(2001) South Africa

• Indicator 5: Resilience to External Impacts: Energy Trade

• Vector Value calculations and values
• Discussion and notes to SEW or next year's Observer-Reporter

Although South Africa relies almost entirely on imported petroleum, it is a net exporter of energy, primarily because of coal exports. South Africa is the world's number 5 producer of hard coal, at 224 Mt in 1998, and number 2 exporter of hard coal, at 66 Mt, just behind Australia (Chamber of Mines of South Africa 1999; IEA 2000b). South African also exports significant volumes of refined petroleum products, including 2.8, 0.58, and 0.303 billion litres of diesel, petrol, and kerosene, respectively. (DME 1999: 7)
For this indicator, the value for 1 on the vector is 100% non-renewable energy exports share of total national exports, while the value for 0 on the vector is 0%. Total exports for South Africa for 1998 were 168.3 billion Rands, of which non-renewable energy exports (mainly coal and liquid fuels) were 14.8 billion, or 8.8% (estimated based on (Chamber of Mines of South Africa 1999; Eskom 1999; TIPS 2001; Wojciechowicz 2001)). The vector value for 1998 is therefore 0.088. Earlier years have not been reported here due to data problems (see discussion).

Metric (actual data) for 1998: 0.088
Vector values for 1998: 0.088

Discussion

The coal-mining industry has increased coal exports considerably until recent years, when the worldwide industry slump has hurt growth. It is also likely that petroleum product exports have grown - particularly because the relatively low diesel to petrol demand ratio in South Africa means that refineries must export excess diesel as demand for petrol grows. This is one of the reasons behind government's proposal to convert the nation's minibus taxi fleet from petrol to diesel.

There is significant disagreement between different sources of data for energy trade. Coal exports as reported by the Chamber of Mines, for example, do not export match data provided by the Department of Trade and Industry (Chamber of Mines of South Africa 1999; Wojciechowicz 2001). Similarly, the amounts of liquid fuel exports reported by the DME in their statistical publications (which is from the South African Revenue Services) do not match the data in the national energy balance (DME 1999, 2000). Given that all data on the petroleum industry was classified until 1993, most of the trade data before then is likely to be suspect. More analysis is needed to understand whether these differences are due to classification categories, pricing and taxation, or other reasons.

Notes to SEW or next year's Observer-Reporter:

Because South Africa does import most of its petroleum, an analysis of resilience from the perspective of imports should be an important next step. This would show the share of South Africa's total primary energy supply that comes from imported non-renewable energy.

In addition, more effort should be put into developing trends over time for this indicator, and discrepancies between different data sources reconciled.