The undertaking includes upgrading present railway strains operating by means of the 2 nations and Zimbabwe and constructing new connections. It features a new deep-water port south of Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, close to a nationwide park dwelling to elephants and cheetahs.
Stranded asset
Botswana has round 212 billion tons of coal reserves, in accordance with the World Power Council, and is keen to search out methods to get it to markets earlier than the world’s efforts to transition to renewable vitality renders it a stranded asset.
The plan — which has been round for many years with out gaining a lot traction — faces main hurdles. Financing for brand spanking new coal tasks has turn out to be more and more scarce, as banks shun the dirtiest fossil gas.
In Mozambique, Ncondezi Power Ltd. had deliberate a 300 megawatt coal energy plant within the heart of the nation. It signed a development contract with China Equipment Engineering Corp. in September 2021, hoping Chinese language financing would comply with. It didn’t.
The identical month, President Xi Jinping introduced his authorities would not fund overseas coal tasks. And after months of uncertainty, Ncondezi in the end dropped the coal undertaking and reinvented itself as a solar energy developer. Final yr, it modified it’s identify to Solgenics Ltd.
(By Borges Nhamire, Matthew Hill and Mbongeni Mguni)