Letters

THIS MONTH'S PRIZE LETTER

Curious inclusions

Botswana's statistics

T n a recent edition of your very informative J. magazine, there was a curious inclusion of Botswana in the article about per capita income by Tom Nevin (Statistics that Hide the Truth, African Business, July 2007 issue).

To be brief, since its inception as a nation in 1966, Botswana has one of the strongest track records in the developing world for including all of its citizens in government figures regarding revenues. This does not mean that a third of the people do not indeed live under the poverty level, but to claim that there is an uneven distribution of wealth in Botswana is a misstatement.

From welfare policies that focus on basic feeding programmes for the needy to school fees that are waived for any family that can not afford them, which also includes bursaries for tertiary students for room and board, plus a plethora of programmes to ensure that all Batswana share in the bounty of material wealth from diamonds, cattle, coal and other assets, the government and people of Botswana share in their Vision 2016 dream and should not be included with the other nations on your list, which are years and even decades behind Botswana.

Please re-visit your assessment and correct your misunderstanding.

Charles M Saunders

Portland, Oregon

USA

Sustainable energy

Meeting Africa's needs

As someone particularly interested in environmental issues, I was intrigued to read Danny Ross' letter to the Editor (Coal can be Clean, New technologies explained - African Business, July 2007 issue) in the light of a recent announcement from energy super-major BP. They had planned to build an experimental hydrogen powered electricity generating plant in Scotland in the northern British Isles using carbon capture, but have said that they could not make the project economically viable without hefty government support and, after spending $50m on it, were abandoning the plan.

The original idea was to pipe natural gas ashore from their gas wells in the North Sea and then separate hydrogen and carbon dioxide using the hydrogen for electricity generation. The waste carbon dioxide would then be piped back off-shore and pumped deep into BP's maturing oil fields to improve their oil production, capturing the green house gas in the same operation.

This is a very similar concept to the one that Mr Ross was explaining, and it bodes badly that BP seems to believe that carbon capture is too expensive unless it is heavily subsidised by government.

It was the for same reason that Shell and Norway's Statoil abandoned plans to capture carbon from a on-shore power plant project and inject it in Norway's off shore fields for enhanced oil recovery. Statoil said the costs could not be justified.

Of course, figures for off-shore operations will always be that much more expensive than operations on-shore, and there may be some difference in using gas rather than coal in any carbon capture project.

The estimated cost of carbon sequestration for on-shore power generation is over $100 a ton while the current traded value of a ton of carbon is hovering around $20, so even with the carbon offsetting mechanism there would appear to be a lack of any commercial incentive to invest in carbon capture unless the additional power generation costs could be passed onto the consumer.

There are also other problems concerning carbon capture, one of the most potentially troubling being the regulatory question regarding just who is responsible for the stored carbon in the years to come.

Nevertheless, BP still remains interested in developing various carbon capture technologies and entered a technical agreement with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US to research underground coal gasification - in other words, converting coal deposits into fuels and other products whilst they are still underground. It may be possible to affordably produce fuels and hydrocarbon feedstock from coal deposits without mining the coal, and producing mixtures of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and other gases for power generation or as feedstock for the production of chemicals and other hydrocarbon products without venting the greenhouse gases.

But even if BP cannot make carbon capture work, the company is pressing ahead with other green projects including making a large investment in Dl Oils pic to form a 50/50 joint venture. This is to be called Dl-BP Fuel Crops Ltd, and the company plans to accelerate the planting ofjatropha curcas - a drought resistant, inedible oilseed bearing tree which will grow on arid land unsuitable for food crops. Jatropha is already extensively planted across Africa to make bio-diesel feedstock.

Jatropha oil is easily produced and suitable for powering small generators. It could be that, as Tom Nevin argues in another article in the July issue of African Business - Think Small to go Big, it is small power projects, rather than the large electricity generating plants which Mr Ross discusses, that will ensure Africa can meet its future energy needs in a sustainable fashion.