Lebanese authorities have failed to uphold the right to electricity by mismanaging the sector for decades, Human Rights Watch said in a scathing report released this month. The report Cut Off from Life Itself’: Lebanon’s Failure on the Right to Electricity, argues that electricity is fundamental to nearly every aspect of living and participating in present- day societies, and as such, the internationally protected right to an adequate standard of living includes the right of everyone, without discrimination, to sufficient, reliable, safe, clean, accessible, and affordable electricity. 

At present, the Lebanese government riddled with corruption provides electricity for only one to three hours a day on average, while people who can afford it supplement that supply with private generators or solar energy. The public sector and private generator industry rely on polluting climate-intensive fossil fuels. The electricity crisis has exacerbated inequality in the country, severely limited people’s ability to realize their most basic rights, and pushed them further into poverty.

“Lebanon’s electricity crisis is leaving people in the dark and dramatically reducing people’s access to critical rights such as food, water, education, and health care,” said Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The dire situation in Lebanon illustrates why access to safe, clean, and affordable electricity isn’t merely an amenity, but is a human right that the state has an obligation to fulfill.”

For almost 30 years, Lebanese authorities have failed to properly manage the state-run electricity company, Électricité du Liban (EDL), resulting in widespread blackouts. The decades of unsustainable policies and fundamental neglect, the result of elite capture of state resources, alleged corruption, and vested interests caused the sector to completely collapse in 2021 amid the ongoing economic crisis, leaving the country without power through most of the day.

For decades, successive governments have promised to reform the electricity sector, but those promises have not materialized. Same with garbage that blocks sewers, and then runs into the sea. Instead of appointing members to an independent Electricity Regulatory Authority to direct the sector, as mandated by law, the Council of Ministers, particularly the minister of energy and water, exerts almost complete control over the sector with little transparency and accountability. The minister has control over issuing production licenses and permits, making policies regarding the sector, supervising those policies, and providing financial oversight.

The report charges that politicians and politically connected individuals have used the electricity sector to further their political goals, including by doling out jobs at the government-run company to make huge profits from lucrative contracts, often at the state’s expense, and reap profits from the private generator market.

A lucrative, though expensive and highly polluting, private diesel generator market has been filling the supply gap for decades, but it is available only to those who can afford it. Steady electricity in Lebanon has effectively become a service only the wealthiest can afford, reinforcing the country’s deep-seated inequality and further pushing people into poverty.

Since October 2019, Lebanon’s economy has been mired in a deep financial crisis that culminated in the country’s first sovereign default in March 2020. The economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, political deadlock, and the explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020 aggravated a recession and accelerated the economy’s collapse. Inflation soared to 145 percent on average in 2021, placing Lebanon third globally in terms of the highest inflation rates, after Venezuela and Sudan. Year over year inflation for electricity, gas, and water peaked at nearly 600 percent in June 2022.

 

The economic and electricity crises have destroyed the livelihood of tens of thousands of people. Unemployment, declining remittances, and the removal of subsidies for key imports have pushed millions of people into poverty and exacerbated existing destitution. The United Nations estimates that more than two-thirds of Lebanon’s population now live in poverty.

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Human Rights Watch partnered with the Consultation and Research Institute (CRI), a local research firm, to survey over 1,200 households, the results of which demonstrated the extent to which the electricity crisis exacerbates inequality, pushes people into poverty, hinders access to basic rights like food, water, and health, and causes extensive air pollution that affects the environment, and health and contributes to a worsening climate crisis. Nine out of every ten households surveyed said the cost of electricity affected their ability to pay for other essential services.

Access to a private or commercially operated generator that can fill the gap for state electricity was dependent on income. Among the poorest 20 percent of households, one in five did not have access to a generator. Further, low-income households spent a much larger share of their income on generator bills compared to wealthier ones, straining family budgets and putting them at greater risk of falling behind on other essential expenses.

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High proportions of respondents said that electricity shortages had affected their ability to carry out normal rights-related household functions such as receiving water, cooking food, or participating in education or work activities.

 

In addition to disproportionately harming low-income households, the Lebanese electricity system’s reliance on plants powered by heavy fuel oil and on diesel generators causes significant air pollution that has taken a huge toll on the environment and had significant impacts on the health of Lebanon’s residents, killing thousands each year according to Greenpeace data.

Lebanon and renewable energy

The Lebanese government has not invested in renewable sources of energy, even though it has estimated that Lebanon’s solar and wind resources could power the country several times over. In 2019, the share of renewables in Lebanon’s total electricity generation was just 7.83 percent, of which only 0.73 percent was from solar power and only 1.82 percent was from hydropower.

The Lebanese authorities are responsible for the daily violations of residents’ rights to electricity, an adequate standard of living, education, health, and a healthy environment caused by the ongoing electricity crisis. Lebanese authorities should take immediate and urgent steps to ensure that all residents have a continuous, affordable, and clean supply of electricity that does not contribute to the climate crisis, with a focus on increasing generation capacity from hydropower, wind, and solar.

The faster the transition to renewables, the more money Lebanon will save, the more jobs created, and the more lives saved from air pollution reductions, Human Rights Watch said. The authorities should also take steps to establish a universal social protection system that guarantees benefits throughout people’s lives, such as child grants, unemployment benefits, and old-age pensions, the group advises. 

International financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, should urge the Lebanese government to reform the electricity sector in line with the country’s human rights obligations, and ensure that everyone, regardless of socio-economic status, has access to and can afford electricity. The World Bank should refrain from funding any new energy projects that rely on fossil fuels and instead provide technical and financial support to expand renewable energy infrastructure.

“Lebanon needs to take immediate action to bolster the electricity sector and reverse the ongoing erosion of basic economic rights,” Fakih said. “The government should invest in renewable energy sources that will create job opportunities, lessen pollution, and give people in Lebanon access to reliable, safe, and clean electricity.”

We definitely want to see a lot more news like this: in the heart of a dry, relentless desert in Jordan that gets almost endless days of sun shines a new project to give its people access to clean energy. Thanks to Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company Masdar, of which zero-energy city Masdar is also named energy-poor Jordan gets a new project under the sun. This month Masdar officially cut the ribbon and inaugurated the Baynouna Solar Park in the Middle East country of Jordan. 

The Baynouna project produces enough solar energy annually to power 160,000 homes, making it the largest clean energy project in Jordan. Thanks to the sun, the Masdar-financed project displaces 360,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, supporting the global energy transition towards green energy. 

The inauguration was attended by Khalifa bin Mohammed bin Khalid, UAE Ambassador to Jordan, His Sultan Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, COP28 President-Designate, and Chairman of Masdar, and Bisher Al-Khasawneh, Prime Minister of Jordan.

Masdar, also known as the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, is a UAE-government owned renewable energy company based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Jordan is one of the poorest countries in the world and unlike neighboring Saudi Arabia does not earn money from oil exploration as most of it is locked up in oil shale.

It came to him in a dream. Dmitri Mendeleev, the man who invented the periodic table and periodic law, faced poverty in Siberia, prejudice in Moscow, tuberculosis in St. Petersburg and the Crimean war while convalescing from tuberculosis. On her deathbed his mother cautioned: “Be careful of illusion; work, search for divine and scientific truth.” 

In February 1869 he wrote the properties of some elements and played something like chemical solitaire to try to understand the pattern before falling asleep. Mendeleev later wrote: “In a dream I saw a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” 

Hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant element in the known universe, remains where he wrote it, alone in the upper left corner of his periodic table of the elements. In 1888 Mendeleev measured 5.8 to 7.5% hydrogen gas seeping from cracks in the Makiivka coal mine in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Chemists were well aware of hydrogen’s relationship to water when they named it hydrogen, but his was one of the first scientific measurements of geologic hydrogen.

Hydrogen as the perfect fuel

Fast forward to the 1970s when environmentalists were beginning to understand what Eunice Newton Foote and other 19th century scientists had predicted about the impact of carbon dioxide on our climate. Coal, wood, oil and natural gas all release carbon dioxide when they burned but hydrogen burns clean, producing only water vapor. The hydrogen economy hype seemed too good to be true. Our atmosphere isn’t pure oxygen so a hydrogen flame produces some nitrogen oxides (NOx) but it emits far less pollution that any hydrocarbon would. Scientists and environmentalists were in agreement, hydrogen is the perfect fuel!

Hydrogen hydrogen everywhere but not a molecule to burn

There is one problem. Where will we get the hydrogen? The sun is 73% hydrogen and Jupiter is 90% hydrogen but they’re hardly as convenient as your local gas station. Every molecule of water in the world’s oceans contains two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. By mass the oceans are 10% hydrogen. But the hydrogen in H2O is stuck tightly to the oxygen so it takes energy to split the hydrogen from the oxygen in water. Electrolysis is a process which uses electricity to do this but efficiency levels are less than 70%. So it takes about six kilowatt-hours of electricity to split the hydrogen from oxygen in a 1-liter bottle of water. (See footnote below)

That would be enough to run a television and refrigerator for about ten hours. If that electricity comes from green or carbon neutral fuels we can consider this to be green hydrogen. Manufactured hydrogen isn’t a replacement for fossil fuels but it can be a useful way to store energy to be burned or used in fuel cells.

Geologic Hydrogen

But what if we didn’t have to split hydrogen from oxygen? What if there were places like the coal mine Mendeleev studied in Ukraine with an even higher percentage of hydrogen? Like the chemical patterns revealed in Mendeleev’s dream, so-called geologic hydrogen was there all along but we weren’t looking for it, or we were looking in the wrong places.

Most known hydrogen producing vents are in Eastern Europe and Russia because people there were looking, partly because Russian scientists had accepted an abiotic petroleum theory that required hydrogen instead of organic matter to create underground oil reserves. The western scientific belief that free geologic hydrogen was rare became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hydrogen is often used as a carrier gas in chromatography instruments used to survey geologic gas. This made these instruments blind to geologic hydrogen.

Prospectors started looking harder in response to the energy shortage caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. One such source of “hidden” geologic hydrogen is where an eternal flame burns on Mount Chimaera in Turkey. In his second book of Historia Naturalis (77 AD), Pliny the Elder referred to writings by Ctesias in the fifth century BC suggesting that these vents which “burned with a flame that does not die by day or night” were the origin of the mythical fire-breathing lion-goat monster named Chimera. This is also believed to be the place where the original Olympic torch was lit. The torch in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo Japan was lit from a cauldron that burned manufactured green hydrogen.

Photo of natural fires on Mount Chimaera, Turkey by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany

How does geology create hydrogen?

The exact processes are not known for all sources of geologic hydrogen but some of the basic chemistry would’ve been known by 1904 when Howard Lane built a device that used a reaction between iron and steam to generate hydrogen. Lane’s process was used to inflate balloons for the St. Louis exposition and airships such as the Graf Zeppelin. There are places deep underground where water comes in contact with hot iron-bearing rock. The iron-rich mineral olivine is common in the earth’s mantle and when it comes into contact with water, a reaction called serpentinization occurs which takes oxygen from water and produces hydrogen and another mineral called Serpentinite. 

Photo of serpentinite by Hermann Hammer

Other hydrogen generating reactions occur deep within the earth but some, such as radiolysis where the energy from radioactive decay splits water are thought to be too slow to produce useful amounts of hydrogen. The serpentinization reactions may be faster than the slow biological decay which produces coal and petroleum.

Follow the hydrogen faeries

The geology which favors coal, oil and tar-sands is not necessarily ideal for generating and trapping hydrogen. Hydrogen can escape or chemically bond with porous sedimentary rock and some microbes eat it. If high purity geologic sources of hydrogen are common enough to replace some fossil fuels, we may find ourselves in a new age of hydrogen prospecting. 

Fortunately nature gives us some clues. Fairy circles are circular patches where grass and other plantlife is altered. Like the Chimera of Turkey, various legends tried to explain what caused them. In English and Celtic folklore said they were caused by faeries dancing in a circle and if a human joined them, they would be forced to dance until they passed out. We now understand that many are caused when trees, mushrooms, decaying stumps and other organic matter alter the soil. But they can also be caused by hydrogen seeping from underground cracks.

A Science.org article entitled Hidden Hydrogen by Eric Hand describes some recent discoveries of geologic hydrogen. One is by a man named Luke Titus who read a 1944 Geologic survey of South Australia during the Covid-19 lockdown. He learned about the use of divining rods and other unusual prospecting techniques and boreholes on Kangaroo island which produced up to 80% pure hydrogen. Mr. Titus acquired prospecting rights in the region and founded a company called Gold Hydrogen.

Other promising sources of geologic hydrogen have been found in Brazil, Namibia, Iceland, Canada, Finland and the US.

The Hidden Hydrogen article describes a 1987 discovery in Mali where a water-well driller was smoking near where wind came from the dry bore hole. He set off an explosion with a flame that was “…like blue sparkling water and did not have black smoke pollution. The color of the fire at night was like shining gold, and all over the fields we could see each other in the light.”

Another place where geologic hydrogen is well known are the black-smoker vents found where volcanic oceanic ridges meet the water of the deep ocean. The relative inaccessibility of this hydrogen is a reminder that there is a difference between knowing where hydrogen exists and being able to economically extract it without causing other unwanted environmental destruction.

For chemists, geologists and environmentalists, geologic hydrogen may be a flash in the pan, or it might be a new hydrogen “gold rush” that forever changes the world.

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Footnote:
My father is a retired science teacher who once called the local power company after calculating how much electricity it would take to split enough water to generate enough hydrogen and oxygen to raise the Titanic. When company officials realized he wasn’t an industrial customer, they didn’t call him back. Assuming a 131186287 liter Titanic just below the surface and I get:

131186287L/1865L/ 6 kWh = 70,348kWh * 6 = 422,092kWh

422,092 kilowatt-hours * 0.12/kWh = $50,651

This is surprisingly inexpensive though this is only in the ideal case where an intact Titanic lies just beneath the surface, not where it sits on the bottom 3800 meters below. The inverse provides perspective the titanic volume of hydrogen and oxygen that must come together to produce 422,092 kWh of energy.