Natural Justice submitted to the South Africa Portfolio Committee on Electricity and Energy, the following comments pertaining to the gazette Publication of the Draft Gas Bill. The gazette for public comment was published on the 16th of July 2026.
Our central concern is this: the Bill builds significant regulatory machinery for gas infrastructure development but embeds very thin environmental safeguards, including clear decommissioning requirements. It repeatedly defers substantive environmental protection to other legislation — NEMA, the NWA, environmental impact assessment regulations — without integrating those frameworks in any operationally meaningful way. That deferral may look tidy on paper, but it tends to produce gaps in practice. Licences get issued, disputes arise, and the absence of clear environmental conditions in the gas regulatory instrument itself becomes a problem.
See the submission here.
