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The Botswana government has sold the rights to frack for shale gas in one of Africa’s largest protected conservation zones to a U.K.-based oil company, The Guardian reported Wednesday.
The area in question is the Kgalagadi transfrontier park, with more than 36,000 square kilometers of wilderness,is home to gemsbok desert antelope, black-maned Kalahari lions and pygmy falcons.
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A jackal trying to blend in... Image taken in the #Kgalagadi by Annette Laursen pic.twitter.com/yrs6sxZsOW
— Africa Geographic (@africageo)
November 27, 201
According to The Guardian, conservationists and top park officials were not informed of the fracking rights sale. However, the paper’s reporters seem to have found evidence of the drilling. “There was an overwhelming smell of tar and a drill stem protruded from an apparently recently drilled hole. It is not known who had carried out the drilling or when,” the report said.
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The company that now has the rights for the drilling, according to the report, is U.K.-based Karoo Energy firm. The company, which has recently changed its name from the Nodding Donkey, was granted the rights for half of the park in September 2014.
Scientists and park officials are greatly alarmed by the news.
“The development that is going to have to go on there, with infrastructure that has to be moved in, seems to be yet another nail in the coffin of wild areas in the world,” scientist Gus Mills, who worked and lived in Kgalagadi for 18 years studying cheetahs and hyenas, told The Guardian.
Lie back and relax this weekend at the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. #LoveSouthAfrica pic.twitter.com/Kq2A8YDFTq
— South Africa Tourism (@VisitSA_UK)
November 28, 201
Meanwhile, Leabaneng Bontshetse, the Botswana Kgalagadi park manager said, “I am surprised and I am shocked.”
Ben van Eerden, the tourism manager for the South African side of the park, and Bontshetse said they were not aware of the licences being issued for the company and as far as they were concerned, there was no drilling taking place in the park.
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In fact, public Botswana government documents, including a map of the 2014 drilling licences in the country, show more than half of the Kgalagadi park on the Botswana side was up for sale to gas prospecting companies last year. Fracking is a technique used to extract underground shale gas by digging deep wells and pumping in large amounts of water mixed with chemicals under high pressure to crack the rock.
Milky way galaxy....view from kgalagadi district @BWGovernment pic.twitter.com/aOe517SFDn
— DIG (@dmatema)
November 19, 201
The drilling is likely to affect tourism in the park, which constitutes a big sum of the country’s income. “It’s a microcosm of what we are doing to the whole planet, as long as it's going to make someone some money that seems to be all that’s important.” Mills told The Guardian, warning the move would “devastate” tourism in the park.
Botswana’s tourism sector is its second biggest income earner after diamonds, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.
