Accelerating green hydrogen deployment where it is most needed to solve the climate crisis, increase energy security and improve job and other socioeconomic opportunities
Really important piece of work here from Natural Resource Governance Institute. As they say, contract transparency is becoming the norm when a company signs a deal with a government in the extractive sector, so surely there is even more of a need for transparency when the agreement is between states. A great service to have a repository for these agreements and some important pointers for what the agreements should contain, including on governance and including civil society. Minerals for the energy transition - for renewables, electricity/hydrogen transmission and electrolysers for green hydrogen - are indeed 'critical' and we need robust governance and transparency around state-state agreements (in addition to state-investor agreements) Gavin Hayman Maria Cristina Mundin Ernst Müller Mark Robinson Eddie Rich Bruce Douglas Sonia Dunlop
There's been lots of talk (some would say hype) around mineral security partnerships bringing together consumer and producer governments around mineral supply (with a focus on minerals important for the global energy transition), including at this week's #MiningIndaba. But as my Natural Resource Governance Institute colleagues Susannah Fitzgerald, Phesheya Nxumalo and Thomas Scurfield set out in this timely piece, to date many of these have been "Deals without Details." https://lnkd.in/eDGTXnjS Given their potential economic and geopolitical significance, greater scrutiny around these deals is important. NRGI has taken a first step by including the publicly available official documentation related to these new state-state mining partnerships on ResourceContracts - https://lnkd.in/e5XGRYJY (a repository of publicly available oil, gas, and mining contracts and associated documents). But lots of work remains, both to increase transparency (no public documentation available on 22 of the 35 identified partnerships) and to analyze and accompany these partnerships as they move to the next steps of details being developed and negotiated. If these partnerships are to live up to their billing for low and middle income mineral producing countries, a wide range of stakeholders will need to be keeping an eye on how they move forward.
I strongly agree. Important that the renewable energy industry does not repeat the same mistakes of its fossil fuel ancestors and that it works to build trust with local communities from the outset!