Government must make a clear-cut decision on whether or not to proceed with shale gas exploration in the Karoo, the University of Cape Town Institute of Marine and Environmental Law’s Professor Jan Glazewski told Engineering News on the sidelines of the recent national shale gas conference, in Port Elizabeth. He said this was also crucial if the country was to discover if there were payable quantities of shale gas in the Karoo.

“A distinction should be made between the exploration phase and the exploitation phase. A final decision should only be made if shale gas is found in the former stage and if gas is found in economically payable quantities, taking cognisance of the volatile gas price,” he said.

He added that the risks and benefits of proceeding with exploitation should only be weighed once it has been established that the Karoo held economically payable quantities of shale gas, adding that it might turn out that there is nothing worth exploiting in the area at all.

“In the meantime, we have a golden opportunity to carry out crucial baseline studies which may [provide] vital data in the future should [shale gas] production go ahead. This will enable managers to gauge the extent of environmental impacts resulting from shale gas production,” he noted.

Glazewski stated that the international shale gas industry had shown that different government departments needed to find ways to cooperate with one another on large-scale projects such as gas extraction, with a view to establishing the necessary regulatory regime.

“We don’t want an acid mine drainage type of scenario a decade down the line,” he said.

He added that a major challenge, globally, was that governments operated in silos, and mechanisms needed to be put in place to take account of a diversity of studies and stakeholder views, ranging from scientific and technical studies on the one hand to social and community considerations on the other.

Although the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) was championing shale gas extraction, he said, the activity of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, triggered the mandates of a number of other national government departments, including the departments of Energy, Environmental Affairs and Water and Sanitation.

“We need government to work together when it comes to major projects like fracking in the Karoo basin. Various committees have been set up, but they have difficulty working together because of the various demands on them,” Glazewski said.

He added that the interests of the three provinces that straddle the proposed exploration area – the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape – had to be considered in line with the principles of corporative governance policy.

According to the DMR’s report on fracking in the Karoo basin, South Africa’s regulatory framework must be robust enough to ensure that, if fracking associated with shale gas exploration and exploitation were approved, any resultant negative impacts would be mitigated.

“This will require a comprehensive review of the adequacy of the existing framework to identify any shortfalls or omissions, and to ensure that it is sufficiently detailed and specific,” the report says.