Project to Retrieve South Africa's Apartheid Oil Stash Stalls
- Contractor misses deadline to replace 300,000 barrels of crude
- Oil stock rotation was irregular, Central Energy Fund says
Extracted crude oil.
Photographer: Dimas Ardian/BloombergA South African company that borrowed $15.4 million worth of oil sludge from the government to help fund the recovery of crude stored in a mine during apartheid has yet to implement the project more than three years after the contract was signed, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The project emanated from a request for proposals issued in 2013 by the Strategic Fuel Fund to recover and reprocess sludge, a lower-value product that accumulates when oil is stored. One of the respondents was Enviroshore Trade and Logistics (Pty) Ltd., which said it believed there could be as many as 5 million barrels of crude in the Ogies coal mine in the eastern Mpumalanga province. It offered to retrieve it on condition it be loaned 300,000 barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserves. Under the agreement it would keep 70 percent of any fuel recovered.