DME 1; iPayipi 0

WELL, WELL, WELL Spigot was right. Could it be that someone in the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) was listening? Probably not. But, at least, common sense has prevailed. That is how Spigot sees the decision by the Cabinet to override the increasingly self-important National Energy Regulator by giving Petronet the go-ahead for the desperately-needed petroleum products pipeline from Durban to the Reef. Let's hope the hilariously-named iPayipi Consortium has the sense to retire from a field best left ( on this occasion) to the State, rather than to a bunch of amateurs with no experience and little to commend them, apart from their having an eye for the main chance. Readers of Spigot will recall him saying that the quickest, simplest solution to the acute petroleum logistics bottleneck facing the Reef, would be for Petronet to bolt on a new bigger pipeline. It will avoid costly legal wrangles around servitudes, for one thing -- a factor that iPayipi's licence application to Nersa spent a great deal of words avoiding. Spigot has to mention that had Sasol not done a deal with Petronet a decade or so ago, to use one of the petroleum pipelines to send gas down to Natal, subverting its original purpose of pushing petroleum products up to the Reef, we would not be in the bind we are in now. So, as Nhlanhla Gumede, deputy director general of the DME, so aptly put it when asked how this would affect iPayipi:"It didn't work. Tough luck." Shame really, but then, at least all those family trusts proposed by the directors of the consortium, have not yet been registered.