Drako Oil and Energy Corp claim

"Well advanced" is the way Drako Oil and Energy Corporation describes its efforts to get a new refinery in Richards Bay off the ground.

The spokesman might well have added, "Old boy" just to make it all the more re-assuring. It seems all too good to be true. The environmental impact assessment, due in the middle of July, should be interesting. The site for this "state of the art" refinery will potentially impact on wetland, a fresh water lake, indigenous forest and a rural community, all of which usually gets the green lobby up in arms.

More worrying to Spigot is that the people planning to build this refinery do not seem to have any experience of doing so. They talk the talk all right, but what other refineries have they built and where are they exactly? The same confident Drako spokesman was reported in the Zululand Observer as claiming that Drako Oil had partners with experience. Really? Surely not the 25% black economic empowerment shareholders they have been so swift to claim.

Could it be the other major partner Drako boasts of --Global Eagle Minerals? Maybe, but Spigot failed to find their website, if they have one and from their name it would seem mining is their game, not petroleum.

Could we be looking at another example of the common perception, not limited to the man in the street, that the oil refining business is as simple as selling beans? Could it be that Drako Oil shareholders suffer under this common delusion? Could it be that they are so well connected that they have convinced the Department of Minerals and Energy, not to give a permit for a new Durban to Johannesburg oil/ fuels pipeline to Transnet?

Every time Drako makes an upbeat announcement, it manages to slip in a reference to how US6 billion is earmarked for a new Richards Bay-to-Reef refined products pipeline.

If all this hype is true, it will be good news for South Africa. If Drako and Co really do know what they are doing, it will be. If they don't, cynical Spigot sees another publicly-funded money trough opening up. If Drako has the huge sums of money it claims it has, Spigot will swallow this blog.

And can someone please comment on what is happening to the pipeline from Maputo to Nelspruit that was trumpeted some time ago?