Agricultural land near the Orange River at Upington, South Africa.
The DMT subsidiary DMT Kai-Batla has been awarded a contract by the Department for Water and Sanitation of the Republic of South Africa (DWS) for the assessment of industrial water use in three of the nine water management areas in South Africa. The year-long project will be carried out together with a local partner and in close cooperation with the DMT hydrogeology and water management experts in Essen, Germany, who supported the South African colleagues with their methodological skills in the preparatory phase.
The DWS is responsible for protecting, managing and controlling South Africa’s water resources. Under the National Water Act, anyone taking water from a surface water or groundwater resource, storing water, discharging effluent water, altering banks or impeding and diverting the flow of water in a watercourse must first apply for a water-use licence permitting them to do so. This helps the authorities control water usage in industrial sectors such as mining and farming.
DMT Kai-Batla has now been contracted to compare the actual water usage in the northern provinces of Limpopo, Vaal Major and Orange with the assigned licences. This will involve extensive data research and in-situ data collection over a period of 12 months. As soon as the correct techniques and simulation methods had been agreed with the contractor, work began to determine the storage capacity of hundreds of reservoirs and to calculate the water requirements for agricultural irrigation for thousands of different croplands across the three regions.