Sasol application to avoid emission standards declined

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FIFI PETERS: Let’s get to the Sasol story now. The company announced today that it is planning to appeal a decision that turned down its application to have its emissions of sulphur dioxide from the boilers of Secunda regulated differently from April 2025. The decision was turned down by the National Air Quality Officer yesterday [Tuesday]. Today Sasol said that it had turned to the minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment to review the application.

We’ve got Simon Baloyi, executive vice president for energy operations and technology at Sasol for more on the story.

Simon, maybe give us the back story. Regarding the regulation of emissions of sulphur dioxide [SO2] at Secunda, why is it that Sasol applied initially for the emissions from Secunda to be regulated differently?

SIMON BALOYI: Evening, Fifi, and good evening to your listeners. Let me start by providing some context and I’ll come back to your question.

As you know, Sasol has a proud heritage of being rooted in South Africa for more than 70 years. We employ over 25 000 people directly, and around 20 000 to 30 000 indirectly as we perform maintenance on our facilities. We produce more than eight to nine billion litres of fuel, mostly for the Indian market, and various other chemicals that are critical to the mining industry and surfactant industry in general.

So as to the compliance journey, we’ve been in this game since 2015 and, as we’ve indicated in our media statement, we today complied to up to 98% of the pollutants, and we spent about R7 billion on that roadmap.

On SO2, which is the pollutant of concern and which relates to your question, we’ve been clear from the beginning that complying on a concentration base will be very difficult for older plants, and various plants in the country with coal for generation of steel and electricity.

And the old plants are not easy to retrofit – and that is why we did a practical marker to regulate it on an alternative limit.

I’m actually excited to say that we do have access, from a Sasol point of view, [to] an alternative [inaudible]based needs, which achieves the same or even better in terms of reducing the SO2 out of the atmosphere. However, this is different from the concentration that was required.

FIFI PETERS: Okay. So you are asking the ministry of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment to essentially re-look this decision that was made by the National Air Quality Officer, the NAQO. What if the ministry upholds the decision by the NAQO?

SIMON BALOYI: I think from where we stand, and as we interpret the regulation, we believe that the Regulation Trust A was in this and actually made for plant like ours, which are old plant. And the intent of the legislation is to make sure that we take SO2 out of the atmosphere and we think and sense that the solution that we have on the table is able to do that, even though we had to indicate that it will be a stepwise introduction from 2025 to 2029.

FIFI PETERS: And in the event that you have to continue under this current framework, what would make it so difficult for Sasol to comply with what the National Air Quality Officer is proposing?

SIMON BALOYI: The current limit, as I said, is on concentration. So if I were to use an analogy on concentration, it is that if you had cups of sugar and you put the system [through] the current compliance test, you must reduce the amount of sugar that we put into the tea. What we are proposing is saying you can keep the sugar the same, and just use four cups instead of five. So what we are proposing does actually indeed take the SO2 out of the atmosphere and will have benefits. Our solution not only takes out SO2, we believe it takes out other pollutants where we further reduce, even more than the legislation [requires], other pollutants like the PM [particulate matter] and the Nocs [nonionic organic contaminants].

FIFI PETERS: Simon, last question. When are you hoping to receive word from the ministry, or have you already had an acknowledgement to the application? Has it been filed – the application to appeal the decision?

SIMON BALOYI: We received the decision from the NAQO yesterday, and based on the current legislative framework we have 20 days to appeal, and we file within the 20 days. Once we have done so, it’s also a legislated process that we’ll get feedback from the minister within a stipulated timeframe.

FIFI PETERS: All right. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak to us about the development today. We’ll certainly be following the developments as to how your application to appeal the decision goes, and what the Ministry of Forestry and Fisheries does actually say.

That was Simon Baloyi, the executive vice-president for energy operations and technology over at Sasol.