sunsetting 64 megatons

Sasol Secunda synthesises petrol and diesel out of coal, and in doing so emits 64 million tons of CO₂ a year, more than any other single point on earth. The chemistry that makes this possible is the Fischer-Tropsch process, industrialised by Nazi Germany when it needed fuel it couldn't buy, taken up decades later by the apartheid state for exactly the same reason, and kept running ever since by a global oil economy that found the arrangement convenient enough to leave alone. Anton Bossenbroek first came to the plant in 2018 as a machine learning consultant, writing the models that predicted failures in its cooling systems — work whose entire purpose was to keep the thing from stopping. He went back with a large-format camera to photograph it ending.

What the pictures find isn't a spoiled landscape so much as a designed one. The ground here was shaped by extraction, and arranged by the economics and racial planning that decided where the plant would go and where the people who work near it would live. Alongside the terrain are portraits made with residents of Secunda and Embalenhle, holding their ground against the plant behind them, and the show follows the ordinary texture of living next to it: the layout of the township, the taxi fare that takes a real cut of a day's wages.

The ending is already underway. The coal is running out, decommissioning is coming, and the same facility that accelerates the carbon in the atmosphere also funds South African teachers' pensions. Neither fact cancels the other, which is the difficulty the work sits inside: what does the place become — architecturally, socially — once the machines power down?