It's a Small World in Renewable Energy

I had a Skype chat yesterday with a well-heeled investor/entrepreneur in Dubai whose family has numerous business operations in Africa and the Middle East – including Pakistan, the country in which one of my favorite projects is located.  Readers may remember last June’s webinar, which featured a clean energy project in Landhi, a large industrial town in the eastern part of Karachi, which, when fully developed, will convert the dung of 400,000 tightly confined buffaloes into biofertilizer and biogas.

Currently, there is a plant there running 24 hours a day, but it’s very small, a tiny fraction of the size required to implement the concept fully. To my surprise, when I described this to my contact in Dubai, he told me that he’d been there, and knows the people who run it.

I tried to talk up the value of the project, both from a financial and humanitarian perspective, and I’m hoping that these folks will invest.  If they put up $5 million, the organization’s CEO Robert Orr will be able to raise an additional $13 million in project financing, and within a year, he’ll have the entire plant operational, mitigating one of the most egregious environmental catastrophes on the planet, while creating a solid profit stream to pay off the investors.