The main objective of a tender, issued by the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF), calling for service providers to take a fresh look at the country’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions guidelines and carbon space allocation, is to review the GHG Emission Performance Guidelines, the department has clarified to Engineering News Online and Mining Weekly Online.
In response to an article published by Engineering News Online and Mining Weekly Online on August 5, the department said the article had misinterpreted the scope of the tender, stating that “neither the guidelines, nor the review thereof, are meant to support one sector to reduce its emissions and are by no means supposed to favour mitigation interventions deployed by one sector over others”.
The news article had stated that a review of the guidelines could offer a boost for the country’s platinum group metals (PGMs) sector.
“With the help of South Africa’s locally mined PGMs, the sun and wind can be harnessed to produce clean hydrogen, with the help of electrolysers that also use PGMs as catalysts,” the article stated.
However, the DEFF said that no mining benchmarks had been determined under the guidelines study, mainly because “there are no international benchmarks for mining”, owing to mining and the resulting GHG emissions being location and situation specific.
The tender advertisement, placed jointly with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) earlier this month, had called for expression of interest from service providers in the review of the GHG Emission Performance Guidelines, which were developed to assist with climate change impact assessments, as well as to review carbon space allocation processes for new entrants in the market.
This, the department explained, could help guide environmental authorisation decisions to accept or reject new entrants and/or significant expansions of existing plants into the market and/or allocate carbon space through a budget to the new entrants and the expansion of existing plants.
“The guidelines are intended to provide support to government in a broader process that is affected by a variety of factors, and includes other government policies, priorities and commitments made, such as overall GHG emission reduction targets, mitigation potential and costs, climate impact vulnerabilities, socioeconomic and other developmental objectives,” the department noted.
As a result, the guidelines would be one of the inputs into decision-making on allocating carbon space and environmental authorisations, which may in future include a climate change impact assessment, the DEFF said.
The project will be used to check the methodology and approach used to develop the guidelines. In effect, this will include data checks on the international, localised and local benchmarks used to develop the proposed standards.
Thereafter, it will recommend the standards or benchmarks appropriate for South Africa, after taking into consideration the socioeconomic and other developmental objectives of the country.