Fischer-Tropff adapted to cook samp.

Avid industry watchers like Spigot remain amazed at how often the core product of our industry is mispronounced by the very folks that are peddling it.

Recently a smallish local oil company expressed a sudden and urgent need to expand its Fischer-Tropff horizons. Executives have been seen cruising the dosh-awash backwater dorps of the maize triangle making deals for next years’ (dubious) crop. The price? Don’t ask us. Ask the chicken farmers what they are paying for feed these days. And ask the beer guys what is happening to the price of their brew.

Men in dark suits, designer Mr. Price two-tones and Grasshoppers haggling over mealie stalks are not an edifying sight to the rest of us in suit alley. Are these the same PAPS (Previously Advantaged Persons) seen sporting traditional Shangaan gear (Sasko baggie shirts, Goodyear tyre sandals, Okapi blades and earings) who were overheard discussing soya futures over a pot of frothy umqomboti with Mr. Sputnik Lobengula, a largish lowveld HDSA pulse and peanut farmer?.

But back to pronunciation. A newish senior executive director from this same company has for years been the butt of jokes because he has trouble pronouncing the product he sells.

Is his company going to be the first biofool producer that can get more than 500 L ethanol a month out of their new fool distillery?

And will he be the first to fill up with mielievoomafool and get his warranty trashed by those nice guys from East London who invented the Fischer-Tropff process in the first place?

More fuelery from Mad Bob

MORE cigarette box economic thinking from Zimbabwe. The lunatics running the Zimbabwe asylum have now banned the practice of importing fuel and paying for it with foreign currency -- the Zimbabwe dollar having been reduced to the status of banana leaves or high quality toilet paper. Quite how this is going to solve the petrol and diesel shortage is beyond comprehension, but it seems that the idea is to stop people making huge profits -- profit being a dirty word to those graduates from Russia's Lumumba University who runs things there. Last year motorists were allowed to buy fuel at state-designated filling stations with foreign currency. Then as now the government said it was trying to control corruption and black market trading. Supply and demand theory being a nasty capitalist idea designed by colonialists, old Mad Bob and his cronies think that they can pass legislation to make everything right. They will be proved wrong again, of course, but more important still, it will mean that the foreign exchange sent back to Zimbabwe by the millions now living abroad (which has been propping up the regime) will now probably finance the exit plans of the elite who, as we write, are no doubt studying airline schedules to the Far East.

Windmill nonsense

FORWARD to the 13th century! Windmills will once again come to our rescue, providing free energy. Bollocks, as anyone who has seen the giant propellers, wheezing and creaking on the hills of Normandy, will attest. Modern windwills have the carbon footprint of a Yeti. Add the cement, steel, copper cabling, not to mention the heavy metal batteries and it is impossible to see these behemoths as doing anything worthwhile. They wreck the view, slaughter happless birds, are noisy as hell and are, at best, a sop to simple-minded Greens. None of this stops Eskom from wanting to pollute the Cape with heaven knows how many of the ghastly things. When they inevitably rust and grind to a halt, the environmental cost of taking them down will be even greater. Roll on a pebble bed mini-nuclear reactor, says Spigot -- that is a truly green solution to energy needs in the Cape. Capetonians have lived with Koeberg on their doostep for years and despite the doomsayers there is no evidence of Kaapenaars glowing in the dark.

Bio- fuels boondoggle, next round

WANTING bio-fuels to create thousands of jobs is not the same as it being possible, just as hoping the British would simply sail away from South Africa if only the Xhosa killed all their cattle, did not make it happen. Dreaming for something is not enough. Now we have a voice of sanity -- Professor Theo Kleynhans, professor in agricultural economics at the University of Stellenbosch, who notes, sensibly, that while it was just possible to use maize as a source for bio-fuel when South Africa produced enough maize to make it a net exporter now with a strong rand, a high maize price, and a need to import, "maize as a main source of bio-fuels is not viable." Please, heaven, Spigot implores, make the Department of Minerals and Energy listen.

Here we go again

THERE is something about parastatal organisations -- like Eskom, like Sasol was (and sometimes still is) -- that makes them what in the business world is called, politely, "suckers". Take the announcement that Eskom is to investigate the feasibility of piping natural gas from Namibia's Kudu field to a gas turbine plant in Atlantis. No doubt, supplied as it is with taxpayers' money, Eskom will now hire consultants to do the work for a fat fee, forgetting that a thorough investigation of the commerciality of the Kudu gas field, done years ago by Shell, came to the conclusion that it was a non-starter. No matter, knowing better, Eskom will now "investigate". What a waste of time -- and our money. The Kudu field, which is being developed by Tullow Oil, is reported to have 85 000m3 of estimated reserves. This is tiny. For a gas field to be productive profitably, it should have trillions, not thousands of cubic metres. No wonder Tullow wants to ensnare Eskom. They want their hands on public capital. But when you are clutching at straws to get you out of the mess resulting from ten years of sitting on your hands, Spigot supposes Eskom has no choice. It is a sucker.

Decoding the mushroom

SPIGOT has always believed that man's ingenuity would silence the doomsayers. Brainpower came to the rescue by taming fire, during the ice ages, and with the internal combustion engine, when the world's major cities seemed doomed to sink under piles of horse manure. Now the boffins are about to do it again. Researchers at the University of Warwick are sequencing the genome of a mushroom that can make bio-fuels, can manage global carbon emissions and remove heavy metals from soil -- game set and match to the scientists, if it works. Apparently, Agaricus mushrooms decompose vegetable matter other fungi and bacteria do not touch. No one yet knows how they do it. When they do,the knowledge will help devise better ways of breaking down plant matter to make bio-fuel. Since all mushrooms absorb carbon dioxide while growing, their role in countering man made emissions is also of interest. These particular mushrooms also accumulate toxic metals, a trait that could prove invaluable in remediation of contaminated sites. This is no pie-in-sky solution or a march backwards, such as that presented by the wind powered generators now about to befoul our South African landscape. Mapping the genome of this marvellous mushroom is predicted to take only four years.

Transnet's special schmooze unit

ONCE again Engineering News has shown it is the only publication in the country capable of writing anything sensible about the oil industry. Instead of publishing appallingly amateurish gunk like most daily newspapers, it takes the trouble to assign real journalists, rather than half-trained, semi-literates. But does the oil industry take note and brief Engineering News accordingly? Does it, my eye! Following up the continuing pipeline saga, Engineering News reports that the projected cost of the new Transnet pipeline has jumped to R11,5 billion, significantly up from the original R9 billion. No real surprise since bureaucratic delays still seem to be getting in the way of action. The truly crazy thing is that although everyone knows that the pipeline is absolutely essential to the economy, Transnet still needs a licence. In other words, bureaucrats who don't know are once again getting in the way of those who do -- at the taxpayers' expense. Maria Ramos the Transnet CEO is forced to use polite phrases like "regulatory uncertainty" to describe this obfuscation. It all goes to prove what we all know that our civil servants are neither civil nor servile. To add insult to injury, Transnet has now had to set up a special "executive-level unit" to "manage its relationship with the various economic regulators governing Transnet businesses." Translated, this means the setting up of a group of highly-paid individuals whose job it will be to schmooze bureaucrats into making the right decision. It makes Spigot weep.

History isn't bunk

FOR a group of people who claim, from their study of history, to know how everything works, the South African Communist Party seems not to have noticed that nationalising industry merely results in decline, atrophy, decay and ultimately collapse -- benefiting only a new class of bureaucrats. Oops, now I see why! The latest demand from these antiquated economic fossils who gathered in Port Elizabeth is for the nationalising of Sasol and Mittal Steel. It would be time to start hoarding fuel and iron ore, if the SACP had any real clout which, thanks to everything that is holy, it does not. But I suppose it must be nice to gather the faithful together for a party every now and then. Have to spend the membership funds somehow.