Cape Town - Energy Minister
Dipuo Peters on Thursday urged South Africans to use fuel conservatively, saying a fuel efficiency campaign would be launched soon.
Speaking in the National Assembly during debate on her budget vote, Peters said political events in the Middle East and North Africa are having a direct impact on the pockets of ordinary South Africans.
This was mainly due to the fluctuations in the oil price, which had over a period of 24 months seen a fourfold increase from $30 a barrel to a high of $130.
"There are also indications that speculators in the market take advantage of the prevailing challenges and add a premium of their own," she said.
"It is therefore important for South Africans to use fuel efficiently, and to contribute to a secure and affordable fuel future.
"I will be launching a fuel efficiency campaign during the month of June.
"We will finalise the framework for Clean Fuels 2 during the course of this year, focusing in particular on the cost for infrastructure upgrade," she said.
The impact of this modernisation process was that refineries would have to be upgraded and in so doing more than 1 000 jobs could be sustained throughout the duration of the programme.
In a further response to President
Jacob Zuma's call for accelerated job creation, the department would also reduce the time it took to process a licence for new service stations to 60 days to accelerate construction of new service stations, Peters said.
During construction, each new station was estimated to sustain 120 direct jobs, and plans submitted to the department by industry indicated that an additional 1 500 jobs could be created by this activity alone.
"We undertook to deal with regulatory uncertainty in the liquid fuels sector and we initiated a programme to develop regulatory accounts which will be used to reward investment in the value chain.
"We have completed the preparatory work and will now move towards early implementation of some of the aspects where decisions have been taken," she said.
"As a nation, we must make investments today to secure our future."
Investment in infrastructure initiatives such as the new multi-product pipeline (NMPP) might appear to be a burden today, but for the next 50 years the economy would reap the benefits that would sustain its competitiveness.
Turning to the audit into the compliance of the oil industry with the provisions of the Liquid Fuels Charter, Peters said the preliminary results were disturbing in many areas. Especially troubling are ownership patterns, management, employment equity, with special reference to gender, procurement spent and an enabling supportive culture.
"This state of affairs, in 2011, cannot be acceptable to South Africans. For our democracy to be sustained, inequality needs to be redressed."
The department would develop and lead a new covenant for empowerment in the petroleum sector.
This included that black economic empowerment companies should be able to source a sizeable percentage of the country's imported crude oil and petroleum products.
"It is clear that the disincentives for non-compliance will have to be tighter and tougher," she said.