Zimbabwe Suspends New Urban Fuel Station Licences

The Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority (ZERA) has temporarily suspended the issuing of new licences for fuel stations in urban areas, citing a need to curb the “mushrooming” of retail filling stations across the country.

The regulator is also considering a new by-law that would enforce a minimum distance of 15 kilometres between two retail service stations while also advocating for a shift towards containerised or portable fuel retail stations in urban centres to reduce land use.

This development follows the Harare City Council’s recent admission of chaos and poor coordination in issuing permits for service stations, resulting in three fuel stations within a 50 km radius, with some located just one metre apart.

Speaking during an Environmental Social Governance (ESG) conference held in Harare last Friday, Zimbabwe Energy Regulatory Authority’s technical services director, Engineer Man’arai Ndovorwi, said they are now working on closing all loopholes to curb the mushrooming of service stations.

“The issue of mushrooming of service stations in the CBD or in urban centres is, of course, of concern for us, and I think one of the challenges or loopholes that we had in our legislation was the licensing of these sites after they had obtained commercial rights in terms of development of these properties in urban centres,” he said.

“However, we are currently in talks with the local authorities to ensure that we revise the by-laws so that the actual permitting and licensing of these service stations is done before the development of these service stations, and so that we also amend our regulations to indicate the minimum distances that should be between service stations.”

Eng Ndovorwi also revealed that new licences will only be issued after the current challenges have been addressed.

“We are happy that the Government, through the Minister of Local Government and Public Works, issued a moratorium in terms of development in urban centres, and this is also not only impacting in terms of housing developments, but it’s also involving the development of these commercial entities or commercial sites in terms of development of service stations.

“So that moratorium is also applying to the development of service stations, and so currently we are not licensing any service stations in urban areas, but at least we are also working around the issue to ensure that we have minimum safe distances between these service stations being established.”

In urban areas, Eng Ndovorwi said, they were pushing for the minimum distance between retail fuel stations to curb further mushrooming of such facilities.

“In other jurisdictions, we find that the minimum distance between these service stations should be around 15 kilometres, so that is what we are also anticipating to happen as we develop our communities and move outside the CBDs to actually also do investment in rural communities.”

In the future, Eng Ndovorwi added that traditional fuel stations in urban areas will be phased out.

“So we are now encouraging them to put containerised fuel stations, which are coming at 20 percent of the cost of putting up a service station. So this is actually a way to help issues of mushrooming of service stations in the epicentres.”

A containerised or portable fuel retail station is a complete, self-contained fuel storage and dispensing unit built inside a standard shipping container.

The storage tanks are above ground, and the shipping container provides secondary containment.

They are also called portable fuel stations because the container installation can be transported on a low-bed trailer as and when necessary.