Lake Kivu
As natural disasters go, the limnic eruption — an explosion of gas from beneath a lake — of Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 ranks among the most horrifying and bizarre: About 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock were suffocated when a large cloud of CO2 descended silently on their villages.
Lake Kivu, one of Africa’s great lakes, which lies on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, poses a similar danger because vast amounts of methane gas and CO2 are buried in its depths. At the same time, rural Rwanda desperately needs more electricity–only about 6 percent of the nation’s 9.7 million people are connected to the electricity grid, according to the government.
To Contour Global, a private company that specializes in power-generation projects in the global south, this is a business opportunity. The company has embarked on an ambitious $325 million plan to extract the methane gas from the lake to provide about 100 megawatts of gas-fired electricity to Rwanda.
To put that in context, total generating capacity in Rwanda is now just 69 megawatts — about 10% of the capacity of a single coal-fired power plant in the U.S. [click to continue…]
{ 1 comment }
