Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo with African women mayors who are calling for greater attention to communities without electricity, given the inextricable link between climate change and energy. Credit: A.D. McKenzie

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, May 18 2015 (IPS)

When some 40,000 delegates, including dozens of heads of state, descend on Paris for the United Nations Climate Change Conference later this year, a group of African women mayors plan to be there and make their voices heard on a range of issues, including electrification.

The mayors, representing both small and big towns on the continent, are calling for greater attention to communities without electricity, given the inextricable link between climate change and energy.

“In my commune, only one-fifth of the people have access to electricity, and this of course hampers development,” Marie Pascale Mbock Mioumnde, mayor of Nguibassal in Cameroon, told a recent meeting of women mayors in Paris.“As mayors we’re closer to the population, and when we work together, there’s hope” – Marie Pascale Mbock Mioumnde, mayor of Nguibassal, Cameroon

Mbock Mioumnde was one of 18 women mayors at last month’s meeting, hosted by Paris mayor Anne Hildalgo and France’s former environment minister Jean-Louis Borloo, who now heads the Fondation Énergies pour l’Afrique (Energy for Africa Foundation).

Organisers said the meeting was called to highlight Africa’s energy challenges in the run-up to COP 21 (the 21^st session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), which will take place from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11 and which has the French political class scrambling to show its environmental credentials.

Mbock Mioumnde told IPS in an interview that clean, renewable energy was a priority for Africa, and that political leaders were looking at various means of electrification including hydropower and photovoltaic energy and, but not necessarily, wind power – a feature in many parts of France.

“We plan to maintain this contact and this network of women mayors to see what we can accomplish,” said Mbock Mioumnde. “As mayors we’re closer to the population, and when we work together, there’s hope.”

Hidalgo, the first woman to hold the office of Paris mayor, said she wanted to support the African representatives’ appeal for “sustainable electrification”, considering that two-thirds of Africa’s population, “particularly the most vulnerable, don’t have access to electricity.”

Currently president of the International Association of Francophone Mayors (AIMF), Hidalgo said it was essential to find ways to speed up electrification in Africa, using clean technology that respects the environment and the health of citizens.

The mayors meeting in Paris in April also called for the creation of an “African agency devoted to this issue” that would be in charge of implementing the complete electrification of the continent by 2025.

Present at the conference were several representatives of France’s big energy companies such as GDF Suez – an indication that France sees a continued business angle for itself – but the gathering also attracted NGOs which have been working independently to set up solar-power installations in various African countries.

“I’m happy that women are organising on this issue. We need solidarity,” said Hidalgo, who has been urging Paris residents to become involved in climate action, in a city that has come late to environmental awareness, especially compared with many German and Swiss towns.

“The Climate Change Conference is a decisive summit for the planet’s leaders and decision-makers to reach an agreement,” Hidalgo stressed.

Climate change issues have an undeniable gender component because women are especially affected by lack of access to clean sources of energy.

Ethiopian-born, Kenya-based scientist Dr Segenet Kelemu, who was a winner of the 2014 L’Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science, spoke for example of growing up in a rural village in Ethiopia with no electricity, no running water and no indoor plumbing.

“I went out to collect firewood, to fetch water and to take farm produce to market. Somehow, all the back-breaking tasks in Africa are reserved for women and children,” she told a reporter.

This gender component was also raised at a meeting May 7-8 in Addis Ababa, where leaders of a dozen African countries agreed on 12 recommendations to improve the regional response to climate change.

The recommendations included increasing local technological research and development; reinforcing infrastructure for renewable energy, transportation and water; and “mainstreaming gender-responsive climate change actions”.

The meeting was part of a series of ‘Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF)’ workshops being convened though June 2015 in Asia, Latin America, the Pacific and the Middle East. The CVF was established to offer a South-South cooperation platform for vulnerable countries to deal with issues of climate change.

In Paris, Hidalgo’s approach includes gathering as many stakeholders as possible together to reach consensus before the U.N. summit. With Ignazio Marino, the mayor of Rome, Italy, she also invited mayors of the “capitals and big towns” of the 28 member states of the European Union to a gathering in March.

The mayors, representing some 60 million inhabitants, stressed that the “fight against climate change is a priority for our towns and the well-being of our citizens.”

Hidalgo’s office is now working on a project to have 1,000 mayors from around the world present at COP 21, a spokesperson told IPS. The stakes are high because the French government wants the summit to be a success, with a new global agreement on combating climate change.

Borloo, who was environment minister in the administration of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, used to advocate for France’s “climate justice” proposal, aimed at giving financial aid to poor countries to combat climate change.

Calling for a “climate justice plan” to allow poor countries to “adapt, achieve growth, get out of poverty and have access to energy,” Borloo was a key French player at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009, but that conference ended in disarray. The question now is: will a greater involvement of women leaders and mayors make COP 21 a success?

Edited by Phil Harris    

Aerial view of the Mejillones Liquefied Natural Gas (GNLM) regasification terminal in northern Chile, the biggest of its kind in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world. Credit: Courtesy of GNLM

By Marianela Jarroud
MEJILLONES, Chile , Jun 16 2014 (IPS)

In April 2004, Argentina began to steadily cut natural gas exports to neighbouring Chile, triggering a major energy crisis and revealing structural problems in this vital sector.

Ten years later, a regasification plant which converts liquefied natural gas (LNG) back to natural gas in the port of Mejillones, 1,400 km north of Santiago, apparently goes a long way towards solving the energy problems in the north of the country, where water is scarce and where the mining industry is concentrated.

President Michelle Bachelet has expressed confidence that, along with renewable energies, natural gas will contribute to the diversification of Chile’s energy mix, and emphasised that “what we do or fail to do now will have consequences in the future.”

On May 14, Bachelet inaugurated an onshore storage tank at the Mejillones Liquefied Natural Gas (GNLM) regasification terminal, the biggest in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world.

French-Belgian power company GDF Suez holds a 63 percent share in the terminal and the rest is owned by the state-owned Corporación del Cobre de Chile (Codelco).

It was Bachelet , during her first term (2006-2010), who laid the first stone for the plant. And in February 2010 she was present to welcome the arrival of the first methane tanker.

Bachelet now inaugurated the huge storage tank with a gross capacity of 187,000 m3. It is a full containment tank with a nickel steel inner tank inside a pre-stressed concrete outer tank.

The CEO of GDF Suez, Gerard Mestrallet, said it was built to the highest safety standards, to withstand seismic activity and tsunamis.

The tank’s 501 elastomeric isolators enable it to withstand the stresses caused by a major earthquake, as well as sophisticated seismic monitoring and protection systems.

The expansion of GNLM involved an additional 200 million dollars, on top of the initial investment of 550 million dollars.

For four years, in the first stage of the project, the BW GDF Suez Brussels was moored on one side of the jetty in the bay and used as a floating storage unit when gas shipments came in.

The land tank’s capacity is equivalent to approximately 110 million m3 of standard natural gas after the regasification process. This is transported to clients, mainly mining companies, through the Nor Andino and GasAtacama pipelines.

It is the company’s clients that pay for importing the gas. The corporations that have signed contracts so far are the Anglo-Australian multinational BHP Billiton, Codelco and Generadora E-CL, a Chilean power company controlled by GDF Suez.

The natural gas storage tank inaugurated by President Michelle Bachelet May 14, to complete the natural gas terminal at Mejillones. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

On May 15, Bachelet – who took office in March – presented her government’s energy agenda, which focuses heavily on clean energy sources as well as the use of LNG to replace diesel fuel and for industrial and household use as well.

The agenda proposes short-term measures to maximise the use of the country’s current electric power generation infrastructure and LNG terminals.

It also includes medium to long-term initiatives aimed at boosting LNG capacity and installing new combined cycle plants fueled with natural gas, “as far as possible with new actors.”

Besides Mejillones, Chile has another LNG terminal, in Quintero bay 154 km north of Santiago, which is owned by London-based BG Group PLC and Chile’s state oil and gas company Empresa Nacional del Petroleo (ENAP).

But the head of the Latin American Observatory on Environmental Conflicts (OLCA), Lucia Cuenca, said the government’s proposal should be looked at with a critical eye.

The country is making the mistake, she told Tierramérica, of not thinking about the high quality natural gas that Bolivia or Argentina could provide, but only about unconventional sources of natural gas. She was referring, for example, to shale gas, which is extracted from underground rocks by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

“ Chile is preparing to incorporate this kind of gas and that has to be evaluated in a much broader manner,” Cuenca said.

Chile currently imports gas mainly from Trinidad and Tobago and Qatar. But the government will reportedly negotiate supplies of shale gas from the United States.

Cuenca added that, even though LNG emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions, “it’s still a fossil fuel, which means it does produce emissions.”

“LNG is considered a transitional fuel; in other words, it is a little better than coal, but it is not exactly the best option from the standpoint of clean energy,” he added.

In Chile, thermoelectric plants are run on three kinds of fuel: diesel, the most expensive and dirtiest; coal, which is also highly polluting, but abundant and cheap; and gas, which is the least polluting, but costs around 30 percent more than coal.

In 1991, a year after this country returned to democracy after the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, the governments of Argentina and Chile signed an economic agreement that established the foundations for gas interconnection between the two countries.

But the late Néstor Kirchner, when he took office as president of Argentina in 2003, prioritised domestic supplies in the face of internal shortages of natural gas, which at the time only covered national demand.

The cuts in exports had a tremendous economic impact on Chile, because power companies were forced to use oil instead, whose international market price had soared.

At the time Argentina cut its gas exports, nearly 90 percent of industries in Santiago were using natural gas from Argentina, which also supplied much of the country’s natural gas pipeline network that serves households.

“The decision reached by Kirchner (2003-2007) was in line with Argentina’s political approach, which will always favour national interests; regardless of who is governing, they are prepared to assume the costs from the standpoint of the international cooperation agenda,” political scientist Francisca Quiroga told Tierramérica.

She said that after Argentina reduced its gas exports to Chile, a debate broke out in which many argued that Chile should not trust Argentina because it was a country that did not live up to its promises. But the political dividends Kirchner reaped outweighed any criticism from abroad, she added.

Quiroga said the question of energy “is a very touchy ideological and strategic issue and is important in debates on domestic policy.”

And in the current regional context, she added, “is it one of the most important issues on the multilateral agenda to address in terms of the challenges of the 21st century.”

In the meantime, Chile is planning the construction of a third LNG terminal in the south-central part of the country, with the participation of the state energy company ENAP.

Cuenca said it is a strategy that serves the large mining corporations that need cheap, abundant energy, because the aim is to offer lower prices on the domestic market.