What is under the Koup
Four times people have come to this country certain there was something valuable under it: gold in 1871 and 1891, oil in the middle 1960s, uranium from 1969 to 1985, and shale gas from 2011. A drill bit still lies on Rondabel. The boreholes SOEKOR drilled for oil are the same cores that deflated the shale gas estimate fifty years later.
1871 to now
There is a drill bit lying on Rondabel. Nobody is certain whose rig left it. It is somewhere between fifty and seventy years old, it was foreign, and it is the most ordinary object anywhere in this history, because four separate times people have come to this country convinced there was something valuable under it.
What follows is the list, with dates, and it is deliberately flat: the fourth round is a live political argument and there are people on both sides of it who farm here. Where a number is contested, and the resource estimates are, both the claim and the peer-reviewed reassessment are given with a source for each.
1. Gold, 1871 and 1891
An aardvark turned up a 2½ oz nugget on Spreeuwfontein in August 1871. Atherstone told the Cape House of Assembly the following year that the rocks were too young to host a productive goldfield, and twenty years of quiet followed. Then a second nugget in 1891, five hundred diggers, 1,042 claims, and a village called Gatsplaas.
Total recovered: 504 ounces. Abandoned by 1892. Atherstone had been right.
Full account: the Prince Albert gold rush.
2. Oil, the middle 1960s
SOEKOR, the state oil company, put down about twenty deep wells across the Karoo in the mid to late 1960s, over an area larger than Germany. The boreholes still carry their designations: KL1/65, WE1/66, SW1/67, SP1/69. [SRC-184]
They did not find economic oil. In 1967 a crew lost drilling fluid at about 2,400 metres on Skietfontein outside Aberdeen, which is still talked about.
This is the most likely origin of the bit on Rondabel, and it is not established, see LEAD-0051.
3. Uranium, 1969 to 1985
SOEKOR's 1967 cores came up with anomalous uranium, and that started the next thing. Prospecting for sandstone-hosted uranium in the Main Karoo Basin ran for sixteen years. ESSO trial-mined into the late 1970s. Beaufort West was spoken of as a coming mining town.
Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 collapsed the uranium price, and it stopped. [SRC-184]
4. Shale gas, 2011 to now
In 2011, Shell, Bundu and Falcon applied jointly for exploration rights over 123,450 square kilometres of the Karoo. Shell alone sought about 90,000 km² in three blocks; Falcon's 30,000 km² took in Aberdeen, Jansenville and Merweville, which is a Koup town. [SRC-185]
The Minister of Mineral Resources imposed a moratorium in February 2011. It was lifted in September 2012.
In 2017 the High Court set aside the fracking regulations in a matter brought by the Treasure the Karoo Action Group and AfriForum, on the ground that they had been promulgated by the wrong minister.
And the same year, the 1960s cores answered the question
Also in 2017, de Kock and colleagues published in the South African Journal of Science. They went back to the legacy SOEKOR cores, SP1/69, WE1/66 and SW1/67, the same holes drilled fifty years earlier looking for oil. [SRC-185]
What they found:
- the Ecca Group is metamorphosed and overmature, its hydrocarbon-generating potential
destroyed
- dolerite sills intruding the shale caused catastrophic degassing
- direct measurement showed little to no gas desorbing, despite high total organic carbon
Their conclusion was that the lowest of the existing resource estimates, about 13 trillion cubic feet, is the realistic one. Claims had run as high as 485.
Where it stands
In October 2025 the Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources announced that the 2011 moratorium will be lifted once new regulations are published. In November 2025 the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment released draft environmental regulations for onshore oil and gas, well design and integrity, chemical disclosure, wastewater management, monitoring and enforcement, for a thirty-day public comment period.
That is where it stands, and it is the only one of the four that has not finished happening.
The pattern, stated plainly
| 1871–92 | gold | 504 ounces, then abandoned |
| 1965–69 | oil | about twenty deep wells, no economic find |
| 1969–85 | uranium | sixteen years of prospecting, ended by the price |
| 2011– | shale gas | 123,450 km² applied for; the resource estimate cut by a factor of thirty-odd in 2017; unresolved |
Two things follow from that table, and no more than two.
The first is that the Koup's emptiness has always been the attraction. Nobody came here for the farming. They came because there is nothing in the way, no overburden on the fossil beds, no lights over the observatory at Zeekoegat, no towns above the shale. The same quality that has made this a hard place to make a living out of sheep is what keeps bringing people back to look underneath it.
The second is that the 1960s boreholes are still doing work. SOEKOR drilled them to find oil and failed. Their cores then started a sixteen-year uranium search. And fifty years after they were cut, the same cores were pulled out of storage and read again, and it was those cores, not any new drilling, that deflated the shale gas number.
A hole drilled for one reason has answered two other questions since. Bear that in mind when you next walk past a drill bit lying in the veld.
What this story is about
Sources
Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.
- SOEKOR's Karoo exploration drilling, 1960s-70s, and the uranium prospecting that followed Council for Geoscience (Karoo Deep Drilling Project); SAJS, 'Deflating the shale gas potential of South Africa's Main Karoo basin'; Karoo Spaceview it online →
- Karoo shale gas: the 2011 exploration applications, the moratorium, and the 2017 reassessment de Kock et al., 'Deflating the shale gas potential of South Africa's Main Karoo basin', South African Journal of Science 113(9/10), 2017; Karoo Space; Daily Maverickview it online →
Research notes
[1 Aug 2026] Written: "its emotive, so keep it factual." The fourth item is a live political argument and people on this ground disagree about it, so the page gives dates, areas, figures and citations and stops. Where a number is contested - the resource estimates - both the claim and the peer-reviewed reassessment are given with a source for each. No advocacy either way.
[5 Aug 2026, moved out of the prose] . 'This page will need revising, and that is unusual for this site' now reads as a statement about the subject being live rather than about the site.
[12 Aug 2026] VOICE REWRITE to STORY-VOICE.md, both languages. en 0/6/1 -> 0/0/1, af 1/5/1 -> 0/0/1 (narration/bold-sentence/punchline). The one hit left in each is 'Full account: the Prince Albert gold rush', a cross-reference line that the punchline heuristic reads as a turned ending. Eleven bolded sentences removed.
A WHOLE SECTION ABOUT HOW THE PAGE IS WRITTEN IS GONE, AND NOTHING WAS LOST, because it repeated the opening. 'A note on how this page is written' said the fourth item is a live argument, that the page therefore gives dates and figures and stops, and that contested numbers carry both the claim and the reassessment. The first two of those are already the second paragraph of the page. The third was the only new thing in it and is now folded into that paragraph, so the commitment is made once, up front, where a reader meets it before the contested material rather than after. THE EDITORIAL RESTRAINT ITSELF IS UNCHANGED: this page still gives dates, areas, figures and citations on the shale-gas question and takes no side, which matters because Frans's own neighbours are on both sides of it.
PROCESS ARCHAEOLOGY: 'That is where this stands as this page is written' dated the page rather than the events; it now reads 'That is where it stands, and it is the only one of the four that has not finished happening', which keeps the point that round four is live. Also 'the most ordinary object on this whole site' -> 'anywhere in this history', 'a borehole on this project's own ground' -> 'on any of these farms', and 'this page will need revising as it moves' -> 'it will move'.
'Still open' renamed 'What has not been worked out' so the panel renders, and its three bullets given labels in the house form. The closing line about walking past a drill bit in the veld is kept: it ties back to the object the page opens on and it is the ending, not a manufactured one. verify_af passing.
The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.