JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) –South Africa’s Environmental Affairs and Tourism Department has raised “significant concerns” with Australian-miner Coal of Africa Limited’s (CoAL’s) proposed Vele Colliery, in Limpopo province, and did not support the project, a top official said on Friday.

Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk noted that the proposed development had the potential to cause both local, as well as trans-boundary impacts, which included air and water pollution.

CoAL owns 74% of Vele Colliery, a hard coking-coal project, which is expected to produce between one-million tons a year and 1,5-million tons a year from the third quarter of 2009. The project would ramp up to five-million tons a year by the end of 2011.

In a response to a question posed by the Democratic Alliance, Van Schalkwyk said that the mine could also impact negatively on the tourism potential of the nearby Mapungubwe World Heritage site and its buffer zones, the Mapungubwe National Park, and its direct adjacent landscape, as well as the Greater Limpopo Shase Trans-Frontier Conservation Area.

He added that downstream from the site, pollution of the Limpopo river would impact negatively on the floodplains of the river in the Makuleke and Pafuri areas of the Kruger National Park, which were registered as Ramsar wetland sites.

“The associated infrastructure like roads, waste dumps, power lines, and electricity generation facilities in this specific area is also undesirable,” Van Schalkwyk added.

CoAL has applied for a new order mining right from the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) in October last year, but was still awaiting an outcome.

Van Schalkwyk said that the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (Deat) at had not been involved in the process from the initiation of the project, and only became aware of the proposed Vele Colliery at a very late stage in the process, when the Peace Parks Foundation brought it to the department’s attention.

The issue was then followed up with the Limpopo regional office of the DME, which awarded Deat an opportunity to comment on the environmental management programme and scoping report.

“It is the opinion of Deat that it could not, at this stage, with the information available, support the awarding of the mining right in this area for this proposed project, owing to detrimental environmental considerations,” Van Schalkwyk concluded.