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A Black Rhino Held in a Stockade During its Relocation
Rhinos Return to their Original Habitat
Saving the Rhino campaigns have resulted in some of the black rhino being re-stocked back in Rwanda. They were virtually wiped out in 1994. Fast forward to June 2019 and another episode of saving the rhinos is re-establishing the species in a hame territory. They are now relocating with this effort, back to the Akagera Park that once had 50 rhino.
Rwanda has been leading the 25 year effort to save the mountain gorilla population. The Virunga National Park’s gorilla numbers returned from the brink. I visited the Virunga Gorillas National Park in 2003 with my project team. I was impressed to see how well protected they were. The Sabyinho gorilla family had armed guards tracking them. So now the Rhino population must have a good chance of repopulating their original habitat.
The five rhinos from European zoos and safari parks will bring to 20 the number of eastern black rhinos in Akagera. These are in addition to a number of the rhinos from South Africa in 2017.
Saving the Rhino will see animals raised in captivity will live on protected land
Pete Morkel is the veterinarian advising on the animal relocation. He is a cousin who was born in the same town as me in Zimbabwe, though I never met him. Indeed he was part of the 2017 relocation from South Africa. This plan has five rhinos flying from the Czech Republic’s Dvur Kralove zoo. Similarly Pete has many years of work experience with saving the rhino in South Africa. I heard last year that Pete Morkel is suffering from a rare cancer. Family is fundraising to get him on expensive treatment. I hoope he hets back to saving the rhino, as it is a difficult animal to manage safely.
Historically, South Africa has the largest, most threatened rhino population in the world. So there in South Africa, poachers kill up to 400 rhino per year. Most poachers are contracted by East Asian crime syndicates to provide just the horn of the rhino, valued higher than gold per kilogram. There, poachers slaughter herds of rhinos on contract.
They cut off their horns to sell to dealers in the underground markets in Asia. The composition of the horn is virtualy identical to human hair. It’s just keratin.
Check out this Hydragas Sway Presentation for more about Hydragas Energy, in this unusual format. For that, you can use this link to access the presentation in Sway, a little used Microsoft Presentation format.
Sway is in fact view-able on any web browser. So try viewing the Sway presentation here now. It will give a quick insight on Lake Kivu’s development. Similarly, it will illustrate the approach used by Hydragas Energy to carry out Lake Kivu development.
See the Hydragas Sway presentation link below:
Panoramic of Mt Nyiragongo from Lake Kivu in wet season
Extract from the BOEM Article Showing the Location of New Under-sea MappingNorthern Gulf of Mexico deepwater bathymetry grid. We create this from 3-D seismic surveys. The grid defines water depth with 1.4 billion 12 × 12 meter cells. BOEM grid coverage is limited to the area defined by rainbow colors.
This article shows the use of high resolution of sea floor mapping. In fact the sea floor mapping in view in this article covers the Gulf of Mexico. So, by using high-res in this case, one provides better resolution and interpretation of sea-floor features. Indeed, this may well include methane hydrate resource patterns and history.
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has now created and released a new regional seafloor data set. It reveals that dynamic environment with stunning new clarity. The data include detailed seismic surveys originally shot by 15 different companies involved in the oil and gas industry. In addition, BOEM gained permission to release the relevant proprietary data publicly in a freely downloadable aggregate map of the seafloor. The detailed report is referenced below.
A number of examples show the improved interpretation potential of the maps available with the higher resolution. The location of methane hydrates becomes distinctly more possible to determine.
I thought we would see the end of suicidal “lemming” investment funding strategies after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Investors piled into sub-prime junk mortgage investments, because everyone else was doing it. It fulfilled the text-book risk management strategy of “reducing” risk. De-risk by spreading ownership of any creative investment vehiclescontagious junk as widely as possible.
But too much such junk, too widely spread, nearly took a slew of major banks down. It had the global financial system on the brink. Was that the end of the road for bad startegy?
Impact investment funding: The new fad?
US Mint Printing $100 Bills
It perhaps should have, but this is not my area of expertise. Was the cure better than the disease? What I do know is that a $20m investment agreement funding my own project was canned two days before signature.
This was Hydragas Energy. Indeed, the date was August 2, 2008. The US investor, a renowned environmentalist and huge fan of the project, suffered his own triple whammy of financial setbacks. His hits included the cancellation of major contracts with California State Government and two cancelled sales of mining and energy investments. He had to bail out of the opportunity.
For years afterwards, risk aversion ruled and any impact investment funding tanked. So I placed the project on the back burner for a while. Because of that, I was busying myself advising governments on regulation for safe use of the lake. This was an essential task for community safety for millions of people.
Where that bail-out money really goes
As a result, global crisis management included some critical interventions hugely expensive bail-outs. This process saw taxpayer (and other newly created) money injected to save the skins of most banks. That is, those other than Lehmann Brothers and Icelandic banks. The “too-big-to-fail” US financial institutions and many global entities were on a knife’s edge.
Trillions of dollars were printed for “global easing”. Where are these trillions now? This was surely a recipe for inflation. That is, unless yours is the ultimate reserve currency, thus able to avertpostpone the problem onto other generations. Taxpayers will pay the interest on the debt and that’s pending. It works out at $50 billion per annum per 0.25% interest on $18 trillion. No wonder the US Executive branch has pushed for rate cuts.
Was it criminal practice?
Arguably it was criminal behaviour that led to the crisis. But at so many levels, that behaviour remained unpunished. No bankers were jailed. So bankers were soon back into business as usual. Their current exercise is to be creative with this mountain of new money printed. To the casual eye, the situation’s almost back to normal, really a “SNAFU” kind of normal. By then, banker’s fees were back to the respectableunconscionable levels. Fees were earned for moving money around, but where to?
Goldman Sachs admitted, as an example among the fraternity of bankers, that they are spending tens of billions of dollars on legal fees and provisions to reduce their risk profile and provide for claims or contingencies. Somebody else is paying for that as an added banking fee.
Is this how you teach investment risk management?
Finance teaching
I discussed this risk management problem with a colleague, Larisa, busy studying for her CFA. So I decided to read her text book’s financial risk chapter. I suggested that the risk management method was utterly flawed. This chapter needed a wholesale re-write. But so far it seems that the only editing was to add the investment destination qualifier, “except for sub-prime mortgages…”. One door closes, many remain open.
So why should I be concerned? Is it because there is more of the same going on, just under different labels?
How to fund real impact projects?
Actually no. My first concern is at the other end of the investing funding spectrum. It lies with the ongoing difficulty of funding real, productive, wealth-generating projects that also do good. The ones that give real returns and real benefits. This is where impact investment funding belongs. These same projects benefit needy communities and climate change. Commodity prices hinder investment, with some exceptions.
Incredibly, it’s the good investments that suffer from a credibility problem with bankers. How is this category ignored in favor of a widely abused spread of “junk” risk?
In old-style Economics 101, it was primary and secondary industry that was the keystone investment. They provided the base on which all economic activity was built. The service industries, such as banking, earned their fees by facilitating the transactions. These kept the wheels of mining and industry turning.
Bankers became incredibly adept at generating new fees for new services. Along the way they created a service industry of advisers to interpret complexity. The process became the means and the end. Who needs a project when the mere movement of the funds generates as much?
What can we learn from Catch 22?
This new school of finance and economics, post GFC, has terminally displaced the older economic construct. This transition was foreseen by Joseph Heller’s character in his post-war novel, Catch 22. Milo Minderbinder is the unconstrained wheeler-dealer that thrives on wars.
Milo, in a most intriguing Catch 22 sub-plot, was the mess sergeant at an air force bomber base in Italy in WWII. He started by trading army rations for fresh food and eggs from local farmers. This was for the benefit of his clientele – the troops. His deal skills and transactions escalated hugely in size and scope. Enter the global entrepreneur and arbitrageur.
He graduated to grand enterprise and insane plans. He figured that it was cheaper for American bombers to bomb American lines and German bombers to bomb their own lines and negotiated the deal!
Bombers Ready for Take-off in Italy, World War II
He offset the cost of bombers travelling the extra distance to bomb each other’s lines. He arranged the arbitrage, among many grand but unheard-of deals, becoming the ultimate and invisible war-time deal-maker and trader. Perhaps it’s Heller’s commentary on the Yalta conference between Roosevelt and Stalin, 10 million Russian lives for US armaments and gold.
Conscience was no barrier to such schemes, nor is it evident in today’s politics. Heller was ahead of his time, sixty years at least, but the practice is alive and thriving in 2019. Catch 22 applies in ways Heller may not have imagined in global finance, but with global politics such hegemony is alive and thriving more than ever.
COP 21 and all that climate change distraction
So where will one see evidence of the newly printed trillions funding something tangible and worthwhile like fixing climate change? COP21 in Paris in December 2015 saw many pledges of investment to save the environment. The over-arching aim was to trim back to at most 1.5 degrees on global warming. That might otherwise rise by 2-4 degrees.
Tech billionaires are in the vanguard of those getting podium time in Paris and face time with politicians at Davos. I don’t doubt their wish to succeed and their ability to influence. They’re good.
World Map showing NASA Climate Change Temperature Anomalies in 2017
But I do have doubts on whether the financial system will carry out their express wishes. There is a growing focus on impact investment funding, but it’s still hard to find.
A multiplicity of Milo Minderbinders out there learnt to be in the mix as the intermediaries. Will they earn their margins and redirect investment funding into pseudo-environmental investments, with virtual enviro-social benefits? Will they sink any form of respectability that these pledges were built on?
How to dress-up a project to get climate funding?
I wonder, for example, will someone in this mix ever look at our project?
In this case we need a paltry $30m initial investment into innovative climate-change technology. We can look deeper. A $3 B eventual, staged capital spend with its 40% real returns. What might one say of its $10bn NPV10 and its ability to avert 2 gigatons of carbon emissions? Because it also stops a pending, one-day methane eruption, by later this century. But then, what might we think of the project preventing the same-day deaths of 2-4 million people in the zone?
How do we assess a value of the lives saved? These are the millions that could suffocate under the toxic gas cloud released if we don’t do the project? Oh yes, it also cuts the cost of imported energy to several countries by 50% into the bargain. And gosh, it reduces greenhouse gas emissions from the imported oil that still provides that energy.
It seems so good, almost too good. It must have a hidden risk. No. Can’t touch it. For deal-makers there are easier ways to make a buck and they don’t have to make sense.
Decision-makers and gate-keepers
Gate-keepers and decision-makers
As one company corporate lawyer said this to me, when we discussed this project as a hedge investment several years ago. “There is no chance that we’ll consider this, there’s a genocide going on there!”
My protest was that Rwanda was 20 years past this event, and now peaceful. It didn’t move him. I showed him a Gallup poll. It listed it as amongst the three safest countries on the planet. But he was unbending. “No I’ve never been there, but this is my information. It’s my decision.” Perhaps I should tell him that WWII is also over. Japan’s actually quite safe too from American nukes. Why bother, there are none so deaf…
But of course there’s hope. What if Elon Musk had to go to the same gate-keeping lawyer? Would he succeed in his plan to put supply and space-station personnel rockets into space? What of his plan to re-use the vehicle? Would that have got past that gatekeeper? No, but he didn’t have to either.
Just thinking. So what would Milo Minderbinder do? He’d figure out a way.
What best do you remember about any project? I’m talking of memories that linger long after any statistics, the millions of incident-free hours. We need the type of memories outlive the productivity data, or the lists of who was there or got fired. They are better than memories of who screwed up. No, those fade as fast as management’s promises to look after you when this project’s is done. Instead, for that enduring memory, we need a hero.
Rather, these are the stark, vivid, often humorous memories. They speak of real people that won’t recede from memory. Their stories are re-told in those long evenings after a days work, on another project on another continent. We hold a place in our hearts for such special people. It’s because we need them to be there, for us.
Telling their story goes deep. It’s way deeper than the glib “employee of the month” commendation. They’re more vivid than the winners of company awards with their awkward photo-opps and certificates. This character is not one for parading even at a gala dinner. He’d more likely skip attending.
I’m sure you know him, in fact I really hope for you that you know one like him. Projects without him are short on character, dryer than binge-watching public service TV.
Saving the day, again and again
I remember it so on a project on one of the Great Lakes of Africa. But it was over a decade before that, deep in Mozambique. My hero had also made his mark. He saved the day, again and again. He did it in true carpe diem style.
The lake one was on a project testing an innovation. This one could prove up something massively important for our clean energy future. It can mitigate two gigatons of carbon and save lives. It promises to be a major gas project on Lake Kivu, producing power for two countries. More than that, it can avert a gas eruption that could otherwise kill millions around the lake.
But that one day, late January 2004, it really seemed close to failing. The project’s aims seemed too far of a stretch. We had totally new and un-tested technology and equipment. It was complex physics, pushing the boundary of gas-liquid theory. It was a search for better ways to produce one of the world’s untapped, but prolific low-carbon energy sources.
Our project’s speculative chances seemed to have run their course. No time was left, no budget, even hope was dwindling. No damn gas.
Our team of scientists and engineers, electronics technicians, were all scratching their heads. This had been a remote chance, like doing experiments in outer space – nobody had done it before. Silence, hanging; but the unspoken question was clear, “Was this all just bullshit science?” How could you even imagine that this would really work? Nobody has done this before.” A palpable sense of mission failure was about.
Need a hero? Enter Rory
Rory stepped up. He was the construction guy, a real-life MacGyver; but like on steroids. He was a diesel mechanic by trade, my first pick for any job in Africa for his sheer resourcefulness, anywhere. He stated calmly, “Listen up, we’re going to do this again, no giving up. We’ve come too far and this is not how this story ends. Tomorrow we’ll take it all apart, figure it out, put it back again. It will be a long day, we leave at dawn. Be at the dock at six.”
This was a serious side of Rory. No nonsense. His usual impish sense of humour was put aside. He’d always kept the team in good spirits. He always came up with a name for everyone. He called the English GM of the local brewery “Alf” because he was an “ambitious little f—–r.” Fabrizio, the young engineer, was forever “picannin”, African vernacular for a small boy.
The local crew spoke no English, except Tomas. He was the unofficial but sometimes laughably incompetent translator. Tomas called Rory “Mr Lolly.” Tomas kept his own name, but “Shorty”, “P–s-face”, “Tiger” and others never did. Rory stayed in touch with Tomas for years.
The universal language of trust
Language was never a barrier to communication for him. He spoke no French or Portuguese or local dialects, but I saw simple and demonstrative communication with his crews in Rwanda and Mozambique. It was clear that they understood him, but also respected and trusted him. Rory had a deep humanity, sometimes disguised but never absent. Wherever he was, he was the go-to person for anyone in dire need. People just knew that.
Cyclone Geralda in the Mozambique Channel
He single-handedly fixed transport and power problems caused by 500mm of rain from Cyclone Geralda at Inhassoro in Inhambane Province, Mozambique. This was in 1994 when floods stranded tens of thousands of people. The flood had cut all north-south roads in a 500-year event.
What do you do when you need a hero, but helicopters and aid don’t arrive for a week and then left after a week. He organized locals to bring their sea-going fishing boats to provide ferry services. Rory even showed them how to strip down cars and walk them across the flooded breaks in the highway, like he had done for himself.
The “detour” around this break was 500km and a week’s drive. It wasn’t fixed for three months before the water subsided.
You don’t belong in any jail
He was once briefly in jail in Vilankulo. This was for taking his own boat out into the Mozambique Channel, cutting foreign pirate fishermen’s long-lines. They were illegally fishing in a dugong marine reserve, aware that the government had no patrol vessels to interdict them. On finding out that the rogue fishermen’s complaint had landed him in jail, the police chief let him free, saying he didn’t belong near a jail cell – they did.
Several times he rescued foreign tourists. Often people were seriously injured in road accidents. This was in a remote region of Mozambique where ambulance services didn’t exist. So he got on with arranging Casevac flights and communicating with the injured’s families.
Back to the lake story; so the next day we packed two Marine boats with tools and supplies. Rory hired ten extra crew for the muscle-burning work of hauling up kilometers of pipe, cable, anchors and weights, hand-over-hand. We motored out over the calm morning water to the experimental rig, at first just a misty dot on the horizon. It was a silent trip, with even Rory deciding not to make jokes.
Making Voodoo
We all hauled pipe. The crew hauled 300 m of it out of the deep water and over the 10m steel deck with a rhythmic chant. We were checking joints, looking for tell-tale bubbles, stripping the electronics and lowering the pipe back into the depths. That evening, ashore, Rory patiently laid out the bundles of cable, meggering and checking each length and each joint.
He then opened up the steel canisters of electronics, built to withstand deep water pressure at 300m. The tell-tale capacitance reading was way off, seals had been compromised – a key discovery. So these canisters were dried out and re-made and double-sealed for good measure. Some hope now.
Repairs on the Kivu Pilot Project
At dawn the next day the boats were re-loaded, with the same extra crew. It was 26 January 2004. Rory had decided that this day everything needed to be aligned. The locals spoke of the legends and mysteries in this lake; there was a mythical deep-water creature that needed to be appeased before we could be successful. The crew would find a sacrificial goat, so one was waiting on the boat too. Optimism was up.
The goat & the weather gods
Our local crew members slaughtered the goat. Its head was weighted and cast in, falling the 400m to the lake bottom. As if on cue the weather calmed, the lake surface perfectly mirrored the orange sun in a sky filled with volcanic haze. Even the electronic capacitance of the system was right on target, for the first time in weeks.
Rory and Fabrizio on the pilot-testing deck January 2004
We had to work fast. With the pipe again hauled over the deck, this time fitted with the cables and canisters, it was attached to the gas separator along with all the other gas lines and instruments. The whole bundle was lowered by winch into the water. All final safety checks were made. We repeated the start-up routine, once again.
The same tense anticipation, hoping for a result this time. Next we connected the electronics to excite the gas, the pipes primed with deep, gas-rich water. Then the clatter of the generator joined in its chorus with the sputter of a compressor. We watched as it bubbled air through the riser pipe to prime the gas-lift pumping. A low surge of water rose out of the pipe, growing steadily until it was a metre high fountain of bubbling water.
Success at last
Suddenly it surged, shooting 10m into the air like fire-hose, with much greater energy. With the gas directed to the flare it lit up enough to feel the heat on the barge. Over the roar of the water fountain and the hammering noise of the machines on deck, everyone was shouting. Rory lit up the gas flare. Smiles broke out everywhere. Hand-shakes. Success at last!
Rory stood calmly in the background, lit up a cigarette and gave a quick smile. “Cooking on gas,” he said, then “Never fear, Rory’s here.”
In memory of Rory
Rory Harbinson died 2014 in South Africa aged 57. Lung cancer. It was just a day after we finally spoke. It hurt to hear him struggle to be heard. I hoped with everything that I had that he would get better, but I could not see him pull off this last miracle.
I’d said to him the things that I felt. “I’ve met and discussed things with Presidents and Prime Ministers, some great scientists and business leaders. But Changamire, you still remain one of two greatest people I’ve known. I owe you so much more than you can imagine.”
Even as we finished that project in 2004, I said to him that when we build that big, ugly construction barge for these projects on the lake, it will be the “SS Rory.” I get to name something, after all. Millions of people, that may never know his name, could some day owe their lives to his work that day. He wouldn’t want anyone to feel obliged, let alone fuss. (more…)
