When you walk off the main street in Graaff-Reinet and into Derek Light’s office he has to talk to you over a mountain of files. The small-town lawyer, who is taking on a number of the world’s largest energy companies, apologizes for the mess and very carefully moves his pile of lever-arch folders onto the floor. Scribbled on the spines with blue marker pens are the names Falcon Oil and Gas, Bundu Oil and Gas, and Shell.
“I have another eight cabinets full, all to do with fracking,” says Light.
It could have been a quieter twilight of his professional life in the Karoo, when he moved back to his hometown to raise his two children. It could have been measured days of drawing farm-owners’ contracts and settling disputes over wandering sheep. Now he has to tackle big businesses and its threat to turn his backyard into one giant fracking well pad.
“The problem is that the process of explorative fracking is not normal. It’s invasive and has the potential to destroy the environment,” says Light.
“Things like land, air and water are emotional subjects. In Britain, we’ve seen people super-gluing themselves to fences and being incarcerated for wanting to prevent the development going ahead. Those are extreme conditions. People act in that way because they don’t have any other way of resisting. They don’t have the means of accessing the courts and employing the scientists and economists,” he says.
According to Light, fracking will change the face of the Karoo.
“If the reserves are there and you go into well fields, you won’t recognize the country. You will have well pads every 5 kilometers in every direction. You will have flaring, false lighting, masses of vehicles on the road. The air quality will deteriorate. The effect is massive.”
He disagrees with the suggestion by Shell and others that it won’t.
“They will be using multi-well pads, with 30 wells on one site. The point is that rock formation needs to be targeted as broadly as possible; if you can only drill horizontally you would have exhausted the rock within 2.5km. You would have to establish another well 5km away.”
The legal costs to fight fracking have been daunting.  Until November 2011, Light was by himself with hardly a budget at all. It was light at the beginning of the tunnel for the lawyer.
“Now there is a big team of councillors, scientists and environmentalists. It would not have been possible without the help of  Africa’s third richest man, Johann Rupert. He made it possible to get the expertise of people to take on the biggest companies in the world like Shell,” he says.
The lawyer has no problem taking on the big guns of the fossil fuel industry. He believes that if you are standing on the right side of the law you can take on anyone, no matter how deep their pockets are.
Light also put his own money on the line.
“I know as a professional you have to be objective, but in this case it is my whole community that is being threatened. I want to keep what we have here, it’s a great environment to bring your family up in and it should never be destroyed,” he says.
“I try not to get caught in that sort of emotional debate because it clouds your own judgment. But I can only achieve what I have set out to achieve with the support of individuals. We have just been very lucky that we have sufficient access so far.”
One of his biggest worries is not enough people know about fracking to make an informed decision. According to Light, most people in the cities do not understand the impact this will have on the countryside.
“I remember about two years ago, of all people interviewed in the urban areas, only 50% knew about fracking and of them 15% knew what fracking really was. So I think it’s a question of if it doesn’t affect you nobody cares.”
“It’s moving as quickly as the oil and gas companies are allowed to move. And we’ve said no. We didn’t make the same mistake that the United States made. They allowed it to happen and then tried to regulate it,” he says.
At a time when most people are looking to retire, he looks set to become a household name.
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<h4>The world refuses to frack down</h4>
From London to Perth people have been fighting police, clashing with truck drivers and super gluing themselves to fences all for the same reason—fracking. In South Africa the debate is still in its infancy. Fracking in Australia, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland and the United States has provoked violence. In France it was banned completely, Tunisia soon followed.
One of the most violent protests came in a small town in West Sussex, Balcombe in Britain. British oil and gas exploration firm Cuadrilla, built a test well to take samples of rock.
Protestors super glued themselves to fences. The 1,000 protestors also set up camp by the road to the site. In August, police moved in to evict them and it was reported to have cost tax payers £3.7 million ($5.8 million).
In September, Cuadrilla announced it would suspend operations until a new planning application had been approved. Its drilling rig was moved to look for oil elsewhere.
“The drilling rig and associated equipment will be removed from site in September and testing equipment will not be mobilized to site until planning consent has been granted,” says Francis Egan, CEO of Cuadrilla in a statement.
On the other side of the coin, in North Dakota, United States, oil-fracking is seen as a boon. From 2005 to 2011, it helped the state’s economy grow from $4.4 billion to $30.5 billion. Eight thousand wells, producing more than 820,000 barrels a day was just the start. These wells are expected to increase to 50,000.
Among the landowners of North Dakota, 2,000 new millionaires are made every year, according to Bruce Gjovig, founder of the Center for Innovation at the University of North Dakota. Oil royalties range from $50,000 to $100,000 a month.
The quest for oil has drawn in thousands from across America to towns such as Watford City, which has grown from 1,700 to 10,000, according estimates in March.
The fracking revolution has been bitter sweet for some. Many long-term, low income residents have been priced out of their homes through property price rises. The population boom has led to overused roads, polluted streams and created the worst aspects of urbanization.
In South Africa, residents of the Karoo are the latest to join the battle. According to Julius Kleynhans, head of environmental affairs at AfriForum, the biggest problem is only one in five South Africans have heard about fracking.
“At the moment the government is doing nothing. It’s refusing to address the public outcry. They are just power drilling their wants through,” he says.
“Why would they care if the Karoo was contaminated? What they were told was the value of getting this energy game-breaker gas was far more important than the value of the Karoo. The fact that the Eastern Cape has a third of the country’s livestock population; I cannot tell you how important this part of the country plays in production. We also produce more wool, mohair and ostriches than any other part of the country and 25% of the citrus in the country,” says local farmer Doug Stern.
You can be sure this time next year many more Africans will know what fracking is and how it could change their lives.
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Light At The Beginning  Of The Tunnel

Shell applied for gas exploration rights for an area covering 90,000 km2—the size of KwaZulu-Natal. Falcon Oil and Gas applied for an area of 30,000km2—one-and-a-half times the size of the Kruger National Park—which encompasses Jansenville, the mohair capital. Sunset Energy applied for 35,000km2 around Graaff-Reinet. Besides these, there are many more; together they cover an area the size of the Eastern Cape Province. It could be the world’s fifth largest shale gas find.
<div id="attachment_728" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-728" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-728 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/JWE-Head-Shoulders-3-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Jan Willem Eggink</div>
According to Jansenville, Sasol is not pursuing further exploration, after initial studies of the Karoo “did not reveal particularly strong prospects”, although it remains interested in the venture. “[It] supports the current moratorium on additional license applications” which allows the government “to define the robust and world-class regulatory environment that is critical for the responsible functioning of shale gas exploration and operations”. Sasol was awarded a technical co-operation permit of 82,145km2 offshore Kwazulu-Natal and might apply for exploration rights after the year-long study period.
Econometrix, South Africa’s largest independent macro-economic consulting firm, reports: “Just 10% of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated 485 tcf (trillion cubic feet) shale resource could add R200 billion ($24 billion) to GDP annually and create 700,000 sustainable jobs.”
Jan Willem Eggink, general manager upstream of Shell, says: “The hundreds of thousands of jobs are only generated if we are producing the gas and it goes into the market where new industry will start. The exploration phase will not generate a very high number of jobs because the skills are not yet here. We will have two rigs: each rig will have 50 to 100 people, possibly slightly more; it depends on the rig.”
PASA believes that only 10% of the estimated reserve is viable for exploitation. Eggink believes that Econometrix’s case studies on 4% and 10% of the gas reserves are “conservative cases”.
“The bottom line is we have to drill wells to actually find out whether the shale [is] there and can be productive,” says Eggink.
South Africa imports 65% of its natural gas from Mozambique. This could be the solution to the country’s dependence on foreign energy.
“The National Planning Commission (NPC), headed up by Trevor Manuel, outlines the challenges for South Africa which are inequality, poverty, unemployment, education and energy. I think these have to be resolved in the foreseeable future. If not resolved, I think there is a huge problem for South Africa. This project provides an opportunity to address many of these issues listed in the NPC report,” says Eggink.
“If you have sufficient energy in a country, then industries will build, employment will rise appropriately and through that, education will also get a boost because if you have significant employment opportunities these people need to be educated.”
Shell has conducted public participation meetings in the Karoo and Cape Town, he says.
“The Environmental Management Plan (EMP) we submitted has the most extensive consultation any project has had in South Africa so far. We had, I don’t know, 6,000 questions which we have all answered individually. They are published on the Golder Associates website, which is an independent entity.
“With regard to environmental impact, the footprint of the development will be very small. First of all, we will explore, and we will explore up to 24 wells in accordance with the EMP in our area. These drilling rigs will end up on a football pitch-sized area. After that we may go into development, and nowadays, on this football pitch-sized areas [you can place] up to 32 wells. One development could be between 1,000 and 2,000 wells which would mean, with these horizontal wells, that you would need 60 or 70 of these football pitch-sized areas, four to five kilometres from each other. That is one development.
“That will be a pretty small area, compared to our license area. We will be operating in 1% of the area for development, and at surface the impact will be significantly smaller than that 1%.” FORBES AFRICA calculates it to be 900km2.
When it comes to water contamination by fracking fluids and gas, Eggink quotes the April 2012 report on The Environmental Impacts of Shale Gas and Shale Oil Extraction Activities, by the Committee of the Environmental, Public Health and Food Safety of the EU.
“It is important to note that no official or other reputable sources have demonstrated any systematic [connection] between shale gas and shale oil extraction and human and animal health. No official or other reputable sources worldwide have demonstrated any cases where hydraulic fracturing has led to contamination of drinking water.”
Eggink quotes one case, which is currently being disputed, in Wyoming. It relates to the poor quality of wells, which he assures will not be the case with Shell as it adheres to high operating standards.
All the chemicals to be used will be disclosed on Shell’s website. Eggink claims that from a list of a few hundred possible chemicals, only 8 to 10—on occasion slightly more—are used, depending on the rock mechanics of the site to be drilled.
According to Econometrix: “At depths of 4,000 to 5,000m below the surface where the shale deposits are expected to be found, any water in the vicinity or between the surface and those depths is likely to have been rendered unusable through natural contamination with arsenic and uranium.”
Chapter 10 of Shell’s EMP outlines its commitments to ensure minimum environmental impact and adhere to safety regulations. The most salient points include: full compensation to landowners with proven direct negative impact or loss due to their activities. Shell won’t compete with locals for water and will monitor water quality through an independent party. It will employ local experts to identify the most suitable water source for development areas. Shell promises to recycle flowback water and responsibly dispose of remaining fluids. It promises that permanently plugged and abandoned wells will adhere to the highest international practices.

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Light At The Beginning Of The Tunnel

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