The findings followed a studied on the viability of Botswana Oil Limited’s coal to liquids (CTL) project, which has been called to question especially the quality of coal in the country. A senior official at Botswana Oil, Gamu Mpofu revealed recently to a team of local technology experts and investors that Botswana sits at over 200 billion tonnes of coal resources which provides abundant resource supply for the ambitious CTL project. He added that Botswana currently has three coal beds, one being over MCM area, then Mabasekwa and Mmamabula. From the three, Mpofu noted Morupule’s coal has been found to be the most technically suitable for the project
. “We assessed the coal from the three beds of coal in the country and we found that Morupule’s coal is the best because of its low ash content,” he told a seminar on coal-to liquids technologies. “The low ash content allows for faster combustion and turning of coal to petroleum.”
The ambitious Ikaegeng CTL, which is predicted to cost up to P30 billion to set up, has been in the works for about a decade and has climbed up the levels of priority in government. A previous attempt by government to self-finance the project was abandoned in July 2021 in favour of the Public Private Partnership arrangement. At that time, Botswana Oil had a list of 11 companies, which it later whittled down to a shortlist of two. Officials at the government’s promotion agency, the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre, revealed that currently Botswana has a per anum output of more than 2.8 million tons per anum. This they say is enough to sustain the CTL project for a thousand years, assuring potential investors of the assured continuity in supply of the projects biggest raw material. The push to accelerate the country’s fuel sources comes as local supply comes under pressure from troubles in South Africa’s refining capacity. South Africa, which supplies nearly all of Botswana’s petroleum products, has suffered a rapid loss in refining capacity with several major plants suspended or ageing out of use.
