Court gives Rhino green light for aerial gas survey
The area includes around 870 000 hectares of land, including parts of Dundee, Glencoe and Dannhauser.
Rhino Oil & Gas Exploration has been the go-ahead, to conduct aerial exploration for petroleum and byproducts over parts of north-western KZN.
This follows an overturning of an appeal against the original decision, brought to the High Court by AgriSA. The area includes around 870 000 hectares of land in large swathe including Dundee, Glencoe, Dannhauser and other areas of NKZN.
In the court papers, AgriSA said: “Although the authorised exploration activities by Rhino Oil & Gas will not entail actual drilling, the current legal dispensation in relation to oil and gas in South Africa affords holders of exploration rights the exclusive and automatic entitlement, to apply for and be granted full-scale production rights, should exploration indicate the presence of viable oil or gas reserves.”
Matthew Hemming of SLR Consulting, which conducted the environmental impact assessment (EIA), told the Courier although the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) has granted environmental authorisation (EA), a decision on the exploration right has not been made, in terms of the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act.
“In the current application, Rhino Oil & Gas only sought authorisation for remote exploration techniques (including analysis of existing data and an aerial full tensor gradiometry gravity survey). Thus no wells, permeability testing, pressure testing or hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) are proposed as part of the current three-year exploration programme. Should Rhino Oil & Gas propose to conduct other exploration activities in future, this would need to be informed by a further application to Petroleum Association of South Africa and a separate environmental assessment and authorisation process.”
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See this week’s Courier for full details of the proposed exploration.
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