Taking care of olive trees and forests includes pruning the trees to make sure healthy growth, and minimize risk of forest fires. Al Koura district in North Lebanon, is especially interested in that practice, given that 64% of the district is covered with olive trees and forests.
Usually, the trimmings are burned. That’s between 1000 and 2000 tonnes a year of burned wood and pruning residue. This is why when I heard about the new Bioenergy production project in Koura with the University of Balamand and Koura Municipalities Union, funded by the European Union in Lebanon, I was very happy and excited!
The plant will take in around 1000 tonnes of pruning residue from the district each year, and transform it into around 700 tonnes of “briquettes” that can replace fossil fuels as a means to heat households and businesses across the country.
The project creates jobs, curbs the burning of pruning residue and provides a cheaper, more sustainable alternative to heat homes and cook in traditional stoves still used across the district. In other words, it reduces pollution, creates a new industry from locally sourced materials and the grander scheme of things, it also helps Lebanon get closer to its COP15 target of 12% renewable energy by 2020.
I hope more and more sustainable projects like this spring up across the country!
LOGI (Lebanon Oil and Gas Initiative) is an awesome Lebanese NGO that’s working hard on unraveling the black box that is Lebanon’s oil and gas industry.
The Oil and Gas Sector in Lebanon
In the past few years, this sector has been plagued with a lack of transparency that has most citizens which are not affiliated to a political party, skeptical about the lofty prospects and promises given about this sector. Unfortunately, most taxpayers feel it’s just another blackhole of corruption in the making, and doubt that the benefits (if any) of this sector, will end up helping the country’s economy, but just lining the pockets of Lebanon’s politicians like most other corruption-infested sectors in Lebanon.
The Video
LOGI released a hilarious and well-executed video today, that highlights the suspicious speed of passing laws associated with this sector, without anyone being sure about what’s next and how it will be implemented, given we are at least a decade away (7 years is the most optimistic prediction) from actually extracting oil and gas, if ever, with the recent Israeli incursion into a block that is supposed to be Lebanon’s.
The Cumbersome, Mysterious Laws Passed at Lightning Speed
The draft laws in question are: the draft law for establishing the National Oil Company, the draft law for establishing the Sovereign Wealth Fund, the draft law for establishing the Directorate for Petroleum Assets and the draft law for Onshore oil and gas exploration.
Personally, I’m not sure why we need to pay taxpayer money to create these entities and employ people to work at them, when we don’t even have an oil sector yet. This sounds and smells fishy, and needs to be clarified to taxpayers, given the current government has done everything it can to hike taxes, but has done absolutely nothing to stop corruption and wasteful spending.
What’s most worrying for me, is the sudden urge to look of oil and gas on land, which wasn’t the case before. If dams and other developmental projects are any reference, this means further destruction of natural areas, cultural landmarks and irreplaceable archeological gems, in a country already drowning in untreated garbage.
We need to create enough public awareness on this issue so that the decision makers delay the passing of the four draft laws I mentioned above, and review them taking into consideration LOGI’s recommendations. We might have a chance at building a robust, transparent sector from scratch, let’s not let them fuck it up.
My Two Cents
Personally, I just wish we can strike a good deal with oil producers so they send us crude oil we can process here, take our share, and resell the by-products to other countries. It’d be cheaper and easier to do that than off-shore drilling, especially given the steadily low price of oil, and the rest of the world shifting away from fossil fuels into renewable energy sources that are becoming more and more reliable and cost-effective, creating more jobs and helping keep what’s left from our environment intact.
Finally, for the first time in history, and many years too late, the Lebanese government will buy energy from the private sector which will generate it from a renewable source: wind.
This week, the cabinet gave three companies licenses to build wind farms in Lebanon’s Akkar region.
The wind farms are expected to generate around 200MW of power, enough for 200,000 households in Lebanon.
The law which OKs buying electricity from the private sector dates back to 2002, and was updated in 2010. Now, in 2017, projects have finally been sanctioned, 15 years after the first law was passed.
This is great news, especially with talk about billions of your dollars being spent on temporary, environmentally-unfriendly power ships. This at a time the government is trying to hike taxes across the board… It’s unacceptable that billions of dollars be spent on a temporary fix for the electricity, when more permanent, and more importantly, sustainable options can happen.
The government should loosen up laws on who can generate electricity in Lebanon. Especially on renewable energy. I don’t get how people are allowed to run diesel power generators in neighborhoods for decades now, but it takes so long to give a permit and allow production of clean power to help close the massive power gap in this tiny country.
Wind farms, solar farms, hydroelectric dams that don’t destroy entire ecosystems and heritage sites like the Janna Dam disaster, are all viable options, that will cost the taxpayer less, and slow down the butchering of our garbage-drenched, toxically-polluted environment.
Then again, the politicians won’t make as much money from no “moteurs” and dirty sources of energy, so, we need to keep an eye out and pressure up to move towards the private sector and private citizens being allowed to generate clean energy.
Anyway, the companies have 18 months to do an environmental impact assessment, and then another 18 months to complete construction of the wind farms. So, in 2020, we should have 3 wind farms in Akkar, generating 200MW of power.
It was barely a week after my post about why I love Mashrou’ Leila and the profound impact I feel they’re having on Lebanon and the region with the causes they champion and their unique way of delivering those messages.
During that time, the boys had sailed off for four days on Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, to write and perform the song whose video I embedded at the top of this post.
For those of you who don’t know, I was a Greenpeace activist for many years in Beirut. Deep down, despite my preoccupation with mainly civil and social issues, I am a conservationist at heart, one that tries not to let the mounting environmental dangers and us getting closer to (or passing!) the point of no return bring me down. When it comes to keeping our planet habitable, I think it’s far more important we do that before or at least while embarking on colonizing other planets, which seems to be the talk of the town the past year.
So, I was ecstatic when I heard about this project, and couldn’t wait to hear what the band and the Greenpeace activists come up with. The song aims to highlight the importance and potential of solar power, and they did not disappoint!
The saddest part for me about this track, is how the witty word choice in the song kind of gets lost in translation, such as “Illi sar, mish maseer” which is an awesome way of saying it’s not too late, and what’s past isn’t necessarily our destiny.
Otherwise, I loved the video and the song and I’m so glad the boys took a few days off their hectic touring schedule to do this. We often get so caught up with our daily struggles and problems, that we forget how close we are coming to making this beautiful blue rock almost uninhabitable for us and other animals and plants that call it home. No cause is more important that the environmental one, because at the end of the day, it’s not just about an election or a law on a paper, it’s about the survival of our species and the planet we pass down to our kids and their kids.
To wrap things up and end on a more positive note in the usually gloom and doom world of environmental policy, this year, renewable energy sources have finally overtaken coal as a source of energy. There might be hope for us yet! And what better soundtrack to that struggle for survival than a good old Mashrou’ Leila track?!
Don’t forget to sign up, support and volunteer with Greenpeace! ❤
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