Oil and gas findings will help develop Zimbabwe

28 Sep, 2018 - 00:09 0 Views
Oil and gas findings will help develop Zimbabwe

eBusiness Weekly

The heightened possibility of petroleum being found near Muzarabani in Mashonaland Central will be good news indeed although it is fairly obvious that significantly more research is needed before even the risk of attempting the first well makes sense.

A quarter century ago exploration by another company came to the conclusion that there might well be petroleum products in the ancient basin, but that these were more likely to be natural gas than crude oil. Since then updated modelling and discoveries of oil inland on the African Plateau in Uganda and Kenya have caused oil companies to rethink.

Any Zimbabwean oil deposit in the lower Zambezi Valley would have formed from organic deposits laid down at roughly the same time as the Ugandan and Kenyan discoveries, more than 500 million years ago as the far older chunks that formed Africa were pushed together with the formation of the Gondwana super-continent. The joins are where oil companies are looking; the really old cratons are where other prospectors seek metals.

Even a modest oil discovery would be a boon, allowing Zimbabwe to end its largest single drain of foreign currency, liquid energy and other petroleum products such as the raw materials for fertiliser. Refineries are not that expensive; after all this country managed to build one in the early 1960s although it was hardly used before being shut down forever at UDI.

Something is needed to tide Zimbabwe over between now and the eventual triumph of the electric vehicle, something we will see in the lifetime of even middle-aged citizens since the technology has already advanced enough to produce high-performance cars with a range of 500km between charges.

This is one of the reasons why a natural gas deposit, and if there is oil at Muzarabani there must also be gas, may well in the longer run be more important and why even if the older finding that there was probably just a gas deposit there is correct it is now good news.

If Zimbabwe is going to meet the new goal of reaching middle-income status by 2030, then we are going to need a lot more electricity, several times what we generate now. Hydro-electric output can be doubled with the planned Batoka Dam, but that will not be nearly enough without more really big power stations, and so far it has been assumed coal will fill the gap.

But coal power stations are being increasingly frowned upon, being one of the significant contributors to global warming as well as creating a fair amount of local pollution. Big banks are becoming wary about financing them both for public relations reasons and because they are dubious about the long term viability of such investments. While natural gas is also a fossil fuel, a gas station is far more efficient than a coal station and the carbon footprint for every unit of electricity generated is thus a lot lower. It is the switch from coal to gas that has done so much to lower or maintain the carbon emissions in much of Europe and North America and most models of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in industrialised countries assume that the process of converting electric generation from coal to gas will continue.

The other advantage natural gas has is that the power stations are cheaper to build and can be commissioned in months rather than years. A gas power station unit is essentially a modified jet engine, the same as the ones slung beneath the wings of any modern airliner, connected to a generator and transformer. The civil works are simply a sophisticated shed to keep the rain out. A reasonable supply of natural gas would allow Zimbabwe to rapidly commission efficient modern power stations and expand them rapidly in phases as demand grows and to do this in a way that minimises environmental damage.

Of course this does not mean we need to ignore renewable energy, and here we are very favourably placed with both a high solar energy potential and, thanks to Lake Kariba and the expanded Kariba South Power Station we have what amounts to a very large storage battery for cloudy days and nights.

The installed 1050 megawatts of Kariba South is greater than what we can put out 24 hours a day. The Zambezi River simply does not have a strong enough flow and the Zambezi River Authority rations water use by both Zimbabwe and Zambia. The extension was needed to help Zesa meet peak power demand, but can also be used to run Kariba South and a large solar station in tandem, basically switching off the dam station in bright sunlight and running it far closer to maximum output at other times.

All available energy sources will have to be tapped if we are to bring our people out f poverty. But we also have responsibilities to play our part in developing in a way that will not destroy the planet we want to be rich in. We also need to avoid the errors some newer developing countries have made in copying the same old mistakes of the older developed countries, who are now generally having to spend a lot of money to clean up that mess.

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