All posts tagged energy

By Gerard Kreeft

Two parallel visions have emerged from COP28: John Elkington, co-founder of think-tank Volans, author of 21 books and member of the Neste’s Advisory Council on Sustainability and New Markets has noted …“In 15-20 years, I think we will be looking at a totally transformed economic landscape. A huge number of companies will have disappeared – and new ones arrived – it will be a moment of absolute market convulsion.” Voltans on its site gives us a stark choice: “Capitalism’s future is contested in a way it hasn’t been for decades. Our economic system as a whole is confronted by a stark choice: evolve or die.”

Yet a very contrasting vision has emerged from APPO (The African Petroleum Producers Organizations) which  declares the approach adopted by the International Energy Agency as biased and states that it’s a direct hinderance to inclusive economic growth in Africa.

How can these two world views be reconciled?

The Present Situation: Viewed by  John Elkington

Elkington argues that COP 28 marks the halfway point between the 2015 Paris Agreement and 2030, by which point the world’s governments are pursuing efforts to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, and well below 2C. They also agreed to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to net zero – the level at which GHGs from human activity can be absorbed naturally – between 2050 and 2100.

COP28 is the first five-yearly Global Stock taking (GST) conducted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which describes it as “like taking inventory. It means looking at everything related to where the world stands on climate action and support, identifying the gaps, and working together to chart a better course forward to accelerate climate action.”

The GST also urges more action on all fronts, noting that the world is not on track to meet the Agreement’s long-term goals. Seventeen key findings include that emissions are rising too fast to meet the 1.5C by 2030 target (they would have to peak within the next two years, but are still climbing) and that reaching net zero by 2050 would require “absolute economy-wide emission reduction targets” at a cost of “trillions of dollars”.

The GST gives us a better sense of the gap between what we should be doing and what we are managing to achieve, Elkington says, but warns that “it won’t be a pretty picture – we are a long way off the targets”.

Note: based on an article by Nick van Mead

Present Situation: Viewed by  the APPO

The APPO  states that the approach adopted by the International Energy Agency is a biased one and a direct hinderance to inclusive economic growth in Africa:

“The International Energy Agency (IEA) has published a report strongly advocating for an end to fossil fuel use and promoting unrealistic and unattainable approaches to achieving net-zero by 2050 as the Conference of the Parties (COP28) is upon us. The report shows a rapid decline in oil demand, urges an immediate transition to renewables, and states that carbon capture is merely an illusion. ..the IEA approach poses detrimental impacts on Africa’s economies, representing a biased perspective that fails to take into account the needs and challenges of the continent.”

“Africa is on the precipice of rapid, economic transformation. The continent holds over 125Billion barrels of crude oil reserves and 620 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, resources which stand to serve as catalysts for industrialization and economic development. These resources can provide the over 600Million people and 900Million people currently without access to electricity and clean cooking solutions, respectively, with affordable energy. Yet, at the same time, the continent faces the worst impacts of climate change and is being told to abandon its oil and gas resources, despite only contributing less than 3% of global greenhouse emissions.”

Who can deny the energy poverty that Africa is suffering?

Yet will oil and gas industry in Africa provide the energy transformation that APPO is promising?

There  is a high need to dispel  a number of illusions that continue to exist. For starters that the oil majors have contributed a net worth to Africa’s economies.  According to Toyin Akinosho, publisher of Africa Oil + Gas Report, African revenues from the oil and gas majors are financing the energy transition in the rest of the world: “. . . the oil majors are funding clean energy from the balance sheet of dirty oil.”

Around 30 percent of TOTALEnergies’ production is in Africa, but less than 0.5 percent of its new energy investment will directly benefit the continent. Yet, according to Akinosho, TOTALEnergies is the best African renewable energy investor out of the majors. These include:

• ENI: In Egypt, where ENI is a major player, the company has not featured in the country’s relatively aggressive renewable energy plan.
• BP: The company has pumped over a billion barrels of oil out of Angola in the last twenty years but has excluded Africa from all of its renewable energy plans.
• Equinor: It pumps 120,000 BOEPD(Barrels of oil equivalent) in Angola but has no plans for renewables.
• Chevron: Its focus is not so much on investing in stand-alone renewable projects but increasing renewable power in support of its business to lower its carbon intensity.
• Shell: The company will likely take $7.5Billion out of Nigeria from 2021–2025. Shell has funded some off-grid projects through solar developers in Nigeria, which basically represents Shell’s footprint in Africa.

Nigerian Petroleum Development and Sonangol: Energy Champions?

In the APPO statement reference is made to Angola’s crude oil revenue of $39Billion in 2022 and Nigeria’s revenue of $45Billion. We should not imagine that national oil companies have a better track record. Africa’s two major national oil companies in Sub-Sahara Africa—Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Sonangol (Angola)—have demonstrated little hope of becoming national energy champions.

Take the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), the operating subsidiary of the NNPC, which “is a massive incompetent wrecking ball, which has been gifted joint-venture participation in 10 mining leases (OMLs) all of them producing.” The NPDC is seen as a bright star within the NNPC’s portfolio. Why? Because the degree of its performance is in direct proportion with the help it gets from its partnership with other oil majors.

Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company, has had a rocky ride since 2017. In the past, Sonangol had two roles: that of concessionaire, a highly judicious key role that gave it power and legitimacy, and being a state oil company with its responsibilities for exploration and development of the resources. Sonangol was then stripped of its concessionaire role, which was given to the newly created National Agency of Petroleum, Gas, and Biofuels.

In Angola today, power has become diffused. Sonangol has been stripped of its concessionaire role and is loaded with a mountain of debt, and the IOCs have the freedom to explore and market their natural gas. Developing green energy is certainly beyond the competence of Sonangol.

Will Hydrocarbons and CCS stimulate the Transition to Renewables?

APPO argues that IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol  is undermining African future oil and gas production. APPO is referring to  the Net Zero Emissions  2050 Scenario(NZE) which  is a normative scenario that shows a pathway for the global energy sector to achieve net zero CO₂ emissions. According to APPO, attacking Africa’s right to developing its oil and gas reserves is a direct threat to developing Africa’s renewables. The argument being that oil and gas will fund the renewables. Yet as we have seen neither the oil majors nor Africa’s two major national state oil companies—NDPC and Sonangol—have proven to be new energy champions.

APPO argues that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is an important asset to ensure that Africa’s oil and gas assets can be developed. Yet IEEFA(Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis) in a recent bulletin was unusually blunt in assessing CCS projects:

“Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an expensive and unproven technology that distracts from global decarbonization efforts while allowing the oil and gas industry to conduct business as usual. Even if realized at its full announced potential, CCS will only account for about 2.4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It’s worth noting that not one single CCS project has ever reached its target CO₂ capture rate. An IEEFA study has reviewed the capacity and performance of 13 flagship projects and found that 10 of the 13 failed or underperformed against their designed capacities, mostly by large margins.”

What can Africa Anticipate from COP28?

Between 2020 and 2030, Africa requires upwards of $2.8Trillion to meet its National Development Goals. Where is that funding supposed to come from?  According to Omar Farouk Ibrahim, Secretary General of APPO, “Africa is not only being stripped of the resources to finance a transition but continues to be disappointed by empty global promises”.

“Over the years, we have seen significant financial commitments made by global partners. In 2009, developed nations pledged $100Billion in annual financing for developing countries, and yet, between 2016 and 2019, only $20Billion was provided to Africa. Commitments have shown to fall short of action, and the same can be said for other financial pledges made in the years since”.

Is COP28 proving to be different?

Adnan Doha, partner at Baker McKenzie’s Dubai office recently summarized various commitments to date:

• In May 2023, the Africa Finance Corporation and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on infrastructure projects that accelerate the energy transition in Africa.
• In 2022, the G7 countries announced that a $600Billion lending initiative, the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Initiative (PGII), would be launched to fund sustainable infrastructure projects in developing countries, with a particular focus on Africa.
• In 2022, the US announced it was mobilizing $200Billion for developing countries over the next five years as part of the PGII. This funding will be in the form of grants, financing and private sector investments. One of the priority pillars of this funding will be “tackling the climate crisis and bolstering global energy security”. Some deals have already been announced, including a $2Billion solar energy project in Angola.
• Power Africa, a US government-led programme that focuses on addressing Africa’s access to electrical power, has also provided significant support for the energy transition. In its 2022 annual report, Power Africa noted that one of its achievements had been to successfully deliver first-time and improved electricity access to 37.7Million people in Africa through 7.6Million new on- and off-grid connections to homes and businesses in 2022.
• In February 2022, the European Commission announced investment funding for Africa worth EUR 150Billion. The funding package is part of the EU Global Gateway Investment Scheme and is said to be in the form of EU combined member funds, member state investments and capital from investment banks.
• China and Africa have also recently agreed to work together on improving Africa’s capacity for green, low-carbon sustainable development. At the 2021 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, green development was one of nine programs identified as part of the China-Africa Cooperation Vision 2035.
• Many new cross-regional energy transition initiatives have recently been announced. The Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI) was launched at COP27 with the goal of substantially expanding Africa’s participation in voluntary carbon markets. The ACMI is aiming for the production of 300Million credits annually in Africa by 2030 and 1.5Billion credits annually by 2050. It noted that these targets would provide much-needed financing for the, energy transition in Africa. Many African countries, including Gabon, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Togo, supported the initiative.
• Egypt launched, under the leadership of its COP 27 presidency, the Africa Just and Affordable Energy Transition Initiative, which will identify local strategies and energy mixes needed to steer African countries away from reliance on fossil fuels. The implementation of a clean energy transition cannot be the same globally. The initiative aims to meet the universal access by 2030 and energy demands of Agenda 2063 for the African continent and, among other means, includes consolidating and facilitating technical and policy support.
• Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan presented a $18Billion energy transition proposal covering 12 southern African countries that are connected via the Southern African Power Pool. The proposal is to increase renewable energy generation (solar and wind) by around 8.4 GW. The 12 countries are Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
• Multilateral and development finance institutions (DFIs) have been important allies in developing and mobilizing funding in Africa’s renewable energy sector. They have provided funding for projects, but they have also structured successful programs to address potential risks. For example, the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA), a multi-donor Special Fund managed by the African Development Bank, provides catalytic finance to unlock private sector investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

According to Doha access to power on the continent has been hampered by the lack of access to competitive funding, the dire state of Africa’s utilities infrastructure, and the need for energy policy and legislation to be adapted to boost investment. However, new systems and networks are now being designed around future environmental stressors and energy demands, without having to consider the limitations of old infrastructure.

“New and cost-effective solutions that utilize renewable energy, green hydrogen, battery storage and smart power technologies, as well as the global drive towards a secure energy supply that addresses climate change and stimulates economic growth, are all leading to innovative private equity (PE) and M&A investment opportunities.

However, according to Bloomberg, clean energy investment in Africa is concentrated in a handful of markets: South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, and Kenya. These countries have been the recipients of three-quarters of all renewable energy asset investments, totaling $46Billion, on the continent since 2010.

It is hoped that the many initiatives that focus on boosting access to renewable energy in Africa will result in a whole-continent approach, switching on access to power for the 43% of the African population who are not yet benefiting from the region’s renewable resources.”

A final note

Africa may long continue to have an abundance of fossil fuels but one should remember that the Stone Age did not end because of a lack of stones.

The final word is best given by John Ellington: “ Capitalism’s future is contested in a way it hasn’t been for decades. Our economic system as a whole is confronted by a stark choice: evolve or die.”

Gerard Kreeft, BA (Calvin University, Grand Rapids, USA) and MA (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada), Energy Transition Adviser, was founder and owner of EnergyWise.  He has managed and implemented energy conferences, seminars and university master classes in Alaska, Angola, Brazil, Canada, India, Libya, Kazakhstan, Russia and throughout Europe.  Kreeft has Dutch and Canadian citizenship and resides in the Netherlands.  He writes on a regular basis for Africa Oil + Gas Report, and guest contributor to IEEFA(Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis). His book ‘The 10 Commandments of the Energy Transition ‘is on sale at https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000211674846/Gerard-Kreeft-The-10-Commandments-of-the-Energy-Transition

If the project is implemented, it will be Egypt’s first. The agreement was signed on the sidelines of the United Nations’s Conference of the Parties (COP) 28 on Climate Change, holding in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Egypt’s cabinet immediately approved the agreement.

A solar and battery storage plant is a rare species; it combines electricity generation with battery storage, generating renewable power when solar energy is at its peak to be stored and later released as required when the sun is down. This makes “hybrid plants ideal for meeting region-wide energy needs during periods of high consumption,” Scatec says in a statement.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) also weighed in by signing a letter of intent to finance the project “at competitive terms”.

Scatec is a Norwegian renewables energy developer with a large project base and pipeline in Africa.

Germany’s Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW), headquartered i Baden-Württemberg The RENEW project marks the launch of research into the repair and reuse of photovoltaic (PV) modules by and its partners.

The three-year project is being funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). Its goal is more effective testing with high throughput of used PV modules and to develop new repair options in order to reduce the amount of discarded PV modules.

The project partners are defining new standards for characterising used PV modules, thus opening up a high utilisation potential. Alongside the ZSW, the companies involved are 2nd Life Solar, HaWe Engineering and ELMED. Ing. Mense.

RENEW is the German acronym for the repair (“Reparatur”) and reuse (“Wiederverwendung”) of PV modules. A glimpse into the future reveals that global PV expansion targets will not only require a constant supply of new modules, but also that these be kept in operation for as long as possible, thus increasing sustainability and reducing PV electricity costs.

With rapid technological development of module technology in the last decade alone, new modules are attractive to power plant operators for economic reasons due to their higher output over the same sur-face area.

So called repowering involves dismantling old modules and replacing them with new, more powerful modules, even though these may still be operational.

Extensive experience with field-aged modules at ZSW’s Solab solar laboratory reveals that even after more than two decades of operation, the majority of modules exhibit almost no perfor-mance degradation, particularly at sites with a temperate climate as found in Central Europe. According to the experience of project partner 2nd Life Solar, around 70 percent of all discarded modules remain di-rectly operational. In order to improve these numbers even more, the project is assessing a variety of additional repair solutions as well.

Moreover, according to the waste recycling industry company, 2nd Life Solar GmbH, the amount of old modules that are currently being properly discarded does not correspond to their anticipated amounts, thus raising the question of where these modules will eventually end up as unchecked electrical waste. This is why their research team is placing its focus on the circular economy model. Before a module is recycled, its functionality is checked before it is then reused directly.

The longevity of PV modules, as well as their repair and test capacity after years of use, are the building blocks for future use. Because many manufacturers will no longer available to customers at the end of a module’s service life, the project recognises the great need across the nation for improving Germany’s repair and reuse capacities.

The demand for used modules is high

Research project on the repair and reuse of photovoltaic modules launched at the ZSW

Not just for smartphones, but for photovoltaic modules too:

Maximilian Engel, project coordinator of the RENEW project at ZSW, sums it up: “The market for used modules is rapidly expanding because of the ambitious expansion targets for photovoltaics. We therefore need every module – whether new or used – to remain in operation until the end of its service life. Even if I’m happy about the current high rate of expansion, we mustn’t neglect the need for sustainable resource use. We therefore need to qualify used modules efficiently and thus cost-effectively with a high throughput, and repair these if need be in order to keep them operational”. Not only can they be used in smaller, stand-alone systems and as balcony power plants, it is also possible to equip entire PV parks with used modules thanks to the high quantity of avail-able field-aged modules.

Nationwide scaling planned

One project partner that is already conducting quality checks on used photovoltaic modules and reselling field-aged modules after extensive testing is 2nd Life Solar. The company intends to further expand its concept in order to meet growing demand. Such scaling requires robust process standards for mobile and stationary quality tests. By upscaling the processes, the project partners hope to reduce the amount of un-tested electrical waste transported abroad.

In order to optimise tests, the project team is teaming up with ELMED Dr. Ing. ELMED specialises in testing equipment from the coating indus-try and can therefore conduct tests with minimal material stress on the coating. HaWe Engineering GmbH will apply the project results in various PV systems in a field study in order to facilitate qualification of used modules on site.

Basis is a list of criteria for older PV installations

Project coordinator of RENEW is the ZSW. Its Solab solar laboratory boasts extensive experience with field-aged modules. The tests carried out at ZSW involve the degradation of PV modules, backsheet analysis and material analysis. The project team also draws on the results of a preceding project: analyses of damaged backsheets at the end of the project culminated in a comprehensive list of criteria for evaluating module defects. RENEW will enable the ZSW to enhance the quality of testing old modules and make it scalable – and thus make PV module use even more sustainable.

About ZSW

The Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) is one of the leading institutes for applied research into the major issues relating to the energy transition, including photovoltaics, wind energy, battery technology, fuel cells, electrolysis, e-fuels, circular economy, policy advice and the use of AI for process and system optimisation. We work in tandem with industry to pave the way to market for new technologies. The challenge falls to more than 300 employees and around 100 research and student assistants at the ZSW bases in Stuttgart and Ulm. The ZSW also operates a test site for wind energy and another test site for PV systems. The institute is also a member of the Innovationsallianz Baden-Württemberg (innBW), an alliance of 10 applied research institutions.

Media contacts

“Produce green hydrogen and you can rely on us as buyers,” the German Chancellor told African leaders.

The government of Germany has pledged to invest 4Billion euros in Africa’s green energy until 2030.

Olaf Scholz, German Chancellor made the announcement at a press conference in Berlin after meeting African leaders and heads of international organisations including the President of the African Development Bank Group Dr Akinwumi Adesina, during the G20 Compact with Africa conference.

The Compact with Africa was initiated by Germany in 2017 during its presidency of the G20 to improve conditions for sustainable private sector investment and investment in infrastructure in Africa.

To date, 13 African countries have joined the initiative: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo and Tunisia.

German companies are involved in a growing number of large-scale green hydrogen projects across Africa and they seem to be far ahead of other European countries in this field. In Namibia, the German energy company Enertrag signed a feasibility and implementation agreement with the government, with production slated to begin in 2027, of a million tons per year of green ammonia, a derivative produced from green hydrogen. In Mauritania, Conjuncta, another German firm, is developing a $34Billion green hydrogen facility alongside UAE’s Masdar and Egypt’s Infinity Power. German companies are also involved in green hydrogen projects in South Africa and Egypt.

Scholz said the conference with African leaders was “the starting signal for stronger, reliable cooperation between Africa and Europe to realise climate-friendly energy supply based on green hydrogen.”

“Produce green hydrogen and you can rely on us as buyers,” the German Chancellor declared.

Chancellor Scholz said African countries should benefit more strongly from their wealth of natural resources and explained that the first step of processing should take place locally, creating jobs and prosperity.

At the meeting, Akinwumi Adesina, Group President, African Development Bank, pushed for stronger partnerships and investment, emphasizing the importance of private sector development in Africa. The continent’s top banker argued that  tackling climate change, Africa’s infrastructure gap, and unlocking industrial manufacturing capacities all require pulling in private sector financing at scale. To achieve this objective, he outlined several actions multilateral institutions must take.

• “First, we must develop bankable projects and make them available to private investors.”
• “Second, private sector development strategies must be aligned with the net-zero emission objective, with green investments prioritised.”
• “Third, we should mitigate global risks and pool resources to optimise investment strategies, including through a platform like the Africa Investment Forum. This is an initiative that the African Development Bank and seven partner organisations created five years ago. It brings together project promoters and private and public financiers to catalyse investments on transformative projects across Africa.”

The G20 Compact with Africa conference discussed several issues around the theme: Strengthening multilateral cooperation and working on a rules-based, fair, international economic and financial system.

Discussions centred around the global economy, current challenges, including high inflation and geopolitical tension; and the need to incentivise investments in global public goods, such as tackling climate change; strengthening trade in a multipolar world; simultaneously combatting labour shortages and unemployment; and strengthening multilateralism.

By Tony Attah

John Bannister Goodenough (Professor), the American materials scientist, won the Nobel prize in chemistry at the age of 97 in 2019, becoming the oldest Nobel laureate in history. His groundbreaking discoveries regarding the use of lithium cobalt oxide as a cathode material, led to the creation of the first practical rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which is now an integral part of almost every portable electronic device; from your cell phones to your earphones, iPad/iPod, laptops, pacemakers, wrist watches, digital cameras, and even electric cars, to mention but a few. In writing this brief tribute on him, I found myself journeying into my own life and wondering about The Meaning of Purpose…

I have always been driven by curiosity, much before I knew I wanted to become an engineer. Growing through adolescence and teenage years, this engineering curiosity led to disassembling many appliances in our home and while I was always very excited to be able to use a screwdriver and decipher the difference between clockwise and counterclockwise turns of the screw, it often times came to a screeching halt after running into trouble when unable to reassemble the appliances. I was always faced with not just the embarrassment of failure but more with the anxiety of “mummy justice” that was sure to follow as part of consequence management. Mummy-justice was so instantaneous she makes our High Courts look static! I can’t begin to tell you how many Pressing Irons, Transistor Radios, Cassette players, VHS players, Gramophone, and Betamax cartridges that were never reassembled, ever!

While they say it’s curiosity that killed the cat, this “Cat” sure must have had more than nine lives and refused to die, despite the incessant exposure to “mummy justice” in the form of automated strokes of the cane and sometimes, outright loss of weekly allowances which was deemed more stringent as it meant the loss of bragging rights that week. Alas, I can safely say I turned out just good, but how “Good-Enough” will depend on which side of the argument you stand. I went on to secure a BSc Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the prestigious premier University of Ibadan in Nigeria which enabled my early management training and hands on experience in a Cement factory in the North before joining the Oil and Gas industry about thirty years ago.

My journey of life through school, industry, business, and social evolution is one that I somehow still deem partially complete as I have yet to answer the all-important question, “What is my Purpose?.” To the extent that I am still searching for my personal purpose, please don’t ask my zany younger brother, who will be quick to refer to the many damaged appliances in the course of this journey and “what better purpose” I can already hear him say sarcastically.

That said, to date, I continue to wonder and marvel at how all things including human beings were made, despite the biblical account of how Adam was created from dust, and he then donated a rib, which is stronger than dust (pun intended), for Eve to emerge. I wondered what thinking process inventors deployed to discover and produce their inventions, I wondered what I could invent and even patent in my name and by when.         I also wonder how Allesandro knew that stacking Zinc and Copper, linking them with cloth soaked in saline water will generate current and in turn electricity. I wonder how Alexander Graham Bell knew he could use sound waves to cause an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency causing diaphragms to vibrate leading to the invention of the telephone.

These thoughts led me to consult with a now late friend of mine, Engineer Moses (may his soul rest in peace) a very deeply spiritual being, who made lots of efforts to help me grow spiritually. Before you start speculating about my spiritual progress, all I can say is the man put in his best to move me along that journey. Engineer Moses gave his viewpoints on how inventions are attained, albeit from a very spiritual perspective which forced my conclusion that I probably will never have any invention in my name, if indeed he was right, spiritual progress or not. Engineer Moses painted a picture of a Wakanda like world where in a spiritual trance you will find yourself in the midst of unimaginable and beyond belief-type science and technologies to make Sci-fi movies look ordinary. With some grace he says, you were allowed to pick an “invention of choice” and once you wake up from your astral trance, somehow the stars will line up and voila, you have an invention and possibly a patent to go with it. I can confirm that my astrophysical flight has yet to take off; maybe  because I am just too afraid to venture into the land of the unknown for fear of not returning especially when no one has validated Engineer Moses’ theory of inventions – ‘I cannot come and kee myself’, as they say in Nigerian parlance.

With this insatiable curiosity and deeper consciousness on inventions, I continued to research and found that a lot of exciting discoveries and inventions have been made albeit accidentally from as basic as Corn Flakes by the Kellogs brothers,  “Post-It” Papers by Spencer Silver, Penicillin, by Sir Alexander Fleming, which became the base foundation for antibiotics, Micro Wave Oven by Percy Spencer,  X-rays by Willem Conrad, Super Glue, Teflon, Synthetic Plastic and even man’s last hope in the twilight of his golden-age “the blue pill ” are all products of serendipitous discoveries and inventions! You have to agree with me that not all ‘accidents’ are bad, if you know what I mean.

It was in the course of my search for more inventions and inventors that I gained consciousness of the works of Professor John Bannister Goodenough, just about the time he won the Nobel prize for chemistry alongside M. Stanley Whittingham of Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Akira Yoshino of Asahi Kasei Corporation, Tokyo, and Meijo University, Nagoya, Japan.  The New York Times in 2019, would go ahead to report the then 97-year-old professor of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, as the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history. Professor Goodenough was one of the many unsung heroes of our time, a professor of Mechanical Engineering and material science, a solid-state physicist, and Electrical Engineering maven. His groundbreaking discoveries regarding the use of lithium cobalt oxide as a cathode material, led to the creation of the first practical rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which is now an integral part of almost every portable electronic device; from your cell phones to your earphones, iPad/iPod, laptops, pacemakers, wrist watches, digital cameras, and even electric cars, to mention but a few. In a layperson’s term, it’s his work that led to the advent of rechargeable batteries in electronic gadgets as against the old “Berec” alkaline and non rechargeable types. I continued to follow Professor Goodenough’s works until June 25^th this year when at about a month shy of the centenarian age of 101 years, the professor passed on to the great beyond. He will be greatly missed, and I hope that his last set of works get completed by his students for the use of mankind.

I understand they were working on a new technology to produce batteries made of glass by “spiking” glass with either sodium or lithium to form an electrode within the battery, which researchers say will revolutionise battery technology and provide three times the energy storage capacity of comparable lithium-ion batteries to the extent that these batteries will last three times longer on a full charge than what we know today. Can you imagine what our world will become with this much improvement in battery capacity and storage technology? With the current technology, electric cars have already been tested to 1000km at full charge; can you imagine 3000km on a full charge?

That is where I boarded my own astral flight and began to imagine the yet unimaginable and as the German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said: “The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees”.

Think about a world where instead of battery power running down, it runs up and self-charges in perpetuity. Imagine if you only need to charge your car once in its life (as in, you do not need petrol or diesel again ever), your cell phone never runs down, your laptop never runs out of battery life!

Can you imagine the patients with pacemaker powered hearts never needing to worry about their batteries ever running down? Can you imagine the power supply from an inverter and battery banks with Solar panels being forever life to power the energy needs of billions of people around the world? I am absolutely blown away by just the thoughts, and what a world this would be, to imagine that almost everything that requires power can now be powered by this future battery technology that never runs down, bringing an end to all the extant storage capacity challenges we currently face globally.

I am a firm believer that the biggest ultimate game changer in Energy Transition will be technology and we have an incredible future ahead as we all transition to make our planet a better place to live sustainably. Energy poverty is the root of all economic poverties, but with Solar power underpinned by improved battery technology, I believe Africa will have a better fighting chance of changing the energy poverty narrative. The full irradiation across Africa will make absolute sense as we can bridge the current energy poverty of over 600mln people who do not have direct access to electricity as a base case for Africa to leapfrog into the sphere of the first worlds. I see a future where, like the rising sun, Africa will arise on the back of battery technology and Solar power.

In one of Professor John Goodenough’s last interviews, when asked what he felt about the impact his work has made to the world, John said “I am glad to have provided something for people of the world”! This statement is even more profound when you know that he himself never carried a cell phone as he says he never wanted to be disturbed and would rather preserve his peace. It is also worthy of note that John actually signed away all his rights to this life changing battery technology and he didn’t seek to make money from it – what a guy! Now, that’s what I call “Purpose”, that’s what I call impact and outright selflessness. I pray for Professor John’s soul to rest in peace and to his friends and family members, I wish to let them know that Professor John was certainly “GOOD ENOUGH”!

Rest in peace.

Engineer Chief Tony Attah (FNSE)

Aare Gbobaniyi of Owu Kingdom

Amaopusenbi of Bonny Kingdom