The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2023 31 Power Africa initiative established in 2013 have made steady progress in constructively engaging with Africa. This second summit—in mobilizing officials, businesspeople, and civil society to address a wide range of old and new topics, in emphasizing “partnership” at every level, in increasing develop- ment assistance, and in cementing deals—appears to have quali- tatively advanced the working relationship. As always, the proof will be in the pudding. Energy and the Environment Prospects The second day’s U.S.-Africa Business Forum, hosted by the Commerce Department, emphasized matchmaking. A “Deal Room” was set up to foster agreements between U.S. and African business representatives. Significantly, President Biden announced more than $15 billion in new two-way trade and investment commitments, deals, and partnerships at the forum. There were sessions on climate adaptation, health cooperation, a just energy transition, and cooperation in civil and commercial space research. And new agreements were reached that give momentum to energy and agricultural projects. President Biden and President Felix Tshisekedi of the Demo- cratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have agreed, for example, on preserving the rain forest of the Congo Basin. In addition to the DRC, the Congo Basin includes Equatorial Guinea, Camer- oon, the Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and Angola. This forest is the second-largest CO 2 -absorbing “lung” in the world, after the Amazon. Until mid-2022, Chinese loggers in the Congo forest were shipping wood to China, and Congolese farmers were cutting trees to make room for agriculture required by population increase. Now tree cutting has stopped while U.S. and Congolese experts work to develop a system of conservation within limited commercial operations. The energy sector, broadly defined, offers enormous scope for investment and economic development. Most African house- holds continue to prepare meals with charcoal, which contrib- utes to the cutting of rainforests. A major effort is underway to expand the use of gas, which produces far less CO 2 than coal, for the preparation of meals. Gas canisters for meal preparation are currently the rule in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia. Since the year 2010, significant gas deposits have been dis- covered near offshore in both West and East Africa. The deposits are measured upward of 40 trillion cubic feet in each region. They are currently being developed to produce liquid natural gas (LNG) that will replace dirty coal for the generation of electric- ity. In northern Mozambique, in the province of Cabo Delgado, offshore gas is processed into LNG, which will be used by private companies to generate electricity. A U.S. company, Anglo Eurasia of Houston, Texas, has received a permit from the Mozambican government to invest in a power plant in the province to produce electricity from LNG derived from offshore gas. This power will be sold to southern Malawi, Zambia, and South Africa, all of whom had serious power deficits as of the end of 2022. Power Africa, a USAID program promoting private invest- ments in power generation in sub-Saharan Africa that will amount to 30,000 megawatts (MW) by 2030, has become another major facilitator for economic development partnerships. I have CONTOURGLOBAL The KivuWatt power project in Rwanda is unusual and important ecologically.