A World Apart: Geological Parallels and Potential Catastrophes

Half a world apart, two geological hotspots have shaped eerily similar landscapes—one nestled in Africa’s heart, the other in the Americas’ Pacific Northwest. Let’s explore the uncanny parallels between Lake Kivu and Vancouver, drawing connections across continents, each originating from powerful tectonic forces.

The Geological Thread

1. Lake Kivu: Dominated by the Virunga Mountains’ two live volcanic peaks, which dammed and deepened the mysterious waters that once were the legendary source of the Nile River. Beneath these Virunga peaks lies Kivu—an African Great Lake that straddles the Western African Rift. Kivu is a deep and warm water body, mostly anoxic, and possibly the world’s largest bio-digester. Its deeper waters also harbor a hidden danger: immense amounts of methane and carbon dioxide are still being created by algae digestion. Gigatons of these gases, trapped by the lake’s unique stratification, hold both promise and peril.

2. Vancouver: Across the globe, Vancouver’s landscape also bears the marks of ancient upheavals. The remnants of these geological forces now define the region’s topography. Vancouver’s mountains and valleys were formed from four colliding land masses, forming the Rockies and causing volcanic intrusions from subduction zones deep below its crust. Ice Age glaciers have since sculpted its valleys, while volcanic intrusions shaped its granite mountains. Post-Ice Age, the deep glaciation scars filled with seawater. Pent-up tectonic pressure threatens to release the “Big One”, a tsunami-causing event offshore of Vancouver Island, that could register 9.0 on the Richter Scale.

   

From these origins, and by looking at the picture above, can you identify where this sunset scene was taken? Is it from Vancouver or Lake Kivu?

In both instances, a wondrous mountain and water landscape formed violently, caused by tectonic plate movement.  Despite the contrasting geomorphology, in that the West Coast plates are colliding while Africa is rifting apart, the scenery is remarkably similar. 

Violent Origins

• Lake Kivu: Tectonic plate rifting birthed the Virunga Mountains and their deep lake, thinning the Earth’s crust to form a hot zone of magma chambers on the Equator. Africa is tearing apart at the rift zone along four Great lakes including Lakes Albert, Edward, Kivu, and Tanganyika. The rifting is stranding extinct volcanic peaks that strayed eastwards, hundreds of kilometers from the hot spot that birthed them. They form the domain of the famed Mountain Gorillas, who choose not to inhabit the more dangerous live peaks of Nyamulagira and Nyiragongo.

• Vancouver: Here, the San Juan plate plunges beneath the West Coast, triggering frequent seismic events. Historically 2000 volcanoes were fueled by superheated steam from the subducting sea bed, forming granite domes and volcanoes as far north as Alaska. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions—like the infamous Mount St. Helens in 1980—remind us of nature’s instability and power.

Shared Risk, Shared Beauty and “Black Swans”

• Inhabitants: Both landscapes have been home to humans for tens to hundreds of millennia. Forested hills and verdant peaks draw human settlers and animals alike. Mountain gorillas still roam the Virunga Mountains, despite poachers that once dropped their numbers below 600, while thousands of bears find refuge in Canada’s glaciated ranges.

• Lingering Danger: Yet danger lurks, in part from the dynamic geomorphology, in part from hard-to-fathom physics, biology, and currently from mistaken human activities.

  • Kivu’s live volcanoes date back 10 millennia. The last glacier vanished from Mount Karasimbi (near Lake Kivu) just decades ago.

  • Vancouver’s glacial impacts hark back to the ancient Ice Age but the tectonic risks remain, infrequent but relentless. Are we complacent about these risks and are there others?

  • One that has come to light is the potential of Lake Kivu to undergo a different form of eruption. This is a limnic eruption where the gigatons of accumulating gases are triggered to erupt in a one-day catastrophic event.

• Kivu’s Dark Threat: Scientists have studied Lake Kivu for almost a century, initially to see why no large fish existed there.
  • The answer was that no oxygen is found below 60 m or 200 feet depth. In a lake 486 m (1600 ft) deep, nearly 90% of the depth is anoxic.
  • Other gases are present, mainly carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen sulphide. It’s a toxic mix, unable to sustain aquatic life other than microbes that convert dead algae sludge into these gases. Those microbes have been active in the 28 C (83 F) depths for millennia.
  • The 80% CO2 content of the gas builds pressure as it accumulates, but the 20% methane content exerts five times the partial pressure.
  • Together, these gases’ partial pressure has reached 60% saturation. This means little to most people, but when the total gas pressure equals the hydraulic pressure then saturation is 100%.
  • At saturation, the gas can spontaneously trigger a limnic eruption of the lake’s total gas content. For Lake Kivu, that is a catastrophic incident, leading to serious climatic and humanitarian impacts.
  • While it could take 100 more years to reach saturation, a large volcanic spill or seismic rupture can pre-emptively trigger a limnic eruption.

What Could Go Wrong?

Both scenarios in distant geographies created cataclysmic seismic events that can again harm millions. Even today’s terrain is an imprint of the effects of catastrophic seismic events. One originates in Africa’s Western Rift hot spot, where two volcanoes have spewed trillions of tons of lava over millennia. A parallel threat can open up a new north-south chasm hundreds of kilometers long and kilometers wide every million years.

Today’s forested landscapes see occupation by people who migrated there, starting tens of thousands of years ago. The landscapes share similar levels of risk to people living in the natural splendour that also drew in water creatures, forest animals, and birds. Where bears found homes in glaciated mountains and lakes in Western Canada, mountain gorillas dominated the verdant volcanic peaks of the Western Rift Valley. The last glacier disappeared just decades ago on Equatorial Mount Karasimbi, while Vancouver’s many glaciated fjords are deep remnants of the Ice Age millennia ago. Do the lingering threats somehow leave either community complacent? Are troubled times not far beyond the horizon?

Murphy’s Law and Our Mission

We started with over a decade’s R&D, trying to look with fresh eyes at this sleeper of a problem. The governments just wanted to develop clean energy. It was needed to displace unaffordable, imported fossil fuels and it can help save the forests. But the discovery process, along with global experts, was disconcerting. Lake Kivu can be catastrophically dangerous. And extracting energy may be a pathway to disaster or success, depending on how it is done.

• Hydragas Energy: Our Canadian startup, based in Vancouver, tackles this enigma with novel and far more capable know-how. We have spent the proverbial 10,000 hours and over 60 Our mission: extracting more gases safely, at better quality, while de-risking an eruption of the lake—a catastrophe that can happen within a century.

• Impact Investment: Hydragas embodies innovation-led cleantech solving great problems. Spending two decades researching and innovating, developed a solution that leaps ahead of legacy methods. The disaster de-risking solution also enables 600% more energy output to the grid from a limited resource. We’re not just technical leaders; we’re navigating a tortuous course to preserve our planet’s fragile equilibrium. Lake Kivu’s story is ours to rewrite with science and engineering. And this creates the first of several, larger-scale opportunities to deploy the breakthrough technology.

In this tale of distant worlds, we strive to change course by steering nature away from disaster—one gigaton of impact at a time. 

How Hydragas Developed a Solution

Hydragas Energy is a Canadian company from Vancouver, British Columbia. Its origins began with people engaged in more traditional  Oil & Gas projects. From the time we were invited to see Lake Kivu and its potential 20 years ago, our work has transitioned to unlocking the mysterious Lake Kivu’s deep waters.

We are an innovation-led cleantech company, founded on breakthrough technology designed to offset the terrifying risk that Lake Kivu can and will erupt if we cannot change the course of nature’s tricks. We must extract methane gas from the water body’s depths before it decides to erupt at its own chosen time. This will happen within a century if we cannot change nature’s course. Hydragas has a powerful story to tell of impact investment potential into globally, innovation-led, cleantech development. Indeed, it is already the technical leader in the field. Its source is the world’s largest bio-digester, a freak of nature, a rift-valley lake in Africa as big as Lake Ontario.

Lake Kivu’s renewable gas inventory is over 12 tcf, with enough biomethane to power the region for 50 years. But recovering it takes a breakthrough in extraction technology.  Not producing its inventory leads to a catastrophe.   Within 100 years, the lake’s contents will one day erupt, ejecting 2-6 gigatons of carbon equivalent in a day. That needs to be prevented, not least because the toxic emissions can kill millions of people in just one day.

A first series of low-carbon, renewable projects is ready to be built in Rwanda, followed by the same in the DRC. These projects can prevent any carbon releases to the atmosphere. They do it with high investor returns on lower energy prices. 

Site Content

We invite you to read more detail on the complexities of the lake, and the solutions needed to avert potentially catastrophic outcomes. Most developers to date have taken an easy and very wrong path on Kivu’s development. They are aguably making the risk of disaster worse.