The Department of Water and Sanitation must surely be tapping its fingers while it waits and hopes that Treasury’s fiscal liability committee will have decided on its request for government guarantees to unlock a R11,3 billion second-phase water supply expansion to Lephalale.
On Wednesday this week, acting director for option analysis Ockie van den Berg, stated at the Fossil Fuel Foundation’s Waterberg conference in Lephalale, that the R1,5 billion first phase of the Mokolo and Crocodile Water Augmentation Project is running behind schedule due to a mixture of contractor delays, labour unrest and damage from the floods experienced in March this year. It was scheduled to deliver first water by September last year. This deadline has now been pushed out to February 2015.The first-phase expansion is meant to supply the needs of the area; including the Medupi and Matimba power stations and the Grootegeluk mine.
The project will deliver up to 30 million m3 of water a year. In the current phase, water supply from the Mokolo Dam is being upgraded with the installation of a new 43 km pipeline and an additional pumping station. The second phase would comprise the building of a new 128 km pipeline from Thabazimbi to the Mokolo catchment area in order to transfer water from the Crocodile River catchment area. This will supply anticipated needs of the present power stations, mine and town as well as new mines supplying coal to power stations in Mpumalanga. The Crocodile West system will also be supplemented with return flows from the Gauteng area. This demand is estimated to total about 75-million m3 a year and everything proceeds as planned it is envisaged that the second phase could deliver its first water by November 2020.
