The additional power will add to an anticipated 600MW to be produced by Morupule B Power Station when it kicks into the national grid from next year.Principal engineer at DEA, Cyril Matshameko, told a visiting US Business Mission hosted by the Botswana Export Development and Investment Authority (BEDIA) at a seminar on Tuesday of Botswana's abundant coal deposits that lay idle despite the country's acute power shortage.
Botswana is home to 212 billion tonnes of coalfields, only 1.5 million tonnes of which is mined annually while 34 percent of the population goes without access to electricity. Encouraging American companies to tap into the resource, Matshameko said coal could become Botswana's next highest revenue earner and that failure to extract the huge deposits could mean the beneficiation line was also not utilised. "Construction of a power station takes four years, which means we have to start now," he said. He added that the time was now for the country to look into coal exports, mainly to Asian countries, and emphasised that the proposed Trans-Kalahari Railway (TKR) link for that purpose needed to be hastened.
