I-Net Bridge |
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:25
[miningmx.com] -- According to Rob Davies, the Trade and Industry Minister, this country can’t expect to have large energy-absorbing projects in the future.
Replying to a member’s statement regretting the withdrawal of Alcan’s proposal to build an aluminium smelter at Coega in the Eastern Cape, made by Smuts Ngonyama of the Congress of the People in the National Assembly on Tuesday, he said: “That was a past concept of industrial decentralisation, and certainly not the current one.”
Davies told the house that Coega’s chief, Pepe Salinga, said that he was not fazed by the cancellation of the project. “Long ago they had moved away from looking for an anchor tenant,” Davies said, “in particular large energy-using but not labour-creating projects like aluminium smelters.”
The minister added that the project was suspended “basically because we don’t have the energy to
support these kinds of projects that don’t generate large quantities of down stream activities.”