Nearly half of all people in the world-2.47 billion, according to estimates reported in Harare, Zimbabwe, last week-lack ready access to electricity. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) would like to reduce the share to zero by the middle of the 21st century.
The oil and gas industry should readily embrace Unesco's goal. Its business, after all, is to provide energy to people who need it. But speakers at the Harare conference compounded the challenge. The event was the World Solar Summit, which meant that not just any type of electricity would suffice.
Emphasis on solar
A conference communique called on international donors and investors to help fund Unesco's World Solar Program. The goal of supporting solar energy-to which few in the oil and gas industry would object-thus rose toward rough equivalence with the goal of finishing the electrification of the world. Here, problems begin. The two goals are not the same and should not be treated as such.
Solar energy is an enticing field of endeavor with tremendous potential for technological development and commercial growth. But it is a minuscule contributor to total energy supplies at present. Technical limits and commercial disadvantages will keep it from becoming a significant contributor any time soon.
This is not to say that solar energy lacks a role in electric energy supply. In remote places unreachable by conventionally sourced electricity, solar power can be, and in many cases is, the only physically available option. But the cost, like that of any exclusive option, is high.
At present, electrifying the world means filling regional voids, meeting the demands of large masses of people, and doing so as economically as possible. While solar energy can fill gaps, it can't do the whole job. It serves the interests of neither providers nor consumers of energy to ask more of solar technology than it can economically deliver.
Some of the speakers in Harare nevertheless exaggerated the solar promise. United Nations Sec. Gen. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, according to Reuter reports, scoffed at conventional power sources for damaging the environment and offering insufficient ability to meet demand. For those reasons and because "conservation and efficiency measures alone will not be enough to cope with this increase in demand," he said, "new sources of energy need to be found, developed, and exploited quickly."
This could be dismissed as a standard eclipse of economics by diplomacy if it were not for 1) 2.47 billion people with no access to electricity and 2) the risk that Boutros-Ghali's insights might influence policy somewhere.
People with no access to electricity tend not to have much else, including the means of improving their circumstances. They spend much of their time and personal energy collecting things to burn-which puts the alleged environmental drawbacks of power derived from fossil energy into useful perspective. For such people, the need is immediate. For them, access to electricity marks a boundary between stagnation and progress.
Satisfying the collective energy need of the world's poor is thus a vital humanitarian goal. It requires that people able to fill the need see doing so as an economic opportunity. And it won't happen if governments and international bodies distort the economic forces that translate need into opportunity.
Creating opportunities
"Major private sector investment will be essential," Robert Priddle, executive director of the International Energy Agency, noted refreshingly in Harare. "Those with the vision to liberalize energy markets and open up to outside investment would create exciting opportunities."
For no one would those opportunities be greater than the people who now cook unrefrigerated food over burning animal dung.
Copyright 1996 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
