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Philip Morkel

Founder & CEO @ Hydragas Energy | Climate & Clean Energy Breakthrough Projects. About As Founder and CEO of Hydragas Energy, I am fundraising to construct a series of breakthrough, high-value renewable energy projects in Lake Kivu, East Africa. This project is centered in a geographic zone subject to historical, high-impact disruptions, caused by genocide, conflict, or natural disasters. The latter risk is a gas outburst that requires major climate intervention. This region’s five million residents face sudden death from an outburst of 400 billion cubic metres of toxic gas in a day. In 2025, with the region embroiled in conflict in Kivu Nord & Sud, with 10,000 casualties, now paused for peace negotiations. For 8 of 22 years involvement with Lake Kivu, we conducted R&D into this unique water body, for essential gas extraction methods. Our solutions, at TRL7 readiness, underwent design, pilot-testing, and stages of feasibility assessment. 5 years into this program, a 2007 conference of the parties included the DRC and Rwandan governments. I was co-opted onto a six-person Expert Advisory Group, tasked with developing the regulatory basis for gas extraction, a process completed in 3 years. We delivered “The Management Prescriptions for Lake Kivu Development (2010)”, which set out design compliance requirements for gas extraction operations. To date, no compliant solutions are in use, but two were permitted to build demo-scale facilities to test their non-compliant extraction designs. These are now due for detailed assessment of performance against the rules in 2025. Rwanda’s environmental agency, REMA, has requested me to lead an investigation into the operational data and monitoring outcomes. We are to report on test results, along with projections for any alternate designs, such as ours. My mission is to deploy novel process technology and designs to extract renewable gases from Lake Kivu, to aavert a limnic eruption and to provide cheaper, cleaner energy regionally. We developed a cleantech game-changer with our team, using two SA-based engineering EPCMs, designing our extraction modules, operating platform, pipeline and power plant that deliver 7x the energy output and 20x the value of alternatives. Used over the full lake, it delivers combined energy sales and carbon credits earnings potential of $100s of billions, >100x the next best. Development plans expand the scale of at risk water bodies to deploy reconfigured technology to capture Arctic methane seeps, methane and H2S from the Black Sea, and later oceanic methane hydrates, the largest GHG source in the sea. They are major threats of vast emissions and climate threat.