Energy and Water Management
INTRODUCTION
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) has nearly unparalleled electricity impoverishment, that must be reversed. In 2019, the electricity consumption in Afghanistan was 158 KWh (kilowatt hours) per capita, per year, which ranked Afghanistan below 175 other countries on Earth. For comparison, the United States’ electricity consumption is 11,757 KWh per person, per year, and that of France is 6,702 KWh per person, per year. Electricity consumption on a per capita basis, is not a concept of how much electricity an individual consumes in his or her house. Rather, it constitutes the totality of electricity that a society consumes – for its industrial factories, for residential, for train systems, irrigation systems, commercial enterprises – divided by the number of people living in a country. It is, in part, an indicator of power: how much electric power does a society have to command to carry out its mission of progress and development, as a whole, expressed on a per capita basis. It is also a measure of standard of living. Afghanistan’s measure is insignificant. Afghanistan’s installed electricity generating capacity – its capacity to produce electricity – is 600 MW, which is minuscule. It is the capacity of a single nuclear or coal plant, located in the West or in China.
After the last 40 years of war, and 20 years of forced underdevelopment under Anglo-American- NATO occupation, Afghanistan, already poor, was, it appears, benumbed, in its development. The September 1, 2020 ToloNews, an Afghan media channel, in an article titled, “Afghanistan Annually Pays $280M for Imported Power,” reports “despite the huge expense of imported power [$280 Million,] only 35 percent of Afghans have access to electricity, government figures show.” The article continues that “According to [Afghanistan’s] Chamber of Industry and Mines, the country’s industries are also faced with a lack of electricity, which is one of the biggest challenges.”
A January 15, 2010 report, released by the U.S.-controlled Office of the Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), titled, “Afghanistan Energy Supply Has Increased, But an Updated Master Plan Is Needed and Delays and Sustainability Concerns Remain,” reported:“As of September 2009, the Afghan Energy Information Center estimates that approximately 15 percent of households in urban centers had access to electric power, whereas only 6 percent of rural households had access to electricity. Afghans rely primarily on electricity produced by costly diesel generators as opposed to lower cost options such as imported power or natural gas, hydro, solar,” etc.
Thus, it was known in 2009, that only 15 % of urban households, and 6 % of rural households had access to electricity. Today, many people might have access to “some form” of electricity for a couple of hours (thanks to their own diesel-fired electric generators), but access to the grid itself is said to service only 35 % of households.
What transpired over the ensuing decade is that transmission lines were built and connected to bordering countries, with financing, to a significant extent, from the Asian Development Bank to transmit electricity into Afghanistan. Some of that has been helpful, in a narrow way. But energy generating facilities inside Afghanistan were not built, to any important extent. That made Afghanistan completely import-dependent. Whatever the nominal excuse for that decision, its effects are felt to this day.
A NEW, TOP-DOWN PERSPECTIVE
Today we must build that ‘master plan, which the above-cited 2010 report of the US SIGAR Office stated was “needed,” but apparently was never put together, and certainly never implemented.
Electricity is not simply a commodity, with an associated market price. It is the spearhead for development. For millennia, society has existed and developed through the increase of energyflux density. From the experimental work of the American Benjamin Franklin, through the work on current by the French scientist Andre-Marie Ampere, to the work on electricity and magnetic fields by German physicists Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber, and the harnessing of electricity generation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Werner von Siemens, Thomas A Edison, and Nikola Tesla, the production of electricity has advanced economies to higher platforms.
This opens the window for industry to graduate from hand- or belt-powered machine operation to electric-power; to the construction of electrified high-speed rail and/or magnetic levitation systems; to the use of super-conductivity; to employment of a wide variety of medical and hospital devices (CT scans, MRIs) as well as refrigeration of serums; to opening a society to a new manifold of scientific discoveries and their applications. Afghanistan can now enter this world. This requires a new top-down perspective.
AFGHANISTAN 2050
As a starting point, we present here the hypothetical scenario where Afghanistan would reach the standard level of electricity consumption, and a corresponding level of electricity production, of France, over one generation, of approximately 25-30 years, that is, by 2050. With its level of electricity consumption of 6,702 KWh per capita, per year, France is a worthy standard. It’s roughly the same as the electricity consumption per person of other ‘industrial’ nations, such as Germany (6, 306 KWh), Czechia (5,991 KWh), the Netherlands (6,386 KWh), and Russia (6,685 KWh), but it is below that of Japan (7,150 KWh), South Korea (10,192 KWh), and the United States (11,757 KWh).
Were Afghanistan to commit to the objectives that the Schiller Institute is promoting for rail, water development, a modern health and hospital system, expanding high-technology industrialization, and so forth, a level of electricity consumption of 6,702 KWh per person, per year, will service it well? Should it choose to go beyond that level, after 15 to 25 years that would be excellent?
France has a decent electricity profile: 69 % of its electricity consumption is produced by nuclear plants; 11% is produced by hydro plants; and 8% by natural gas and coal plants. Only 12 % of France’s electricity comes from low energy-flux density renewable-interruptibles (wind and solar).
When the Schiller Plan is put into operation, electricity consumption of all of Afghanistan would rise from 6.4 Terawatt hours (6.4 trillion watt hours) in the year 2021, to 227.8 Terawatt hours within a generation, in 2050.
First, that electricity must be produced. Based on the technological capability of the selected electricity-generating power source, and as well, its suitability to Afghanistan, and the type of resources Afghanistan has, the Schiller Institute projects Afghanistan’s electricity to be produced in 2050 on the following distribution basis: 27% produced by nuclear power; 25% by coal; 25% by natural gas; and 23% by hydro power.
Of course, seen from where the country stands today, and without foreign help and backing, this seems a very unlikely scenario but examining such a scenario allows us to put less ambitious plans in the right perspective.
With our scenario, things look as follows (see graphic above). Starting from where what we want to reach, we now can determine how many power generation plants should be built, if possible by Afghanistan itself, but eventually by friendly countries such as China, Russia, Argentina or France, to reach this level of installed electricity generating capacity.
Take the nuclear sector, which as the above table shows, will require an installed electricity generating capacity of some 9,000 megawatts.
This could be produced by a range of nuclear reactors with capacities ranging between 250 MW (Small Nuclear Reactors – SMRs) adapted to kick-start rural electrification in smaller cities, and 1,000 MW for large urban areas such as Kabul where the water of the river can be used as a coolant.
Taking the required 9,000 MW of installed capacity, it would seem, based on meeting Afghanistan’s present and future economic configuration, the growth of the Afghan economy would be optimized, if four 1,000 MW nuclear plants; six mid-sized 500 MW nuclear plants; and twelve 250 MW small modular reactor nuclear plants were to be built. That’s a total of 20 nuclear plants, with an installed capacity to produce electricity of 9,000 MW. The urban and industrial centers would be anchored by the 1,000 MW nuclear plants, the rural and remote portions of Afghanistan would be anchored by the 250 MW plants, of course heavily dependent on a far more perfect water management system, indispensable for cooling them.
The number of plants recommended is not fixed, it could be more or fewer, and a different distribution of wattage among them. However, what is important is that, in consultation with nuclear and civil engineers, all the basic considerations must be worked out. They include:
determining what are the locations for siting the first plants (or least the first group); what ground preparation must be done— leveling, grading, and earth quakeproofing; which country’s design is to be utilized—that of Russia, China, or France, etc.; what will be the transmission line routes, and the configuration of the whole power grid; how will the power plants integrate with other utilities and resources in the region, etc..
Leap-frogging ahead, Afghanistan could opt directly for the construction of a couple Generation IV high temperature reactors (HTR), which are the most advanced types, such as the Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor and/or a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), which may be ready for commercial deployment much faster than expected, and would demonstrate features extremely useful in mining activities.
After all, Afghanistan was a founding member of the International Atomic Agency (IAE) and has some history to build on. Most importantly, besides technology transfers, there needs to be a focus on education of Afghan youth and college-aged students in nuclear, electrical, and related engineering to build a cadre force for the nuclear industry. This will be discussed below.
A point on why nuclear was chosen to have 35% of the installed electricity capacity for Afghanistan, the highest amount, even though it does not have a single watt of such right now. While combustion of coal has an energy density of 2.7 x 10^4 j/g (joules per gram of fuel), and the combustion of natural gas has an energy density of the about the same order of magnitude, nuclear power has an energy density of 3.7 x 10^9 j/g, which is five orders of magnitude greater.
Second, for any power generating station, there is a measure called the “capacity factor.” This is the ratio of the power that a power plant actually produces during the period it is actually in operation, relative to the power it could have produced if it ran at a 100 percent-rated capacity 24/7, 365 days a year. A capacity factor of 100% means a generating unit is operating all of the time, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Nuclear’s capacity factor, the highest of all fuel sources, is between 90 and 92.7%. Once a nuclear plant is commissioned and put into operation, it only needs interruption for refueling, approximately once every 18 months. The capacity factor for other fuel sources is much less: natural gas is 54.5%; coal, above 60% (except when its production is suppressed to make it possible to produce solar and wind); and hydroelectric is 45-50%, on average, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Hydro can run as low as 20% when there is drought, to as high as 85%.
Thus, nuclear power has a higher energy density and capacity factor than other fuel sources. Its conversion efficiency, another measure, is being improved in new Generation IV designs.
Of course, again, nuclear power plants, for their cooling, consume a good deal of water daily, and in landlocked Afghanistan, they would be situated on rivers or large streams. In that sense, water management and hydro-power reveal themselves to be the key infrastructural platform to access nuclear power.
OTHER ENERGY SOURCES
Now look at the promise of various fuel source sectors to produce electricity, in combination with nuclear, and the means by which electricity generating capacity in Afghanistan was degraded.
Natural Gas
Afghanistan has significant, largely unexplored gas reserves that could be used. It also has in operation a singular, fascinating mobile-unit method for producing gas-fired electricity. The Munich, Germany-based Siemens Corporation devised the trailer-mounted SGT-A45 mobile unit, which is the core basis for a complete gas-fired plant. The way it works is that it all starts in a Siemens factory. Siemens builds a gas turbine trailer; it also builds an A/C generator trailer, and thirdly a power control module trailer—it is called a trailer because all three units are mounted on separate flat-bed trucks. The three units are taken and loaded onto large transport planes, which are flown to another country, where they are off-loaded, and trucked to a destination. Siemens says it has a “plug and play“ installation: at the destination, two of the units plug into each other, and various other necessary pieces of equipment are plugged into these units.
We are attaching a 1 minute 45 second video about this, which is very helpful to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4H_j-DoSaY
We are also attaching a picture of the Siemens designed SGT-A45 gas turbine.
The turbine (picture) is of an advanced aeroderivative design and produces up to 41 Megawatts of power (at 50 Hertz).
The Bayat Energy and Bayat Power Group bought a group of these Siemens units, and built a power plant, using them, in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, which is a town in Jowzjan Province in northern Afghanistan, along the banks of the Safid River. The Sheberghan plant, comprised of a few turbines, has a rated capacity of 200 MW, and was commissioned in 2019. This makes it the largest power plant in Afghanistan, although, it is not very big. But it is very promising.
The Bayat Power Group is part of the larger Bayat Group, founded in 2002 by Dr. Ehsanollah Bayat, and has companies for wireless and internet services, media, and energy. The Bayat Group’s home page says it employs 10,000 Afghanis directly, making it Afghanistan’s largest company employer. Dr. Ehsanollah “Ehsan” Bayat, is an Afghan-American entrepreneur, born in Kabul, educated at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, who spent some time living in Pakistan.
A quick word on Siemens. Siemens operates approximately 285 manufacturing plants around the world, and operates in 190 countries. It built all 17 of Germany’s nuclear power plants, and built the Transrapid maglev project in a joint venture with Thyssen-Krupp. It has extremely valuable engineering and manufacturing abilities. The point is, however, that it is one of several competent design firms for power generation, in many countries.
General Electric manufactures an excellent high-efficiency combined-cycle power plant, called the 9HA. GE claims that its gas-fired plant has a 62% efficiency conversion, which is extraordinarily high.
( For documentation, see video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eiBMqVuPA)
There are other countries that make excellent gas-fired plants. In terms of abetting Afghanistan’s development drive, the question is a matter of how quickly can gas-fired electricity power plants be constructed. Dave Flickinger, president of Kiewit Power Group, told the September 1, 2015 Power magazine, “The majority of [;gas-fired] power plant projects today are… often being engineered, procured, constructed, and commissioned in as little as 28 to 30 months.” This presumes wellprepared and well-chosen sites. It may take a few months longer in Afghanistan, so that the combined time for preparation, construction, etc. could be 2.5 to 3 years. Possibly, the Siemens’ AGT-A45 plant, including time to manufacture the unit, could be done more quickly.
Of the four major modes of electricity generation—nuclear, natural gas, coal, and hydro—the gas electricity-generating station can be built the most rapidly. For reference: in China, nuclear power electricity-generating plant construction takes five years; coal takes about four to six years; and hydro-electric, unless one is constructing considerably small units, takes four to seven years, according to authorities in the field.
An important consideration in Afghanistan about the rate at which different modes of electricitygeneration can be built, and how gas-fired power recommends itself in the short-term, is that the Ibn Sina approach to developing a nation puts people’s health and well being in the forefront, and for that, the spearhead is the construction of modern health and hospital systems. It is fortunate that Afghanistan has the gas resources. Public health—sanitation, good nutrition and all, and modern medical systems require significant volumes of electricity.
Therefore, these considerations call for building gas-powered electricity stations in Afghanistan initially, to get the Ibn Sina development program going, while at the same time, we build nuclear, coal, and hydro-power stations, as each of these modes possesses its own beneficial quality, though they may take a little bit longer to construct. We would attempt to build all of them on an emergency basis, lowering construction time by perhaps an additional 6 to 12 months.
Afghanistan is endowed with considerable natural gas reserves, were they to be drawn upon. A September 7, 2012 Reuter’s article entitled, “Exxon Explores ‘Very Promising’ Oil and Gas Fields in Afghanistan,” reported that Afghanistan “has an estimated 59 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas reserves, about half the proven reserves in neighboring Iraq.” A BP oil company spokesman commented in the Reuters article, that Exxon would not explore for natural gas in Afghanistan, which it was doing at that time, “unless the areas are very promising.” But Afghanistan only produces a mere 6,675 million cubic feet of natural gas per year, which could be greatly improved upon. The Schiller Institute perspective calls for an immense infusion of technology, advanced equipment, and skilled manpower, to increase gas production 25-fold. Gas resources, besides going for power, are important for fertilizer production, industrial processes and products, and fuel uses as well.
Coal Afghanistan’s coal resources are significant, and have received much attention but little action. A May 31, 2021 article in Arab News titled, “Chinese Firms Set to Invest In Afghan Energy Sector,” reports that, “A group of Chinese firms was poised to pump $400 million into a coal-fired electricity generation station project in Afghanistan, officials revealed on Monday [May 31, 2021]. “The investment plans are being seen as the latest sign of growing economic engagement by Chinese entrepreneurs in the mineral-rich country. “The group involved in a number of private businesses in Afghanistan, shared its spending ambitions during a meeting with President Ghani” on May 29, 2021.
Sangar Niazi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s power department told the Arab News, that,”Using coal [in Afghanistan] for producing electricity is also cheaper than importing hydroelectric power from the region. Based on its past practice, we can be reasonably sure that whatever plant China were to build in Afghanistan would not be an old-fashioned conventional coal plant, but supercritical (SC) or ultra-supercritical (USC) coal power plant. Nearly every new coal plant that China has built for the last 7-8 years has been a SC or an USC plant. The same is roughly true for Russia and India. The USC plants operate at a thermal efficiency of 44 to 47%, as compared to 34% for conventional coal plants. They are known as ‘clean coal’ plants, and their process of production eliminates the vast majority of emission of nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, ash, etc.
normally associated with coal power production. (See “Clean Coal Can Electrify the World,” by Richard Freeman, August 6, 2021 EIR).
The Schiller Institute proposed plan calls for Afghanistan to construct 12,974 MW of installed coalfired electricity generation capacity, within 25 to 30 years, which would enable it to produce 25% of Afghanistan’s electricity consumption; see table above. This could be worked out in a number of different ways, but would call for a mix of mostly 400 and 600 MW coal-fired power plants (One intelligent plan to meet the nation’s needs could be to construct perhaps ten 400 MW capacity coalfired plants; twelve 600 MW plants; two 1,000 MW plants, which would total 13,200 MW installed capacity. The mix and timing are to be worked out by teams of engineers, manufacturers, construction interests, and others, based on Afghanistan’s national mission.
A 2005 U.S. Geological Survey study, titled, “Assessing the Coal Resources of Afghanistan,” reported that, “Afghanistan has moderate to potentially abundant coal resources”. Much of the coal was found to be “relatively deep or currently inaccessible,” but that was because there was limited attempts to recover that coal using even moderately superior technology. A study by www.Worldometers.com found that in 2016 Afghanistan had proven coal reserves of 72.6 million tons.
As with natural gas, Afghanistan has the coal reserves to produce abundant electricity. Get Afghanistan the coal mining equipment, and the coal-fired electricity plants, and it can become abundantly self-sufficient in electricity.
Hydropower
The Schiller Institute projects the need to reach a level of 14,324 MW potential of electricity generation from the extraordinary resource of hydro-power, within a generation. The hydro-power dam installations could range from the size of 1,400 MW to some in the 200 to 500 MW range. Most of Afghanistan’s existing dams are small, with the largest today being the Naghlu Dam on the Kabul River in the Surobi District of Kabul Province, with 100 MW installed capacity.
A list of identified new, possible hydro-electric dams that could be built in Afghanistan, and their MW installed capacity shows that the possible new installed capacity would equal 7,513.5 MW. The Schiller Institute plan of 14,324 MW installed capacity, would roughly double the list, but could expand as new potentials, including Micro Hydro Power Projects (MHP) be studied and validated.
Nuclear
The construction of nuclear electricity power plants in Afghanistan, discussed above, should result in an overall installed generating capacity of 9,069 MW. They will play a powerful role in the modern, nuclear-age economy. Afghanistan has several potential partners to work with on the construction drive, to bring about this transformation. China, France, Canada and Japan all design and construct high performance nuclear power plants. Russia, whose state atomic energy corporation is Rosatom, is the largest exporter of nuclear power plants in the world.
THE DEADLY TRAP OF “RENEWABLE” ENERGY
In the name of the fight against “climate change” it has become nearly mandatory to promote wind and solar technologies. Scientifically speaking, it is intellectually dishonest to compare installed capacity of wind and solar (which have a low energy density and are very intermittent), with that of hydro-power (far less intermittent). High tech wind mills in France, for example, deliver only 25.7 % of their installed capacity! So this means that when the Asian Development Bank says that Afghanistan has a 67,000 MW wind potential, that means you will get only one quarter out of that or 16,700 MW, i.e. far less than the 23,000 MW you would get with hydro-power, and of course contributing nothing for water management and flood regulation.
The Western hysteria to convince the entire planet to ban fossil fuels, abandon nuclear and promote solar and wind power, is clearly a NATO geopolitical scheme to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the rest of them down,” as a modern version of NATO’s former Secretary General Lord Ismay would phrase it.
TRAINING
A critical factor in lifting up the electricity and power platform of Afghanistan, is the education of an echelon of nuclear engineers, nuclear technicians, power plant operators, and so forth. Some of this training will begin and occur with several years of intensive courses abroad.
Russia runs the MEPhi National Research Nuclear University, which specializes in training nuclear industry specialists. The university reports, for example, that at the present time it has 1,500 international students, including from Kazakhstan, Turkey, Jordan, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. They learn the Russian language, and learn such courses as Nuclear Physics and Technology, and Nuclear Power Plants: Design, Operation, and Engineering. Russia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University also teaches a nuclear curriculum to international students from Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, India, Tanzania, and so forth. China has the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which offers a Master’s Degree in
Nuclear Science and Technology for international students. Universities in the U.S., France, and Japan also offer such courses At the same time, small experimental research reactors (often 10 MW) are to be constructed at centers in cities such as Kabul or Herat. Such reactors produce radio isotopes for medical, agricultural, and industrial use, and they are sometimes called isotope reactors. They can be optimized for beam-line experiments, where one can look at the path of accelerated particles, and so on.
Though small, they are real reactors, with a nuclear core, and a cooling system, which can be studied. There will be an accelerated thrust to have courses on advanced nuclear physics taught at universities in Afghanistan.
The final goal is to produce a core of scientists, initially maybe four or five dozen, but ultimately numbering in the thousands, who will be the nuclear scientists who will direct the nuclear plants, and design reactors, and make breakthroughs in Afghanistan’s own indigenous nuclear program. These scientists will contribute to the world.
The main aim is to inject a jolt of electricity into the Afghanistan society, on a crash basis, so that in the first three years, some of the most immediate life-saving sectors of the economy, will be supplied with energy.
During the first seven-to-ten years, some of the major industrial, infrastructural, and social services will be powered into existence. By 2050, Afghanistan will take a leap, and be a modern economy.