JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Coal-miner Sasol fully intended to be a world leader in carbon capture and storage (CSS) technology, Sasol CEO Pat Davies said on Monday.

Davies said that Sasol, the world's only commercial coal-to-liquids (CTL) company, saw CSS as one of the significant solutions to the challenge of reducing the carbon footprint.

The company had carbon reduction targets of 15% by 2020 at existing operations and 30% by 2030 at new CTL operations.

"We have all our engineers and scientists making sure that we do reach those targets," Davies said.

Long term, Sasol was mulling its role post internal combustion engine and was investing in solar, biomass and electron mobility to ensure that the company was sustainable into the future.

"Sasol is an innovative company with many scientists and engineers and I'm sure Sasol is going to become a world leader in reducing the carbon footprint on CTL plants," Davies tells Mining Weekly Online.

He said that, while there were no carbon-emission issues associated with gas-to-liquids technology, carbon emissions were an issue with CTL, alongside the rest of the coal-using industry.

CTL's carbon-emission issue was being tackled firstly through process improvement, but, in parallel to that, the company was working with several intitutions around the world on CSS.

"We're pretty reliant on CSS technology, which is a new technology, becoming successful, so that it can be used at scale to mitigate our carbon footprint.

"We're also looking at a number of low-carbon forms of energy as well to ensure that out value proposition for growth in the future, which is dependent on CTL, is not blunted in any way," he said.

Coal was a "very important" part of world energy and there would hve to be a continued focus on coal, particularly in the developing world.

Coal continued to accounted for 95% of the input material fed into Saasol's CTL plant at Secunda in Mpumalanga and natural gas for only 5%.

CTL was being used in China where Sasol was far advanced with a feasibility study for an 80 000 bl/d plant.

If that was successful, China, with its huge coal reserves and a large market for transport fuels, presented tremendous upside potential for more CTL plants to be built into the future.

"Coal must play into that space, but it must be done in a responsible and sustainable way," said Davies.