It’s been nearly a decade since South Africa lifted a freeze on shale gas exploration, but the resource-rich nation’s potential ensuing shale revolution never quite materialized. Much attention and expectations have been bestowed upon the vast, semi-desert region called the Karoo basin, but a series of studies on the potential shale play over the past decade have shown increasingly disappointing results for prospective drillers. Back in 2017, in an article in The Conversation delightfully titled “ Shale gas in South Africa: game-changer or damp squib? ,” seemed to lean far toward the damp squib end of the spectrum, pointing out that recent estimates had shown the upper limit of gas reserves in the Central Karoo as discouragingly low–around 20 trillion cubic feet (tcf)–what the author referred to as “trillion cubic feet (tcf).” In fact, it’s about one fortieth of the size of South Africa’s coal reserves. It’s also dwarfed […]