Wednesday, May 11, 2011

PRELIMINARY ENVIRONMENTAL STUDY FAVOURS COAL BARGES

A preliminary environmental impact assessment suggests that taking coal down the Zambezi river in barges will cause no significant environmental damage, reports Tuesday’s issue of the independent daily “O Pais”.
A major problem for companies investing in the Moatize coal basin in the central Mozambican province of Tete is that the Sena railway line, from Moatize to the port of Beira, cannot handle the vast amounts of coal that will be produced in a few years time.Currently the railway, recently rebuilt after it was completely destroyed by the apartheid backed Renamo rebels during the war of destabilisation, can handle around five million tonnes of cargo a year. A further upgrade, including doubling the track in places, could raise this to 12 million tonnes a year. But just one mine, that opened by the Brazilian mining giant Vale, expects to be exporting 22 million tonnes of coal a year in its second phase. By 2013, the Australian company Riversdale Mining (recently taken over by Rio Tinto) experts to be exporting five million tonnes a year from its Benga mine, adjacent to the Vale mine. A second proposed Riversdale mine, known as the “Zambeze Project”, has even larger coal reserves, and many other companies are queuing up to open mines in Tete. The Moatize area has been described as the largest unexploited coal basin in the world.Give the constraints of the Sena line, companies are seeking alternatives. Vale favours a new railway from Moatize to the northern port of Nacala, which would run across southern Malawi. Riversdale has been looking into the possibility of using barges to take the coal to Chinde at the mouth of the Zambezi. It could then be transshipped onto larger. ocean-going vessels, or taken down the coast to the new coal terminal under construction at Beira.The use of the Zambezi requires an environmental impact study before the government will give it the green light. The preliminary study, ordered by Riversdale, indicates that nothing seriously damaging to the aquatic environment is expected from the transport of coal.The most serious accident would be a spill of fuel, but adequate mitigation measures can reduce the likelihood of any such spill – these include the use of double-sheathed pipes to transfer fuel, and of valves that automatically shut the operation down if any fuel is lost.It is possible that some coal will be lost at sea in the transfer from barges to other ships. This would change the texture of the sea bed somewhat, but the study regards such impacts as negligible.The amount of coal dust generated when loading and unloading the barges depends on the methods used, and the study believes that the impact could be kept to a minimum.A more serious problem lies with the dredging of sections of the river to allow the barges to pass. This could reduce the amount of sediment carried by the Zambezi, and which ends up deposited on the beaches of central Mozambique. The study describes this as “a relative erosion” of the beaches, but regards this as an impact of only “moderate significance”.This study is limited to the transport of coal down the river, and thus says nothing about the Malawian proposal to use the Zambezi and its tributary, the Shire, for carrying Malawian imports and exports between the Indian Ocean and the river port of Nsanje.

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