ECOWAS highlights green energy benefits, advocates fertilizer export strategy for West Africa

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has emphasised the advantages of green energy for the sub-region during its programme in Lagos, titled ‘Regional Capacity Building Workshop of ECOWAS Private Sector Actors on Green Energy.’

Dr. Bruno Korgo, Regional Coordinator for Renewable Energy and Hydrogen at the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) highlighted the significance of green energy on the event’s final day.

He stressed the need for West Africa to focus on exporting, rather than importing, fertilisers.

He said: “Green energy is the unit energy vector that can penetrate in the large range of vectors to decarbonize many sectors at a time, especially sectors that we refer to as hard to abate sectors, like transportation industry and steel.

“Green energy can penetrate all these sectors and decarbonize them because these sectors are one of the most emissive sectors in terms of soot. As you know, pollution in the atmosphere is a major cause of climate change with all the catastrophes that we have witnessed in recent days.

“Green energy can be used to produce fertilizer from ammonia. Green energy, when you have it from renewable energy and water, you can combine it with the nitrogen that you capture from the air to produce fertilizer this fertilizer is green and this is something we can do in our country. All the countries in our continent are importing quantities of fertilizers for agriculture.

“This is not something we must do. We’re the ones who should export fertilizers because we have the resources. We have water to produce hydrogen, we have renewable energy, and potassium, we have the technology and we have agriculture as well. About 60 to 80 percent of our economy is based on agriculture. Green energy can give us this opportunity.

“When you look at the petrochemical industry, refineries are using important volumes of hydrogen to refine so that we get fuel, gasoline, but most of this hydrogen comes from fossil fuel, which means the process they’re using to produce the fuel we use in our cars, engines is not environmentally friendly. We have to do more and act when we talk about climate change because we are also victims.

“So, using green energy can help to decarbonize the environment. In the steel industry, there is also a substantial amount of CO2 that is emitted. One of these is to transform the raw material into iron and steel, they go into different processes and highly emit soot.

“We can reduce it by using green hydrogen. When you look at cement, our country is underdeveloped and we’re the ones who have to do it in the coming years.  We need the infrastructure, the cement sector is polluted and we can decarbonize it. We can use green hydrogen to effectively heat the kiln.

“The final process emits a large amount of CO2. Cement is the most emissive in the process. Fortunately, this CO2 can be captured and we add it to the hydrogen that we can produce metal which can be used to heat one component of the cement. It can bottled for our mothers for clean cooking. One of the advantages is the export opportunity.

“As everybody is committed to decarbonizing the sectors, even those who don’t have the potential of producing green hydrogen. The closest region to Europe for export is West Africa. We have to take this advantage because it will generate revenue to help us build our infrastructure, and build schools and hospitals for our population.

“WASCAL is aware of this future of energy transition and the role green energy will play that is why we have developed a couple of portfolio of initiatives to prepare the West African region to move to green energy technology.

“For example, we have developed the regional policing strategy and we are also building capacity. For example, we have developed an international master’s programme to train West African students to be well-skilled in various aspects of green hydrogen technology.

 “They’re trained in four countries in West Africa, Niger, Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, and Senegal, and one part of the training is done in Germany. We want them to be in contact with the technology and infrastructures, so they can be complete in terms of training. We want them to be international theoretically and also international in terms of practice. We have trained the first batch.

“Four Nigerians have graduated. We’re looking at how to increase the tracts of this training, to add more specialties in the training. We’re prospecting to create two more schools, one in Nigeria and another in Ghana.

“We’re in the process, we have to create the curriculum and look at the need on the ground in terms of industry, in terms of decision-makers. They also need to have capacities. We need to assess before we identify exactly what will be the specialties in these countries,” he said.

Chigozie Nweke-Eze, Coordinator of African Hydrogen Power and CEO of Integrated Africa Power, emphasized the urgency for Nigeria and other African nations to begin serious discussions on green hydrogen.

“Other countries have already made significant progress in this area,” he stated. “We’ve lagged, often supporting efforts in other regions, but I’m pleased to be here to contribute to the development of my continent, the West African region, and Nigeria.”

On the advantage to the country, he said: “Nigeria has been an oil and gas country and hydrogen is close to what we already know and I also want to say that it is very easy for us to take it up because we have the manpower, we have the skills. We just need to upgrade the skills of the people who are already experts in the oil and gas industry and they can be experts in hydrogen and even do the hydro plants within Nigeria and we can also export the skills.

“There are so many job opportunities in it. So we have that advantage in terms of skills and manpower. We also have the advantage of having the resources and of course, the renewal of energy resources is there, and of course, also having a government that is interested in climate change.

On the sustainability of the innovation, he said: “You have to look into the economic and social aspects as well. As long as it is economically viable it will continue. It is also environmentally friendly. It’ll also impact the lives of people especially the communities that are also involved. These are the things that we always make sure that every project that we have in mind makes profit enough to sustain itself and has a solid impact in the lives of communities where the project is located and doesn’t contribute to pollution in the environment.” Nweke-Eze said.

He urged Nigeria and other African countries to take the lead, rather than always lagging when new technologies emerge and waiting for others to develop them.

He emphasised that this approach could put the region at a disadvantage.

“That is why we’re here. We advise governments across the African continent to make sure they key in what they need to put in place, policy regulation wise, governance framework to ensure they cooperate so that the initiative becomes a reality,” he said.