On Tuesday, mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe, addressing a group of coal mining executives at the Council for Geoscience in Pretoria, continued his campaign for coal. They should not, he said, “be shy to fight for SA’s national interests on coal mining and coal power stations”.
On Wednesday, the country was plunged back into stage 2 rolling blackouts. The coal is in the ground but the coal-fired power stations the country depends on can’t burn enough of it because they have been too poorly maintained for too long. The blackouts are there to avert catastrophe — a trip that brings the entire system down.
Coming back from a total blackout would take weeks, an unimaginable edge on which SA teeters literally all the time. People joke that if you’re not living on the edge you’re probably taking up too much room, but in our case the relationship between the billions of tonnes of coal in our ground and the electricity it powers is literally life and death.
Which is why it has to end. We cannot afford coal. Mantashe tries his best to stop the inevitable, but he is a finger flick from extinction himself. Our future is being written beyond our borders. In Australia, BHP, the world’s biggest mining company, is getting out of thermal coal. In the US, BlackRock, the world’s biggest fund manager with more than $10-trillion under management, now puts climate at the centre of its investment calls.
When the money stacks up against you, you’re losing, even if you choose to ignore it. And while coal’s utility and the jobs it provides here and in Australia and beyond are hard truths even for environmentalists, the fact is that truly serious money is being invested in energy ideas and technologies that will soon blow us all away.
Do read a new book, Race for Tomorrow, by Simon Mundy. He worked for a while at Business Day before moving on to the Financial Times. It is easily the best reporting on climate change I have come across.
Its essential message is that climate change is driving, already, huge changes in what we eat and how we generate power. In the US, plant-based meat from Impossible Foods is already available in more than 30,000 restaurants and 20,000 food stores. It may be high end, but it is also the sharp end. In Israel a tech start-up is actually growing its own meat.
It’ll be expensive as hell, but so were Elon Musk’s electric cars when he started building them in 2009. Last year, he produced almost 1-million vehicles. Tesla stock is worth more than BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler Benz put together.
In a sense, Musk straddles a generational shift that we should keep our eyes on in SA. Today’s big money wants to explore the stars and deepen the internet. Tomorrow’s big money is going into climate.
In Texas, Mundy finds investors funding Quidnet, a start-up that would use fracking technology in reverse. Rock can flex and Quidnet’s owner believes he can pump huge amounts of water under pressure into the earth using green power and then, at night, extract it and allow the water to drive small turbines on the way back up.
In San Jose, California, QuantumScape’s founder became a billionaire when he floated his company in 2020. The company still hasn’t produced a single thing but promises a solid state battery with a far longer life than the lithium ion batteries today's electric vehicles use. They carry a flammable liquid electrolyte. QuantumScape claims to have found a material that allows lithium ions to pass from positive to negative without the electrolyte. Its share price is volatile, but the prospects are breathtaking. And QuantumScape’s biggest shareholder? Volkswagen.
Near Atlanta, Georgia, start-up LanzaTech is making biofuels from garbage. The key was finding a way to turn the gases produced by burning the garbage into ethanol. The LanzaTech founders discovered a microbe in the gut of rabbits that worked a treat. Virgin has flown with its fuel. L’Oreal has used it to make packaging. Shougang steel in China uses the microbes to produce 30,000 metric tonnes of ethanol a year in a pilot plant.
Mundy quotes Sean Simpson, a LanzaTech co-founder, as saying something profound about the American approach to tech. “No-one is asking you how much money you’re going to make them,” he says. “People just want to know how great your idea is.”
That is the essence of our dilemma in SA today. We have lost, or perhaps we never had, the power to dream. Unless we find it we will always be catching up, fearful of risk and anxious about making mistakes.
Time is already up. Ask Eskom. We are, indeed, right on the edge. A brand new report by Harvard University’s Ricardo Hausmann warns that in SA “GDP per capita is not expected to recover its precrisis levels in the next four years, nor is debt expected to regain its pre-Covid path. GDP by 2024 is projected to be 7% below 2019.”
It may comfort Mantashe that tech hasn’t yet made coal impossible. But it will. And the same will happen to gas and oil. How do we make our country ready?
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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