Diesel drought ahead: Fuel price shock threatens SA economy

There’s something to be said about sowing seeds before it rains, but nobody tells how to prepare for drought. That phrase, when it rains it pours, unfortunately doesn’t come with a drought equivalent so, for the time being, and saying when it droughts, it’s arid, doesn’t quite capture the severity. Never mind.

It’s not like we need to imagine a phrase for it if we’re about to live it. Sadly, playing the I-told-you-so card can come across as doom saying, but the petrol increase in the forthcoming days is going to expose a stack of doom for a stack of people. How much diesel are we burning to avoid load shedding?

That’s just one example that brings about so many resultant questions… What will a 20% increase in the diesel price do to the electricity supply and cost? What will increased diesel prices mean to farming and the cost of food? What will it mean for food security in an already food-insecure environment?

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Tell me about the impact it will have on the industry and the employment of seasonal workers and independent contractors. The knock-on effects of this impending price shock are scary to even speculate on, let alone realise. And yet, all this stems from increased dependence on foreign fuel when we have a whole Sasol that pioneered commercial synthetic fuel out of low-grade coal.

We have piles of low-grade coal, and we even have mines that can get it out of the ground. But there’s the rail infrastructure that collapsed, so we can’t move the stuff, and investment into Sasol tech never really seemed prioritised of late. And energy?

We spent so much time fighting over some idea of a Russian nuclear plant proposal that cost more than four Medupis, we ditched our pebble-bed tech, spent five times more than China on a coal station and let the choo-choos we use to move the coal kinda just stop. To be fair, we did put up some 1 500 wind turbines over 34 stations in the 2010s, and clean energy has become about 13% of our mix but that hasn’t meant we’ve had to stop burning diesel because, for whatever reason, we can’t burn coal. Kenya manages to get over 15% of its electricity supply from a single wind station. Djibouti… yes, it’s tiny but despite not having any wind turbines in 2022, now satisfies around half of its demand from wind.

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