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.
Enter the members of my new favorite boy band.
DAC, BECCS and BiCRS.
(Laughter)
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.
(Applause and cheers)