meltdown and issues around capacity and so on?

Creamer: Every country in the world now is going for financial stimulus and economic stimulus through investment in infrastructure.  Fortunately, South Africa has already got this good programme in place, which involves investment of about R600-billion over five years.

Now, we see the US President Barack Obama, he is expected to announce some R775-billion worth of investment into infrastructure.  We see that the Chinese Present, Hu Jintao, has already announced $700-billion worth of investment into infrastructure.

Everybody is looking to infrastructure to provide economic stimulus.  We have got a bit of a shock in South Africa, because we had this programme firmly put in place and then suddenly Eskom said they are not going ahead with the nuclear programme.

That sent a few shivers out and people were saying will Acsa and Transnet change their programmes, as well.  It looks like the Transnet expenditure programme, R80-billion worth, is firmly in place.  There doesn’t seem to be any change to that.

It also seems that they will be able to raise about R13-billion offshore in their R21-billion programme and that the new diesel locomotives will still be coming in numbers of over 200 and maybe even going up to 400.

Then Acsa, which has had a fantastically phenomenal growth over the last five years, perhaps, there is talk, that they might be slowing down.  But, what can fill the gaps?  We see IPPs coming through, so the private sector coming in to energy could be the infrastructural investment providers to fill any gaps where there is a lack of investment that had been announced.

These IPPs we saw Eskom looking at quite a few private sector initiatives to come in with new power stations.  There is also the water issue, with the Lesotho Highlands project going ahead at R7-billion.  An important one, because it won’t use as much energy as if we had the alternative coming through from Kwazulu-Natal.

Fortunately, the Lesotho Highlands is in an elevated position, so the water will come down by the force of gravity and we won’t have to spend on electricity to pump it out, so good advantage there and then more investment in transport infrastructure could also fill the gap.  But, everybody is holding thumbs that most of our R600-billion infrastructure programme will remain intact, despite the global financial problems.

Modise: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he’ll be back with us at the same time next week.