Irish planning giant chemicals plant outside Hopefield – threatening the West Coast's most fragile ecosystems

This article was first published on PoliticsWeb.A little-known Irish conglomerate is quietly moving to build a massive industrial facility three kilometres outside Hopefield, a small West Coast town sitting atop one of South Africa's most ecologically sensitive landscapes. The Phelan group's plan is to manufacture so-called Electro-Sustainable Aviation Fuel – a synthetic jet fuel mandated by EU green energy regulations – and ship it to Europe via Saldanha Bay. The plant would consume up to 8 million litres of water daily, operate continuously for 25 years, and be surrounded by 2.6 million solar panels covering 3 000 hectares of land currently classified as Critical Biodiversity Area. Critics say the project has advanced with virtually no public debate, and that DA-controlled authorities at municipal, provincial and national level have failed to raise the alarm.By James Myburgh and Marie-Louise Antoni for PoliticsWeb.The small town of Hopefield lies on the banks of the Sout River in the West Coast region of the Western Cape – 100 km due north of Cape Town and 40km east of Saldanha Bay. Founded in 1852, it is the oldest town in the area, and has retained its rural, agricultural character over the decades, with a population of just 6 800 people. The town is a centre for the wheat farms that lie to the north and east, and which grow the crop over the winter months.Given the stark, bleak beauty of the area, especially in the dry summer months – when the sun beats relentlessly down on the flatlands of the Sandveld – it is possible for the visitor driving through to miss its immense ecological importance. The town falls within the Cape West Coast Biosphere Reserve; one of South Africa’s, and indeed the world’s most ecologically sensitive and threatened areas. It has also lent its name to Hopefield Sand Fynbos, which surrounds it, a highly localized, fragile, and endangered ecosystem. To regenerate this fynbos requires intense, rapidly spreading, high temperature fires – driven by raging south easters – every ten to fifteen years. There are also pockets of the critically endangered Swartland Shale Renosterveld in the area.The natural charms of the West Coast and the pristine waters of the nearby Langebaan lagoon draw in tourists from around the world. The Saldanha Bay Municipality, in which the town falls, notes on its website that the area around Hopefield, for its part, is “renowned for its vibrant and indigenous spring daisies that appear after winter rains during August and September. Added to the over 500 different species of fynbos that naturally occur here, this area is an Eden for botanists and flora lovers. Fine fynbos honey is also produced here.” One of the major employers in the town is today the nearby fynbos flower farm.The ecological importance of the Hopefield area lies not just in the flora above it. The Sout river flows to the north to join the Berg River just above the Berg River estuary – a wetland of international importance and a declared Ramsar site. The aquifers lying beneath the sandy flats of the town sustain the fynbos, the farms, the wetlands, and river pools, and residents living outside of town, especially during the dry summer months. The Elandsfontein aquifer drains Westwards into the Langebaan lagoon near the Geelbek area, where it provides the clean, freshwater inflows that the delicate ecosystems in and around the salt marshes of the lagoon, another Ramsar wetland, are wholly dependent upon to survive.This quiet town, sitting in one of the most ecologically sensitive areas on earth, has further significance. It has been selected as ground zero for a devastating environmental bomb which is about to be dropped upon the West Coast as a result of the European Union’s relentless drive to meet utopian “net zero” objectives – regardless of economic cost or ecological consequence.The basic story is set out in the scoping reports prepared for two Environmental Authorisation applications – the one being submitted to the DA-controlled Western Cape Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning and the other to the national Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE), which is headed by DA Minister Willie Aucamp. Given that the Saldanha Bay municipality has been under DA-control since 2011, which will have to grant other permissions, this project is almost entirely the DA’s political responsibility.These documents reveal that the Phelan group of companies, owned and run by the Phelan family of Ireland, has bought up great tracts of the farmland to the immediate north and east of Hopefield. The plan is to build a giant chemical processing plant – the size of a small, modern oil refinery – three kilometres to the north of town, on the western side of the Sout River. This complex will stretch over 61 hectares of land, and the bulk of it will be between 25 and 40 meters high, but with the flare stacks potentially reach up to 60 metres into the sky. This grey, hulking industrial facility will loom over not just the residents of the town but, given it is located on a flat plain beneath the undulating hills of the Swartland, it will break the horizon from a vast distance away, making it and its operations potentially visible from the elevated ridges of Vredenburg, Aurora, Moorreesburg and Darling, and Langebaan to the West. It will in other words, permanently blight the landscape, for hundreds of square miles around, of one of most beautiful areas on earth.This plant will steadily expand production, eventually producing 140 000 tonnes a year of so-called Electro-Sustainable Aviation Fuel (eSAF) which will be transported by truck to the Saldanha Bay port from where it will be shipped to Europe. The nature of the production process requires that it then operate continuously, 365 days a year, for the next 25-years. It will consume up to 8 ML a day of water sourced in part, the scoping report says, from the municipality’s potable water line. The plant will both use and produce vast quantities of inflammable and hazardous materials, and generate great amounts of toxic byproducts as well. If located in Europe it would be located at the absolute peak of the EU’s chemical safety hierarchy as a Seveso III Upper-Tier Establishment. The ecological risk of placing such a synthetic hydrocarbon manufacturing plant on top of a sandy aquifer in a fire prone region between two Ramsar wetlands – where a single chemical discharge over the life of the refinery would destroy both – is quite simply off the charts and would likely never be permitted in Europe.E-Saf fuel is dangerous, difficult, and extremely expensive to produce, compared to just producing normal aviation fuel from crude oil at an existing site in a working European refinery operating under secure first world conditions. However, at the height of the panic over the “climate catastrophe” the EU wrote into law that an ever-increasing share of airline fuel would have to be produced from “renewable” sources. Airlines which failed to comply would have eyewatering fines imposed them. There has been a subsequent scramble to meet these economically irrational mandates, and the EU is willing to throw huge amounts of money at making the looming commercial crisis it imposed on its own airlines someone else’s problem.The advantage of the Hopefield site for the production of e-SAF, beyond its proximity to the deepwater Saldanha Bay port, is that the West Coast region of South Africa has high levels of daytime solar irradiation, and coastal winds that peak at night. Solar and wind power can be used to supply the massive electrical current required to split water molecules and release the hydrogen gas required for manufacturing such fuel, without having to use hydrocarbons (thereby satisfying EU mandates). Though e-SAF produced in Hopefield will be up to three times the cost of normal aviation fuel, it will cost multiples less, per tonne, than any equivalent produced in Europe.To generate the energy needed to power such an industrial chemical process – even in the most ideal situation possible – requires a vast area be placed under solar panels and wind turbines. Powering the great, grey behemoth of the Hopefield e-SAF plant will thus require the surrounding lands to be covered by a lake of black glass, with a forest of enormous grey poles and their spinning blades on the fringes. In the initial three phases 2.6-million solar polars will be plastered across 3 000 ha of farmland, which will eventually reach a maximum output of approximately 1.6GW. These will completely surround Hopefield to the north and the east, stretching 11km from one point to the other, and encroaching as close to 1km to the edge of the town.While the risk of a catastrophic explosion and/or chemical spill from the e-SAF chemical plant itself will depend on how it is engineered, built, and maintained over its 25-year lifespan of its operation – and whether this is done to first or third world standards – the environmental devastation that will inflicted by carpeting the landscape with black solar panels is real, immediate, unavoidable, and irreversible.The farms on which the plant and solar panels are to be built is supposed to be protected land. The site lies within the Swartland Protected Agricultural Area and around 30% of the site is currently grassland. The remaining 70% of the land is covered by Hopefield Sand Fynbos and is classed as a Critical Biodiversity Area. This will soon need to be obliterated, if DA controlled departments give the necessary approvals. This Eden for botanists and flora lovers will then be no more.It is beyond belief that this project has been able to progress as far as it has, without any meaningful public debate. The only reason we know about it is because one of the authors of this article lives in Hopefield. Allowing this and other similar projects to progress beyond the point of no return will result in the destruction of the unique “sense of place” of the West Coast, and the transformation of the environment and economy of the area. The residents of the region never signed up to live in a sort of Sasolburg by the Sea, and the more the region is blanketed with hulking hydrogen plants, and the solar panels and wind turbines needed to supply them with electricity, the lower its attractiveness for local and international tourists.DA politicians in Saldanha Bay and the Western Cape government are presumably aware of the project, but they have raised no red flags, nor have they initiated the appropriate public consultations as to whether the painful trade-offs involved are warranted. Instead, a series of applications are steadily and quietly making their way, piecemeal, through the necessary approval processes, at three different levels of government.Western Premier Alan Winde, for one, should take the people of the Western Cape into his confidence and explain whether, and on what basis, he supports the construction of the e-SAF plant in Hopefield, and the installation of the sea of solar panels that will soon surround it. And, if not, what actions he will take to put a stop to it.For our part we plan to report in further depth on this project, and the applications that are being submitted to government to secure the necessary environmental authorisations..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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Irish planning giant chemicals plant outside Hopefield – threatening the West Coast's most fragile ecosystems

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