A nasty nip in the air floors Eskom

OK. So it is spring, traditionally a season of changeable weather. Sometimes, it has even snowed in the Cape in November. This year, however, an October cold snap came as such a surprise that Eskom is reported to be "struggling" to avoid a national blackout. Note the connotations of the word "struggle". It is used by local hacks to evoke sympathy for a bureaucratic, bumbling, parastatal organisation. This is an organisation that for the past 14 years has so taken its eye off the ball that it's staff members cannot be trusted to plan anything further ahead than banking their next fat pay check. One of the blissfully-naïve reasons Eskom puts forward for its inability to meet demand is that some power stations have "run out of coal" while others have wet coal. Dear heaven. Wet coal still burns. It also burns better than dry coal as any steam engine buff will tell you. Oh, Spigot forgets: You have to order coal in advance, something that is clearly beyond Eskom staff.

Refinery pie-in-the-sky

ONCE the word got out that South Africa has run out of -- or soon will run out of -- oil refining capacity, it was perhaps inevitable that we should have a rush of enthusiastic amateurs willing to build new refineries (or pipelines). First, Petroline, iPayipi, and Transnet Pipelines strutted their stuff. Then there were assorted others saying they would build refineries in Richards Bay or Coega. Now we have another lot -- Venessia Petroleum -- claiming they have R10.3 billion just itching to be turned into a refinery in Zimbabwe (Huh?). The latest promise comes from Qatar, whose citizens seem to have more money than sense. But it all goes to show that if you cover the oil industry in layers of secrecy for decades (as we did) and, if you allow perceptions to become entrenched so that everyone believes that manufacturing and selling petroleum products is akin to growing and selling radishes, everyone thinks they can do it. Trouble is, the ground is now perfectly prepared for sundry optimists-cum-con-artists to lead investors and governments up the kamikazi garden path.

PetroSA gets four more years -- PW Botha's revenge

The continuing economic lunacy of Mossgas/PetroSA never fails to astonish. Born out of the paranoia of PW Botha, the plant outside Mossel Bay has been milking the taxpayers ever since. Now we have the trumpeted news that (hooray) five new wells, drilled at a cost of R3.2 billion will give the elephant four more years of production. The self congratulatory tone of the PetroSA press release sets Spigot's teeth on edge but it pales before the excitement evident in the public utterances of that other partner in the patch-up -- Pioneer Natural Resources, a US-based minor oil company. They boast that their deal with PetroSA links the price they can charge "their" gas supplied to PetroSA with the price of Brent crude. Isn't that cozy? Pioneer owns 45% of the operation and sells its production from the project.Production from the five wells will be 50 million cubic feet of gas equivalent per day. Nice money. "We appreciate the efforts of PetroSA in accomplishing this goal, and look forward to continuing our successful relationship." No kidding.