One of apartheid's dirtiest secrets just got messier - a 10-million-barrel lake of oil sludge rising up beneath Mpumalanga mealie fields.
The sludge is the remains of the apartheid government's notorious secret oil stash of 150 million barrels, stored in five interconnected old mine shafts.
A private firm contracted by the government's Strategic Fuel Fund to monitor and extract the oil from an underground facility near Ogies, east of eMalahleni, is embroiled in a commercial dispute that threatens to interrupt its work at the site.
Durban firm Enviroshore claims the oil will contaminate groundwater were they to stop work at the site, where they are currently removing oil and managing water levels."Contamination of the groundwater by sludge from the caverns will have devastating effects on the surrounding communities and the environment," Enviroshore CEO Sizwe Makhaye said in a letter to then acting Strategic Fuel Fund CEO Mojalefa Moagi, which the Sunday Times has seen.
"Freshwater bodies are highly sensitive to sludge water contamination. If not properly managed, and if contaminated, it may take years to restore the various dams and distributed swamp areas encountered at Ogies."
The company's warning coincides with an investigation into state oil deals involving the fund, including the sale of 10 million barrels of crude previously stored in the state's Saldanha Bay facility in the Western Cape.
Enviroshore's contract to remove oil from Ogies forms part of the investigation, as does an "oil loan" agreement between Enviroshore and the fund under which the company was allowed to sell 300,000 barrels of sludge from Saldanha - ostensibly to offset capital costs of the Ogies project.
Neither the fuel fund nor the Department of Energy replied to repeated Sunday Times queries on the matter.
However, Enviroshore MD Arthur Potts said allegations of wrongdoing appeared to be part of a smear campaign aimed at removing the company from the Ogies site."The reason behind the 300,000 barrels was to commercialise Ogies and clean the old tank bottoms at Saldanha from crude sludge and replace this with good clean crude recovered from Ogies mine. We have tried on four separate occasions to return [the oil] but are informed in writing by the Strategic Fuel Fund that the storage tanks are full to 2020."
Potts also pointed to a signed 2015 collaboration agreement between Enviroshore and the fund which details the scope of the Ogies project.
The National Party regime kept strategic oil reserves at Ogies, and most of it was sold in 1995 to help fund the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Until recently no one knew how much was left over. But 10million barrels - enough to fill five oil tankers - would be a significant revenue windfall for the Strategic Fuel Fund and its parent body, the Central Energy Fund.
Potts said Enviroshore estimated there were 10 million barrels left at the site, spread across 25km² to 30km² of underground caverns. "Water is filling up the area. There is a lot of ongoing mining with lots of explosions. If one cavern decides to collapse ..."
The company has invested hundreds of millions or rands in the project, using guided-wave radar to determine the location of the remaining sludge, which lies in an uneven band across a wide area. "The problem is it is alive, moving as the water moves beneath it. This makes it difficult to extract."..