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Opinion

Beyond clean tech extractivism: African countries must embrace multiple energy sources, including natural gas

Opinion July 30, 2025

In the second of two articles, the Gates Foundation’s Obinna Onyekwena argues that for Africa, the “clean energy transition” brings both heavy human costs and new forms of dependency. Countries like Nigeria must pursue a more pragmatic approach, anchored in gas as a strategic bridge fuel, to drive industrialization, reduce energy poverty, and avoid replicating colonial patterns of technology dependency. Onyekwena writes in his personal capacity.

Obi Onyekwena 25022025 croppd.jpg

Obinna Onyekwena

The human cost of the “clean energy” transition is often hidden, but in Africa, it is stark and immediate. As the Global North pushes for renewables, the “dirty” work is outsourced to the South. Extraction of critical minerals like cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo fuels humanitarian crises and environmental devastation. This extractivism perpetuates dependency, swapping oil geopolitics for mineral vulnerabilities dominated by China. Moreover, with over 80 per cent of renewable energy patents held by Northern firms, African countries become locked into new technology dependencies for energy - a strategic critical priority for all other development - trapping nations in low-value roles like assembly or maintenance without control over innovation or production. For Africa, true sovereignty demands moving beyond this cycle, prioritizing pragmatic strategies that leverage our resources for industrialization and resilient energy futures.

The unspoken realities: physics, economics, and human cost 

Beyond the geopolitics, an honest conversation about the energy transition must confront the hard constraints of physics, economics, and the often-hidden human costs. To ignore these realities in pursuit of ideological purity is a dereliction of our developmental duty to the African people.

The technical challenges of building a society entirely on intermittent renewable energy sources are immense and, for key sectors, currently unsolved. While the market for grid-scale battery storage is growing, with costs having fallen by 90 per cent between 2010 and 2023, the scale required to back up an entire nation’s industrial economy remains staggering. Projects in California, a global leader in the transition, will need nearly 58 gigawatts of electricity storage by 2045 - a monumental undertaking for one of the world’s wealthiest states. For developing nations, the cost and complexity are magnified exponentially.

A more fundamental and often-ignored barrier is industrial heat. The foundational industries of modern development - steel, cement, fertilizers, and chemicals - require extremely high and stable process heat, often above 900-1000°C. Today, fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, provide this heat with unparalleled reliability and cost-effectiveness. Electrifying these processes is technically complex and prohibitively expensive, while alternatives like solar thermal struggle to deliver the required energy density. To pretend this challenge does not exist is to pretend that Africa does not need to build its own bridges, factories, and hospitals.

The transition to renewables does not eliminate geopolitical energy dependence; it merely swaps one form for another. We are moving from a world reliant on the geopolitics of oil and gas to one reliant on the geopolitics of critical minerals, with deeply troubling ethical and supply-risk implications.

The supply chain for these minerals is dangerously concentrated. China exerts control over vast swathes of the market, including more than 85-90 per cent of the world’s rare earth processing and a dominant position in lithium, cobalt, and graphite. Beijing has already demonstrated its willingness to weaponize this dominance, imposing export controls on key minerals to achieve its geopolitical aims. A scenario in which China is removed from the global supply chain would leave the world critically short of the materials needed for the energy transition.

Even more disturbing is the human cost. The term “clean energy” is a dangerous misnomer. While it may be clean at the point of consumption in a European city, it is profoundly “dirty” at the point of extraction in the heart of Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies most of the world’s cobalt, a mineral essential for electric vehicles and device batteries. Investigations by organizations like Amnesty International have documented that the cobalt rush has led to forced evictions of entire communities, sexual assault, arson, and artisanal miners, including children as young as seven, working in perilous, hand-dug tunnels for a dollar or two a day, often without basic protective equipment. Similarly, in South America’s “Lithium Triangle,” lithium extraction is plagued by conflicts with Indigenous communities over water rights and land access, often in violation of international labour conventions.

This reality exposes a deep moral hazard. The pursuit of a “green” lifestyle in the Global North is enabled by outsourcing the environmental degradation and human rights abuses to the Global South. It is not a transition from “dirty” to “clean” energy, but a transition from one set of externalities to another. For Africa, which bears the brutal human cost of this new resource scramble, this is a distinction that must be at the forefront of our policymaking.

Development vs. ideology

Africa stands at a strategic crossroads, caught between the crushing reality of our development needs and the external pressures of climate ideology, punitive trade policies, and contradictory financing rules.

Our continent’s most immediate, life-threatening crisis is energy poverty. According to the 2025 edition of the World Bank’s Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report, a staggering 666 million people globally still lack access to electricity, and an overwhelming 85 per cent of them, 565 million people, live in Sub-Saharan Africa. The situation for clean cooking is even more catastrophic. Globally, 2.1 billion people rely on polluting fuels like firewood and charcoal, a practice that leads to an estimated 3.2 million premature deaths each year from household air pollution. In Sub-Saharan Africa, four out of every five families lack access to clean cooking fuels.

This is not just an inconvenience. It is a fundamental barrier to modern healthcare, quality education, industrial productivity, food security, and job creation. For Africa, universal energy access is not one goal among many. It is the foundational prerequisite for all other development, especially since our minimal emissions footprint should absolve us of outsized mitigation burdens, allowing us to prioritize industrialization without apology.

As Africa strives to industrialize, we face the rising threat of “green protectionism” from the very partners who preach free trade. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a prime example. By imposing a tariff on imported goods based on their carbon intensity, CBAM effectively penalizes countries with less-developed green industrial bases.

The economic consequences for Africa could be severe. One analysis projects that CBAM could reduce the continent’s GDP by 0.91 per cent, a loss of around USD 16 billion at 2021 levels, and slash Africa-to-EU exports by 5.7 per cent. Key African export sectors vital for industrialization, such as iron and steel, cement, and fertilizers, are directly targeted, facing potential export declines of over 30 per cent in some cases. This is not a climate justice mechanism. It is a trade barrier that threatens to lock Africa out of value-added manufacturing and trap us as mere exporters of raw materials.

The landscape of development finance is equally fraught with contradictions. The narrative of a monolithic global ban on gas finance is false. In fact, the policies of multilateral development banks (MDBs) are fragmented and often work at cross-purposes.

  • The European Investment Bank (EIB) has the strictest stance, having officially ended all financing for unabated fossil fuel projects, including natural gas, at the end of 2021.
  • The World Bank has adopted a more flexible “all of the above” approach. It will consider financing mid and downstream gas projects if they are the “least-cost option,” align with a country’s development plans, and do not crowd out renewables. It is also actively reviewing a return to financing upstream gas in “exceptional circumstances” to fight energy poverty.
  • The African Development Bank (AfDB) is the most pragmatic. Its leadership has clearly stated that it will continue to finance natural gas projects, viewing gas as an essential “transition fuel” needed to provide reliable baseload power to stabilize grids and support the integration of intermittent renewables.

Gas-led development in Nigeria

For a gas-rich nation like Nigeria, the policy chaos in global development is a mandate to be unflinching in asserting its own sovereign position. Nigeria must reject development contingent on external whims, instead setting non-negotiable terms for industrialization: presenting bankable gas-to-power projects first funded domestically - requiring enhanced financial and organizational discipline - then to institutions like the AfDB and World Bank demanding alignment with national imperatives, not the other way around. Nigeria must pivot from reacting to global narratives to proactively defining and executing its sovereign destiny, with an ambitious blueprint for development and energy as its cornerstone, drawing from national laws like the Electricity Act of 2023.

To achieve this, Nigerian policymakers must reject ideological “clean energy” purity and embrace a hybrid, technology-plural energy future. This strategy must be anchored in our most abundant and strategic resource: natural gas. Gas must provide the affordable, reliable baseload power required for a massive industrial take-off and grid stability, complemented by cost-effective renewables where economical, as enablers, not substitutes.

Prioritizing gas as the foundational energy source not only ensures grid reliability but also creates the industrial backbone needed to manufacture renewable components domestically. Projects such as NLNG Train 7 demonstrate how gas-led strategies can position Nigeria as a regional energy hub, catalyzing job creation, technology transfer, and industrialization.

Looking ahead, Nigeria must also explore emerging technologies like Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which hold potential for delivering safe, scalable, carbon-free baseload power. While current cost, regulatory, and security challenges are real, strategic investments in SMRs could provide long-term energy diversification. Hybrid systems, such as gas-backed solar microgrids, could enhance resilience, powering critical infrastructure like hospitals and factories during outages or grid disruptions.

A headlong pursuit of renewable energy at the expense of African gas infrastructure carries strategic risks. While large-scale solar and wind projects are often celebrated, they frequently rely on external supply chains for panels, inverters, and turbines, leaving Africa exposed to price volatility and supply disruptions. There are several examples of oversized allocations to renewables in Africa. For instance, Morocco’s Noor Ouarzazate solar complex (580-megawatt) and Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Farm (310-megawatt, powering one million homes) demonstrate renewable potential, but often rely heavily on imported technology from China and Europe, perpetuating foreign dependence under the guise of transition.

In contrast, emerging Nigerian efforts like Starsight Energy’s solar assembly plants offer a promising path toward local manufacturing.

There are of course costs associated with pursuing gas-led growth. Environmentally, unchecked gas flaring and oil spills have devastated ecosystems in the Niger Delta, causing acid rain, soil and water contamination, and rising health burdens like respiratory illness and premature deaths. To mitigate this, Nigeria must strictly enforce its 2030 zero-flaring targets, invest in flare capture and utilization technologies, and empower communities to monitor environmental impacts transparently. On the geopolitical and economic front, Nigeria faces threats from tightening climate finance restrictions, LNG oversupply, and regional insecurity that delays infrastructure projects.

To safeguard its energy future, Nigeria must prioritize domestic gas-to-power utilization over raw gas exports, not only to improve energy access but also to reduce exposure to volatile international markets. The success of this strategy is currently constrained by a heavy dependence on imported complex gas turbine technologies and spare parts. Addressing this in the long term requires deliberate investment in local manufacturing capabilities over time, even of less complex turbines, technology transfer where feasible, and skilled workforce development to support turbine assembly, maintenance, and eventual innovation.

In parallel, Nigeria should deepen intra-African trade through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), build strategic security partnerships to de-risk infrastructure, and negotiate long-term contracts that offer price stability in an increasingly competitive and geopolitically unstable energy market.

Nigeria must treat fossil fuel resources not as a curse to be abandoned, but as a strategic financial bridge to a self-sufficient, industrialized future, using revenues from gas exports to build a domestic industrial and technological base, and turning export receipts into domestic jobs and sovereign capability.

This model has successful precedents. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which is now valued at almost USD 2 trillion as of June 2025, was built on decades of oil and gas revenue. Nigeria could invest a portion of its gas revenues in an “Energy Transition Fund”, capitalized by 20-30 per cent of annual exports.

While adapting Norway’s model offers inspiration, such a fund would have to confront corruption, infrastructure deficits, and governance gaps that have plagued some sovereign wealth funds on the continent. This would require establishing independent, transparent institutions with anti-corruption safeguards - drawing lessons from successful African models like Botswana’s Pula Fund, which emphasizes diversified investments, strict ethical guidelines, and parliamentary oversight to prevent misuse, and investments in local capacity building to ensure funds drive equitable growth rather than elite capture.

Energy realism is the only practical pathway to our sovereign destiny. We must look beyond incremental development plans and embrace a far grander ambition: an industrialization strategy designed to achieve irreversible economic ascent, aligned with Agenda 2063’s vision of an integrated, prosperous continent. Mass industrialization needs reliable power, with gas as its cornerstone. Nigeria must lead demands for technology-neutral climate finance, untied from donor technologies, not export subsidies but empowering sovereign choices in gas, hydro, solar, or nuclear.

_____________________________________________________________

Obinna Onyekwena is Deputy Director for Infectious Diseases Advocacy at the Gates Foundation, and a traditional leader in Ufuma, Anambra State, Nigeria. He works at the intersection of global health, local leadership, and systems change, advocating for equitable development grounded in agency, innovation, and sustainability. He contributed this article in his personal capacity.

 

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