Cape Town - Deep below the dry soils of the Karoo lies a wealth of natural gas that Sasol and Shell plan to exploit using new technology that has revolutionised the American gas market over the past five years.

Ebbie Haan, the managing director of Sasol Petroleum International, said the clay like shale, which is rich in organic material, has an ability to collect natural gas.

The former South African oil exploration company, Soekor, which today forms part of PetroSA, last did exploration in the Karoo in the 1960s and certainly found gas - but not enough to be regarded as commercially viable.

But mine-development technologies and geoscientists' skills related to rock characteristics have since considerably improved.

In the United States small exploration companies have managed, using innovative techniques like horizontal drilling and the injection of water and sand at exceptionally high pressure, to extract the gas trapped between layers of shale, by introducing cracks through which the gas can rise to the surface.

For Sasol it is important to exploit more natural gas, which produces far less greenhouse gas than the company's carbon-intensive coal-to-fuel process.

Sasol and Eskom - the two single-largest emitters of greenhouse gas in South Africa - are under pressure to reduce their carbon footprint in order to help achieve government's carbon-reduction targets.

Haan says that Sasol, together with the Norwegian Statoil and the American Chesapeake groups, has researched the shale gas potential in the Karoo.

The area over which Sasol will explore for shale gas covers 88 000km² and comprises the largest part of the Free State, the eastern part of the Northern Cape, the north-eastern parts of the Eastern Cape and south-western KwaZulu-Natal.

Other unconventional South African sources of gas on the radar of exploration groups include coal-bed methane in coal deposits such as in the Waterberg, and methane in the Free State goldfields.

- Sake24.com

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