After 20 years in business, SLGlooks ahead to new opportunities

YOGASHEN PILLAY yogashen.pillay@inl.co.za

SPRING Light Gas (SLG) celebrated its 20th anniversary in October as one of the leading natural gas suppliers in South Africa.

Group CEO Mzi Tyhokolo said among the company’s secrets to success was its strong relationship with customers, which it had built over the years.

Natural gas has many uses, Tyhokolo noted.

“Our focus area is industrial customers. We supply gas only to industrial customers, these are people who produce products from the gas. Industrial customers have the capacity to buy the gas in large volumes,” he said.

“When you buy bread, gas is used in the process baking, when you buy a plastic bottle of water gas is used in the process to manufacture PET. The textile industry uses natural gas to treat the dyes and material that are used.

“Everyday in your life you touch a product that uses natural gas in the process of its manufacture. An aerosol can which has sanitiser uses natural gas to make the can. Natural gas is also used in the baking process.”

Over the next three years, SLG has a strong plan to grow its market share by 50%, Tyhokolo said.

“We want to diversify the business of SLG, we want to remain in the energy space but we effectively want to diversify our energy supply offering and go into what we call embedded power generation,” he added.

“For our industrial customers we know that we might have gas available in the pipeline but they might have an electricity shortage to make a product so we want to address that and supply both gas and electricity.

“That is something we are looking at going into for the next three years and are very hard at work at it.”

Tyhokolo added that SLG was also looking at securing a new source of gas.

“South Africa is running out of gas. Sasol was being supplied gas from Mozambique but we know the supply is going to start declining around 2026 or 2027. We can't wait for that time. We need to secure a source of gas now,” he said. “We are exploring new supply opportunities to sustain not only ourselves but the natural gas industry in South Africa. We believe that natural gas is also needed for a stable electricity supply.”

He said the past 20 years had been good for the industry, but now there were challenges.

“We had gas piped from Mozambique and it was being produced at Sasol in Secunda, the two sources of gas. Like I said the gas fields from Mozambique are declining and then Sasol is facing a huge push back from its international and European customers about coal burning operations. With this zero carbon agenda, Sasol has to relook at how it uses its product.

“We are now looking at the issue of running out of gas so the next question is are we going to shut our industry down or find a different source of gas.

“Remember, natural gas is traded around the world like crude oil, we don’t produce crude oil but we have diesel, petrol and paraffin.

“So we buy crude oil from around the world and to an extent we refine it here, the exact same thing needs to happen with gas. Gas is sold around the world as liquefied natural gas and that is the next source of gas for South Africa, it is not a question of maybe, it's a question of when.”

Tyhokolo said liquefied natural gas will have to be shipped to South African ports.

“We have six or seven ports around our coast and the liquefied natural gas will have to be offloaded strategically and will either be regasified back into pipelines or can be decanted into tankers like fuel and trucked to points of use. That is really where the shift of natural gas will be.”

Speaking on the challenges facing the South African economy, he said manufacturers were the first to suffer when there was no growth.

“In order for the economy to grow we need to be a productive economy, we need to make things. The only way to make products and if you look at the history of countries like America and China you need to have a stable energy supply,” he said.

We need to not focus on carbon reduction as South Africa. Africa contributes less than 2% of carbon emissions. What we need to focus on is producing electricity the cheapest way we can and that is electricity from coal. We need to fix the power plants that we have. We can write policies but if we don’t have a stable electricity system, we can’t grow the economy.

“Remember when we talk about the fourth industrial revolution whether it is electric cars, WiFi and new AI technology they all rely on a stable electricity supply.”

SLG Group CEO Mzi Tyhokolo.

Celebrating 20 years of supplying natural gas in South Africa.

SLG a proudly South African company that provides high quality natural gas to industrial and commercial customers in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.