The Coal Reserves of Mozambique

The day dawns cool but even in the early light the sky is burnished brass and the sun a red orb through the Mopani and Baobab trees, heralding the scorching temperatures to come. Not that one wakes to the sounds of the bush – the cockerels have been crowing since 04:30, the guinea fowls chirruping not much after that, and a generator has been thumping away in the neighbouring driller’s camp since 5 a.m. Six a.m. finds us nursing cups of tea around the fire, talking shop as one is apt to do in these environs, and contemplating the day’s work ahead. Home is tent town, but actually quite civilised – there is a beautiful grass-thatched lapha, open to the four winds, with a concrete floor, dining table, DSTV and a couch and an adjacent kitchen tent. Fridges and freezers whirr away while the periodic clunk of the ice maker as it dumps another load of ice into its frigid innards punctuates the morning. Concrete paths lead to tents, the shower block or to garages, coresheds and stores. Seven p.m. and everyone goes their way – to the core sheds, to the drilling rigs, to the ‘office’ to beaver away in proving the vast reserves of coal which underlie this entire region and outcrop at surface in the river bed not 30 metres from the camp. This is our source of fuel for heating up the donkey boilers for our hot water. All that is required is a wheel barrow and a pick to dig the coal out, and a bit of legwork to push it up to the shower block. This might almost be construed as a free lunch.
The coal reserves of Tete Province have been described as the largest unexploited coal reserve in the world. Deposited in ancient forests over 300 million years ago, they have lain essentially unsullied until now. Evidence of ancient life lies everywhere, not least being the coal, but in places one can see the distinctive imprints of Glossopteris leaves fossilised in the ancient sandstones. Glossopteris was the Gondwana tree, found across India, Southern Africa, Australia and Antarctica, which made up the majority of the biomass from which the coal was derived. A number of exploration concessions have been granted to Australian, India and UK based mining houses and the race is on to get the first Mozambiquan coal out of ground and to the port. Which is a logistical nightmare in itself, as the bridge over the Zambezi at Tete has been officially condemned thanks to a Russian commander driving his tanks over the structure, exceeding its design loads and damaging it forever. Then there are the terrible roads down to Beira to contend with, which can only get worse as they fall to pieces due to the excessive loads of coal trucks. But the reserves need to be proven which is what brought me to Tete Province and the life of a coal geologist.

Occasionally we make it up to Songo, which is the town adjacent to the Cahorra Bassa Dam and 25 km distant from our life in the bush. Higher, cooler, and relatively civilised, it overlooks the amazingly beautiful Zambezi gorge. The dam is awesome and the lake stretches back 250 km. The bream straight out of the lake are delicious and one of the highlights of life in the vicinity of Songo. But there is not much time to go sightseeing or fishing, and we spend all of our time not more than 2 km from the camp. A morning walk out into the Mopani woodlands and baobabs is welcome relief from the tedium of the camp, and a climb into the ancient granite hills to the north of the concessions reveals vast tracts of Africa, punctuated by Baobabs and the ubiquitous power lines which hum south-eastwards towards South Africa.

And that is why it has been a while since my last missive – stuck in the bush without easy access to emails and the internet, and without much spare time for that matter either. But it was an interesting few weeks and certainly Mozambique is in many ways the land of opportunity.