HILARY IN YANG DUKE ENERGY, DISTINGUISHED PROF. ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE.
SPEAKING ON HOW ENERGY PROBLEMS FACING AFRICA CAN BE RESOLVED.
Energy can be looked at in terms of two major sectors, electricity and oil. In Africa Nigeria is the eighth largest producer of oil in the world, most of which goes overseas. For example, Nigeria is a major supplier of oil to the United States — but that is just the raw oil. The problem with Nigeria is its lack of productive capacity which causes frequent petrol and gasoline shortages.
What determines a country’s efficiency with respect to production capacity of crude oil is its ability to orchestrate efforts to develop refineries and to maintain good transportation networks and pipelines for distribution to major centres. At this point, Nigerian labour unions get involved and organize strikes, resulting in the stagnation of economic development. The issue has to be dealt with by the Nigerian Ministry of Petroleum.
When dealing with the energy sector and electricity supply. One must address electricity generation, transmission and distribution. Currently, Nigeria’s power generating capacity is very low; it is only one third of what is required to provide uninterrupted power for the country’s development programme or even for its households. The Nigerian distribution and transmission systems are inadequate, though I am certain that the new administration will try to deal with the issue, because Nigeria is the economic engine of sub-Saharan Africa.
On a global level, energy must be recognized as the engine of modern economy. Now, supplying the demand is not the point because geopolitical alignments have significant implications, especially on energy sustainability of one country or the other.
Now most countries are trying to align their energy resources to reduce that dependency on petroleum, because oil has to be viewed from the perspective of producing countries as well as consuming countries, and none of this is reliable. This is so because the consuming countries often have a production capacity less than their consumption capacity, meaning, they have to import oil from other countries. It so happens that these regions where they import oil are often unstable; examples are the Middle East and some sub-Saharan African countries, including Nigeria.
At this point global political alignment over the political problems will be an important determinant of global energy sufficiency for some time to come. Until renewable energy is developed by the high consuming countries like the United States and other countries in Europe, such as Greece. A problem that remains unsolved
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR AFRICA?
Having said all that, the developing countries must by necessity strengthen their economies through economic development facilities like factories and so forth which generate the pollutants implicated in global warming. On the other hand, they could use the less-polluting sustainable technologies, discarding the old technology of the advanced countries. This should be the challenge to Africa.
The question then is how countries generate enough energy-producing activity to support their large population centres. Within the next thirty years, most of the world’s most populous cities will be in the developing world — Lagos, Mumbai. So they will need jobs, and jobs are not created without economic development; and economic development in the context of the developing world often means the construction of factories and extraction of natural resources, all very energy intensive.
So the question of what the future holds for the developing world can be answered only by the hope that the entire globe through its international agencies will devise clean development mechanisms making it possible for the developing world to industrialize and provide jobs and services for their populace, without having to use the old toxic technologies that have put us in this quagmire.