Plans are afoot to build a plant in the Western Cape that would produce electro-sustainable aviation fuel, or eSAF. a synthetic jet fuel made by combining green hydrogen, produced from water using renewable electricity, with captured carbon dioxide. But there are serious environmental concerns.

The plant would be located about three kilometres north of Hopefield, itself about 50km from Saldanha. At full production, the facility is expected to produce 140 000 tonnes of eSAF a year. But the market for eSAF is still largely artificially created. Demand for eSAF is driven primarily by green mandates in the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom rather than by real market demand, with production costs up to 12 times higher than conventional aviation fuel.

WSP Group Africa is the environmental consultant appointed to manage the scoping and environmental impact reporting process. In this role, WSP is acting as the purportedly independent environmental assessment practitioner. That means it is responsible for compiling the draft scoping report, identifying the potential environmental and social impacts, setting out which specialist studies are required, and managing public participation before the Western Cape Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning decides whether the process can move forward.

The draft scoping report is an early-stage document that identifies issues requiring further investigation. WSP says the scoping phase “did not identify any fatal flaws associated with the project”. But the same report also says, “A number of environmental impacts have been identified, which require more in-depth investigation and the identification of detailed mitigation measures.”

Those risks include groundwater contamination, impacts on wetlands, loss of biodiversity, hazardous material storage, fire and explosion scenarios, traffic, air emissions, and visual changes to the rural landscape.

The project would operate as a continuous industrial process. The report states that the facility, including green hydrogen production, would operate “continuously on a 24/7 basis”. The process would use electrolysers to split purified water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would then be combined with captured carbon dioxide in an industrial process that turns gases into liquid hydrocarbons suitable for aviation fuel.

Water is one of the central issues. The report says, “The water that will be used on the plant will be sourced from the municipal potable water line.” It estimates “approximately 8MLD (megalitres per day) of gross water usage per day” at full production, with recycling expected to reduce this to “about 3-5MLD of net water usage”. One megalitre is one million litres and 8MLD is the average water usage of a town of between 30 000 and 50 000 people.

The report also records that the Hopefield area receives low rainfall and that “groundwater plays a crucial role in meeting both domestic and irrigation requirements, and outside of town boundaries, it is the only readily available source of water”.

The report says the site is underlain by “highly permeable unconsolidated sands”, which makes the primary aquifer “highly vulnerable to surface-based contamination”. It also says groundwater from the aquifer beneath the property would drain toward the Langebaan Lagoon and Geelbek area, where ecosystems are dependent on groundwater flows. The report states that “it is thus vital that the aquifer be protected against …sources of contamination”.

The report identifies the “risk of groundwater quality deterioration resulting from contaminated stormwater, chemical spills, SAF leaks, fuels, catalysts, or other process-related chemicals infiltrating the highly permeable shallow aquifer”. In context, SAF refers to the synthetic aviation fuel product the plant would produce. It also identifies the risk of contaminated groundwater “migrating downgradient towards sensitive receptors”, including “downstream groundwater users, the Sout River..., … and ultimately the Langebaan Lagoon”.

That is the technical version of the concern raised by Dr James Myburgh on the Talking Sense podcast. Myburgh warned that “if there's any kind of wastewater that gets out or there's an accident in the plant and there's a spillage, then that goes straight down into the aquifer”.

The report also flags surface water and wetland risks. The Sout River lies about 875m east of the plant, and the site slopes down toward the river. The report says the Sout River is dominated by a floodplain wetland from upstream of Hopefield to just downstream of the site, where the estuarine functional zone begins. In its impact section, WSP says the project “may have negative impacts” on the wetland associated with the Sout River and other wetlands on and near the project site. It says hazardous chemicals could enter the wetland habitat “either directly through surface runoff during rainfall events, or via subsurface water movement”.

A national government environmental screening system identified the aquatic biodiversity theme as very high sensitivity because part of the site falls within an aquatic ESA1 area. ESA1 means ecological support area 1, a higher-priority ecological support category used in biodiversity planning for areas that help sustain watercourses, wetlands, and wider ecological processes. In this case, it means the concern is not only whether a wetland lies directly under the proposed plant, but whether the site forms part of a broader aquatic system linked to the Sout River and downstream wetlands.

The report also notes one prioritised freshwater ecosystem priority areas (FEPA) wetland downstream along the Sout River. FEPA refers to mapped freshwater systems identified for conservation. Yet the report states that “a full assessment is deemed not necessary due to the distance of the wetland from the site”.

The report says the project area is 61 hectares, roughly equivalent to 61 rugby fields, and “currently consists of indigenous vegetation”, specifically Hopefield Sand Fynbos. It also says the western portion of the study site, more than 30.0%, falls within critical biodiversity areas for terrestrial, wetland, and river features. The report says these areas should be maintained in a “natural or near-natural state, with no further loss of natural habitat”.

The report identifies Hopefield Sand Fynbos as vulnerable and “hardly protected”. It also says desktop vegetation mapping showed Swartland Shale Renosterveld, a critically endangered vegetation type, as potentially occurring in the broader study area. However, fieldwork did not confirm the presence of that vegetation type on the site. Field investigations instead found that the site is mainly “disturbed Hopefield Sand Fynbos”, covering about 60.0% to 70.0% of the study site, with secondary grassland making up the remainder. In this context, “disturbed” means the fynbos has already been affected by human activity, including cultivated farmlands, informal access roads, alien plants, and poor vegetation management. But the classification does not mean the land has lost its ecological value. It means a degraded part of a vulnerable and poorly protected fynbos system would be further transformed by the proposed industrial development.

The report warns that construction could cause “land use changes, habitat degradation and/or fragmentation, loss of faunal and avifaunal [bird] habitats and mortality of fauna or avifauna within the study site”.

The plant would also store and use hazardous materials. These include potassium hydroxide; amine; ammonia; caustic, hydrochloric acid-based cleaner; sodium hypochlorite; and other water treatment chemicals.

The report says, “a flare is required for the safe combustion of flammable gases” and that it would be fuelled by natural gas to ensure continuous ignition. A flare is an industrial safety system used to burn gases that cannot safely remain in the process system. The report says the gases combusted are mainly methane, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide.

The report also identifies risks from “fires and explosions, as well as asphyxiant releases”. It lists possible incidents involving “electrolysers failure, hydrogen storage failure, CO2 liquefaction and storage failure, and bulk fuel storage”. The report says a major hazard installation study will be required in the next phase.

During construction, the report says the national ambient air quality standards could be exceeded. During operation, it identifies “routine emissions and flare emissions”.

Traffic impacts would be concentrated during construction and product transport. The report estimates about 44 500 one-way truck trips over a five-year construction period for major components and construction materials. During operation, the plant is expected to produce 140 000 tonnes of eSAF a year. Assuming 34 tonnes per truck, the report estimates 4 118 truck trips a year to transport the product, or about 11 one-way truck trips a day.

The report also addresses visual impact. It says the area south of Hopefield is predominantly nature conservation land, while the area north and east is a rural landscape being transformed by renewable energy infrastructure. The project would include structures rising up to 30m high, roughly the height of an eight-to-ten-storey building. The report says the plant infrastructure is “anticipated to dominate the view” and that construction cranes could introduce “large, industrial, and uncharacteristic elements into a naturally scenic or tranquil environment”.

Public participation was done between May and early June. Public comments will be included in a comments and responses report as part of the final scoping report.

The report therefore presents two accounts of the same project. It describes the facility as part of South Africa’s green hydrogen and low-carbon aviation fuel strategy. It also identifies a set of site-specific risks involving water supply, groundwater contamination, wetlands, biodiversity, hazardous materials, fire, explosions, air emissions, truck movements, and changes to the aesthetically pleasing natural landscape.

The next stage will determine whether those risks can be avoided, reduced, or managed through design, licensing conditions, and monitoring. For residents and environmental groups, the key issue is likely to be whether a project of this scale should be placed on a permeable aquifer system connected to the Sout River and, ultimately, the Langebaan Lagoon.

It is clear that the project poses a serious risk to one of South Africa’s most fragile natural wonders. Effectively, due to the environmental rules of the EU, one of the few places in the world where it makes economic sense to build a chemical eSAF factory is in one of the most ecologically sensitive areas in the Western Cape.