New Fracking Route to grace the Karoo

This Tourism Week 21 April 2011

New Fracking Route to grace the Karoo

Media Release. Immediate. 21 April 2011

South Africa’s heartland, the unique, inimitable and semi-arid Karoo, is set to become the country’s newest tourism attraction with the announcement today of the establishment of a new Fracking Route for the area.

“We believe that the Fracking Route will quickly kick Table Mountain into second place as the country’s leading tourism icon,” said a clearly excited Minister of New Developments, Donald McSnout.

“It’s where it belongs.”

Mr. McSnout said that Fracking – hydraulic fracturing of deep underground rock – requires both vertical and horizontal drilling and that the wells that will be sunk for the purpose will become the basis of the tourism Route.

“We’ll run a public participation process to find suitable names for the individual wells in due course, but really what the route is all about is the excitement of seeing the rigs in what would otherwise be a barren and forgotten landscape.”

Asked whether the fracking process required huge amounts of water (as has been reported in some quarters of the reactionary capitalist media), the Minister said that the Karoo has this resource in abundance. “And anyway, nobody uses it all: most of it just flows down the rivers and into the sea, where it goes to waste,” he said.

“And who cares whether the process of injecting chemicals into the rock damages the water table? There’s more water in the sky, and it rains often enough in the Karoo.”

The minister demonstrated his deep knowledge of the scientific processes involved. “We need the methane that fracking will deliver in order to deliver a better life for all our cadres – and although there certainly are alternate methods of producing the gas, it’ll be a long time before it’ll be commercially viable to put methane collectors onto the back ends of each of the cows in our national herd,” he said.

Minister McSnout said that the Route will create undreamed of economic possibilities, which will benefit the people of the Karoo. “We’re thinking of setting up cultural villages at some of the wells where the locals can show off their traditional way of life – you know, stuffing boerewors and making veldschoene, that kind of thing.

“They’re just a bunch of sheep farmers, anyway, and most of them are unemployed, so you’d think they’d be grateful for what we’re doing here!” he said, with feeling.

… And if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. (There’s an excellent article on the issue here.)