How Africa’s Green Industries Could Save the Planet

Justin Norman: Despite contributing just 3% to global emissions, the African continent is the most impacted by climate change. Extreme weather is sweeping over several parts of Africa.

News Anchor: Nigeria is grappling with severe flooding.

Justin Norman: A continent that is tasked with major economic development has to do so under this compounding pressure.

News Anchor: The drought blamed on climate change will affect more than a 1000000 households.

Justin Norman: But amidst this uncertainty, there lies an opportunity. Africa has an abundance of natural resources. With solar, wind, and geothermal energy, it is uniquely positioned to lead a green revolution across the globe. And one country in particular is at the forefront of this movement.

News Anchors: Kenya. Kenya. Kenya is a critical player in solving the world's climate emergency.

Justin Norman: By investing in green industries, countries like Kenya could turn the climate crisis into an economic opportunity.

Bilha Ndirangu: We still haven't scratched the surface when you think about how much potential we have.

Justin Norman: This is a chance for Africa to reshape its future and lead the world in a transition to a low-carbon economy. But does it have what it takes?

African founders are solving local problems with global implications. But to fight climate change and grow the continent, we need a blueprint. This is The Greenprint.

For African nations, industrialization is essential for their economic development. However, the traditional industries that fuel this growth are often amongst the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. This puts Africa's economic development in tension with global climate pledges. But what if this is actually an opportunity for African nations made possible by ever-increasing global demand for industries powered by green energy? And African countries, particularly Kenya, are uniquely positioned to meet these needs. One company leading this charge is Great Carbon Valley.

Bilha Ndirangu: My name is Bilha Ndirangu. I'm the CEO of Great Carbon Valley. What Great Carbon Valley is looking to do is develop green projects that need renewable energy and potentially carbon storage.

Justin Norman: Great Carbon Valley's mission is to bring these green industrial projects to Kenya, where it and other African countries too have a comparative advantage.

Bilha Ndirangu: You want to go to countries that already have a fairly green grid, and the reason for that is building a renewable energy project in another country, it's most preferable that that power actually goes to defossilizing the grid first before you start using it for massive industry. People get surprised when they find out that Kenya's grid is about 93% green. It just so happens that in addition to, you know, geological endowments on, you know, things like geothermal, we also just don't have a lot of fossil-fueled resources. And we sort of got to this place where now the world is actually putting a premium on renewable energy resources, and so you're now starting to see a little bit more financing going into that.

Justin Norman: This energy production could be the best solution for Africa's economic development, and it just so happens to be climate-friendly as well.

Bilha Ndirangu: We're in a world where people are looking to decarbonize, reduce their carbon footprints. It's actually important to begin to think about these kinds of industries coming to Kenya is not only are we giving the world renewable energy resources, but it's actually unlocking the development. And so a part of what we're looking to do is co-locate, the development of energy with significant power users. And then what we're hoping that will happen is in addition to providing power to, industries, you then have additional power and then can go to the grid and then becomes useful for, to our industries, you then have additional power that then can go to the grid and then becomes useful for retail offtakers.

Justin Norman: Africa's abundant resources and minimal legacy infrastructure offer a unique opportunity to leap into a green future. Growing demand from green industrial projects drives renewable energy production, creating a cycle of sustainable development.

Bilha Ndirangu: We still haven't scratched the surface when you think about how much potential we have. If we can sort of marry this idea of the need for green industry, green economy, that needs to grow, how do we get more and more investments coming into Africa? Not only does it help us solve for climate, but at the same time begins to create livelihoods and economic transformation. Basically, it's anything that's energy intensive and would benefit from renewable energy. So one is trying to look at data centers, and this is surprising for a lot of people because people ask, okay, why do you need data centers?

Justin Norman: A recent report revealed that data centers and data transmission networks are responsible for 1% of energy-related emissions. The emissions from company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are likely 7.62 times higher than their official reports suggest.

Bilha Ndirangu: With the growth of AI, lots of demand for data centers. What we're targeting is global companies that need renewable energy for the data centers. All industries that we're looking at have been on the direct air capture and storage sector. All we're trying to do is essentially remove carbon from the air, and given the great shift value that runs through Kenya, gives us an opportunity to be able to do that.

Justin Norman: Climate scientists argue that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could prevent the most severe impacts of climate change. To achieve this, it's estimated that between 5 to 16 billion metric tons of CO2 must be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050. While natural solutions like reforestation play a role, technological innovations such as direct air capture are essential to meet this goal. Duncan Kariuki is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Octavia Carbon, a climate startup based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Duncan Kariuki: It was our founding conviction and remains our conviction today that Kenya is the best place in the world for dark. We are the global south's first direct air capture company. We are developing an engineered solution to reversing the effects of climate change through c o two removal. Essentially, direct air capture is the process of literally filtering out CO2 from air and then, processing that CO2, purifying it, and pumping it deep underground or storing it in any other form of permanent sequestration. The difficulty to associate with the problem is essentially how dilute CO2 is in the atmosphere.

CO2 only accounts for about 0.03% to 0.04% of, volumetric concentration and therein lies the challenge. We essentially have to engineer a material that has a very high surface area and that would selectively filter out that CO2. We have to use renewable energy and clean energy to remove CO2 from the air. Otherwise, it's pointless. We're actually quite lucky that, where you have a lot of geothermal energies where you can store the CO2, which means that we can essentially co-locate our DAC plant, our geothermal plant. We follow the energy, and we follow the storage.

Justin Norman: With the deployment of carbon removal technology at scale, African countries like Kenya can be the world's lungs. DAC machines don't need to be located where the pollution is taking place, but can instead be located in the best possible location for energy access and storage.

Duncan Kariuki: We all share an atmosphere as, all countries in the world. The CO2 molecule that's emitted here today will be halfway across the world in a week. And if you think about it, that's why climate change affects the entire world. It does not only affect high-emitting countries. That's why even here in Kenya, people face severe droughts, climate change-induced droughts despite Kenya not being a heavy emitter.

Justin Norman: While many DAC companies in Europe and North America focus on manufacturing and exporting their machines, Octavia Carbon is not only deploying its technology in Kenya, but also manufacturing it locally.

Duncan Kariuki: Kenya is still a developing country, so that means we have a very low-cost base of manufacturing. There's also the operational efficiency of being able to build just 2 hours from where we would deploy, and that really works well because we want to essentially build small units like this and build them at scale and deploy them.

Justin Norman: An added benefit for African countries is this modular and decentralized technology, which can be colocated with renewable energy sources, boosting local manufacturing, and delivering significant climate and economic gains. Through this approach, another green industrial company operating in Kenya, Talus Renewables, not only addresses climate challenges but also tackles local issues like food insecurity.

Hiro Iwanaga: My name is Hiro Iwanaga. I am the Co-founder and CEO of Talus Renewables. Talus started philanthropically, focused on improving access to basic fertilizers in the developing world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. We build modular green ammonia systems to tackle global food security and climate change by locally producing this critical raw material that feeds half of the world. It's 2nd most produced chemical in the world.

It is responsible for feeding 7 of the 8 billion people in the world. We produce it in giant centralized plants and then ship it all over the world. So the problem with that is delivery into the developing world is significantly more expensive than into the United States. So a farmer in Africa pays double or triple for fertilizer as a farmer in the United States. The second problem is it's incredibly carbon-intensive.

Ammonia alone is 2% of global carbon emissions. So if you could locally produce ammonia that is carbon-free, it would be a significant impact for decarbonization. More immediately, it will improve access to basic fertilizers, and a basic fertilizer in Sub-Saharan Africa can double crop yields and reduce water consumption by 30% effectively overnight. And our approach is local production. Local production is important for cost, it's important for reliability, and it's important for sustainability.

At Talus, we developed a fully containerized modular green ammonia system. As is the case for a lot of climate tech, it is low-cost renewable power. The cost of solar has declined in price by 90% over the course of the last decade. Our green ammonia can be 20 to 30% cheaper than imported fertilizers. Once our system is deployed and installed on a farm, our only input is power, a little bit of water, and air.

Justin Norman: Instead of relying on hydrogen sourced from natural gas, Talus Renewables generates hydrogen through electrolysis, a process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind.

Hiro Iwanaga: Ammonia is a really simple molecule. It's 82% nitrogen, 18% hydrogen. There's nothing else in it. It's a relatively simple chemical process. Getting nitrogen is easy.

We get it from air. Getting hydrogen's always been more difficult. We get hydrogen in big industrial plants from natural gas or coal, which is why it's so carbon-intensive. You can get hydrogen from water. Right?

We've known how to do that for a long time. It is power-intensive to do that. But one of the biggest enablers has been the availability of low-cost renewables.

Justin Norman: By harnessing renewable energy to address both local and global challenges, African tech entrepreneurs are driving solutions to climate change, fostering job creation, boosting economic growth, and laying the foundation for the continent's industrial sector.

Duncan Kariuki: It fills us with pride to be able to design, to manufacture it, and to deploy this in Kenya, creating meaningful Kenyan jobs and allowing people to exercise their ingenuity and their innovativeness to solve the greatest problem of our time, that fills me with so much pride as a Kenyan.

Justin Norman: Thanks for watching this episode of The Greenprint, The Flip's series on climate action and economic development across Africa. For more episodes like this, please hit that subscribe button.

This episode was produced in partnership with Catalyst Fund, Delta40, and Africa Climate Ventures. If you want to learn more we've added more resources and links in the description as well.