AFTER THE BELL: How long will King Coal continue to glitter?

South Africa’s coal industry remains a vital economic force even as the country grapples with the long-term shift to renewable energy.

Despite growing up in a country that really depended on coal I had no idea of how important it was in my life.

We moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg just in time for the 1985 school year, which meant that the year after that was dominated by the celebrations of Joburg’s centenary.

And so I learnt all about the gold industry, how important it was, how it created so much for our economy and how nearly half of all the gold mined by humans had come from this place that my family had just moved to.

And, would you believe, at one point I even got to join the miners as part of a school outing to the then brand new Gold Reef City.

I don’t know if teachers would be allowed to take so many minor miners underground now, but I seem to remember that fiddling with the light on my hard hat was probably the best part.

And yet, I only realised how important coal was to my life when too much coal got too wet back in the wet summer of 2007 and 2008.

Those raindrops, that fell so coldly on my head in the mud of the ANC’s Polokwane Conference that year led to load shedding and all that followed.

Now, all we seem to talk about is how quickly we need to move away from using coal.

The numbers speak for themselves, you can’t really argue against the economic case for it; renewable power, once installed, relies on solar and wind which you don’t have to pay for. Coal has to be mined and transported, sometimes for thousands of kilometres.

This morning Exxaro Resources reported its revenue was up 7% to R22-billion. Its Ebitda was R5.6-billion, while it sold nearly twenty million tonnes of coal.

The numbers are hard to comprehend, they produce literally mountains of coal.

And there is so much of the stuff under our ground. Some estimates suggest we have about 6% of the world’s total coal deposits.

But the sheer energy it contains, its “calorific value” to use a phrase I’ll have to look up later, makes it hard to really live without.