Ending Global Energy Poverty

Welcome to the gates of hell. Now depending on your frame of mind, that is either a bizarrely morbid or entirely appropriate way to start a talk about climate action in the year 2022. Behind me is a picture from the Hell’s Gate National Park in the town of Naivasha, in the Great Rift Valley in my home country, Kenya. Now its name may not scream “tourist trap,” but believe me, it is a beautiful part of the world and you should all try and visit sometime. But more importantly, it could play — It has the potential to play a crucial role in the fight against global climate catastrophe.

The most recent IPCC reports are clear. Humanity has left cutting emissions too late. Any realistic path to avoiding unacceptable levels of warming now requires us to not only drastically cut emissions, at least halving them by 2030, but also undertake an equally massive effort to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at an accelerating rate.

Now, let’s be clear. Greenhouse gas removal is not and cannot be an excuse for continuing to emit. Just as installing seat belts and airbags is not an excuse for deliberately ramming your car into a wall. (Laughter) Indeed, current estimates suggest that even with drastic emissions reductions, the world will need to be removing between five and 16 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every single year by 2050.Now to give you a sense of the scale of that, the low end of that range, five billion tons, that’s bigger than the size of the global petroleum industry in 2020. So let’s not kid ourselves that carbon removal, at anywhere close to the scale that we will need in order to survive, is some sort of easy way out. It is going to be damn difficult to do. So how do we do it?

Well, the first and most familiar measures would be interventions such as reforestation and landscape restoration. Essentially giving Mother Nature the time and space to heal herself. In addition, we can increase the amount of carbon held in our soils through the widespread application of biochar and enhanced weathering of chemically suitable rocks. We estimate that in Africa alone, something like 100 million to 680 million additional tons of carbon dioxide could be drawn from the atmosphere using these types of methods. However, they do require a lot of land, a lot of water and a lot of other natural resources that may limit the extent to which we can scale them. Moreover, they are subject to some of the feedback loops from the climate change that we are already experiencing, such as more frequent and intense wildfires. And all of that means we are going to need to supplement them with technologies that accelerate and amplify natural processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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Enter the members of my new favorite boy band. DAC, BECCS and BiCRS.These are a set of engineered approaches that use physical, chemical and biological processes to gather and concentrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before safely sequestering it, usually underground. As more people run the climate math, you’re seeing growing levels of interest and investment in these technologies, with billions of dollars already being committed to early pilots and installations in various parts of the world, particularly in Europe and North America. But the reality is they have a very long way to go. To date, engineered removals around the world have accounted for something like 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removed total. To get to the multi-billion-ton scale we’re going to need by 2050 is going to take a truly epic process of exponential scaling. Probably means we need to get to something — If we want to have a realistic shot at it, we need to get to something like 100 million tons per year by 2030. For those of you running the calculators, that’s a thousand-fold increase in less than a decade. And guess what? We will have to continue that insane rate of growth for another two decades after that.

And here’s the really bad news. Anything close to that level of scaling of this industry in the places where it’s currently being piloted presents some really difficult climate action trade offs. For that, let me take the example of DAC or direct air capture. The best known DAC facility in the world is in Iceland. It’s the Orca plant in Iceland, it was inaugurated last year, 2021. It uses plentiful green geothermal energy to capture carbon dioxide, dissolve it in water and inject it into porous basalt deep underground, where it chemically reacts to create a stable solid that can stay there for centuries. It takes the equivalent of between two and three megawatt hours of energy to take a single ton of carbon dioxide today and render it in that way. To get to the hundred million number in 2030, on that track, would entail something like 200 to 300 terawatt hours of electricity. Again, that’s about half the electricity usage of Germany. And all of that power would need to be renewable, otherwise, we would be taking two steps forward and one and a half steps back.

Now it’s reasonable to expect and assume that we are going to see substantial improvements in energy efficiency of these technologies as we deploy them and learn to use them better. However, keep in mind that probably the most urgent thing we can do to slow climate change right now is stop current emissions. And so scaling these technologies in places where we do have fossil fuel energy emissions that we could be curtailing does not make sense. Essentially, every unit of renewable energy that we are bringing on stream in places like North America and Europe should be going towards displacing and retiring existing fossil fuel capacity. And so the world is kind of stuck. Right? We need to scale this technology. We need to get DAC down the cost curve and up the efficiency curve urgently. Our lives literally depend on it. But at the same time, we cannot do it except at the expense of other equally urgent climate imperatives.

So we need places in the world that somehow have three characteristics. A, they need to have the right geophysical conditions. You know, plenty of porous basalt rock in a geothermally active zone is one such example. Two, they need to have plenty of renewable energy potential. And three, they need to have no current proximate emissions that that renewable energy could be used to displace.

And that brings us back to Hell’s Gate National Park. Here’s another view of the park from an angle that may explain its potential. That is one of the power plants that together constitute the Olkaria Geothermal Energy Plant, which provides about a third of Kenya’s electricity. That’s right. My home country not only has 92 percent renewable electricity being dispatched on its grids today, but its largest single-energy installation is seamlessly integrated into an honest-to-goodness national park. Literally, between the different plants you can see herds of zebra peacefully grazing all times of the day. It’s amazing.

Now at just under 1,000 megawatts, Olkaria is nothing to sneeze at. It’s one of the largest geothermal electricity installations in the world. But it’s barely scratching the surface of the potential in Kenya. There’s 10 gigawatts of proven, high-quality geothermal resource in the country, widely recognized, ready to be tapped. And in addition, Kenya is endowed with excellent wind and solar resources that have also barely been exploited. We are on the equator, after all. We estimate conservatively that there’s about 50 gigawatts of potential deployable renewable energy in Kenya that can be readily accessed with the right level of investment. And yet, Kenya remains an energy-poor country where, despite a lot of progress in recent years, more than a quarter of the population still does not have access to basic electricity. And those that do often pay prices that are almost three times as much as much as their counterparts in countries like India and China.

Now you might be sitting there wondering, “Well, all right, James, if this is true, if Kenya has all of this renewable energy potential and all of these people in need of energy, well, before we have this whole conversation about fancy climate tech, shouldn’t we first have a TED Talk about affordable energy access?” And you would be right. Were it not for a particularly cruel paradox of energy economics in countries like Kenya. You see, part of the reason why energy is so expensive in the country is those consumers who are on the grid have to pay for capacity that is not currently being used. There’s something like 1,000 megawatt hours every day that goes begging because there isn’t sufficient industrial demand. At the same time, those very same high energy prices make the country unattractive and uncompetitive for manufacturers and other users of energy looking for places to site their industries.

So to get this straight, the reason why the average Kenyan cannot get affordable access to clean, renewable energy despite all of this natural bounty, is this tremendously frustrating feedback loop where firstly, we would have all of that energy if someone invested in renewable power plants. People would invest in those power plants if there was a lot of available industry to use the energy. Available industry would come if energy costs weren’t so high. And energy costs wouldn’t be so high if there was enough demand. It’s enough to drive you crazy. But it also points the way to a potential huge triple opportunity.

Firstly, introducing DAC and other energy-hungry climate technology into places like the Rift Valley would give them the space and capacity they need to really scale to planetary levels. With no competition, with none of the trade-offs they would face in other parts of the world. At the same time, having that energy-hungry anchor industry available suddenly creates the basis on which people are willing to invest in expanding the country’s renewable energy potential. Actually creating the business case for providing tens of millions of people with the productive energy they need to improve the quality of their lives. And thirdly, introducing these new and exciting technologies on the continent with the world’s youngest and fastest-growing workforce could potentially activate their imaginations and their energies towards becoming climate innovators and solution builders themselves, basically building an army from the world’s largest workforce to solve the world’s biggest problem.

I call it the “Great Carbon Valley.” And it’s just one of the ways in which Africa, as the continent, which, per capita, is the closest to net-zero and has contributed the least to climate change, can play a role in helping the planet avert climate disaster. But in addition, it can do more and be the first continent to go substantially net-negative. We’re used to thinking about the continent in terms of its forests, its peatlands, its grasslands, its wetlands that need to be preserved. And we should definitely continue to invest in the Indigenous communities, the smallholder farmers and the local innovators who are protecting and expanding natural carbon sinks. But that should not blind us to the fact that Africa also provides an ideal potential home for scaling the latest and most ambitious of climate technologies. Whichever of these narratives most speaks to you, one thing should be clear. We need to shake the old, tired idea that Africa is a poor, hapless, helpless climate change victim. Instead, Africa and its people have the potential. They can, and they should, be the world’s climate vanguard. Thank you.