Key Sentence:
- BEFORE Covid-19 hit the planet like a massive global ice storm, the South African economy took a significant hit.
Mechanical engineering is a highly affected industry. We’ve seen the damage done to major civil engineering companies that have become some of the best in the world. The urgency of the situation has led some local engineering firms to look for other firms. One such company is Centurion’s Print Engineering, which operates in other African countries.
One project that I find interesting from a technological point of view is the methane energy project in Rwanda. This project extracts methane gas from a deep lake and then supplies it with an internal combustion engine that generates electricity. Lake Rwanda is Lake Kivu, which is almost ten times larger than Lake Baal.
This lake contains vast amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane and has 480 meters. The high water pressure makes the gases dissolved.
The carbon dioxide comes from two active volcanoes near the lake, Nyamuragira, and Nyiragongo. The volcano is one of the busiest in the world and pushes hot water with dissolved CO₂ to the lake’s bottom. An exciting science is keeping the water warm at the bottom of the lake.
Organic matter falling from the lake surface then interacts with microorganisms that produce methane from dissolved CO₂. But the enormous water pressure makes the methane dissolved in groundwater. So there is a large amount of methane, which is very profitable to extract and sufficient to run a suitable power plant.
The technical challenge is to get it out and produce productive electricity. Arin is involved here. A consortium of international companies is currently promoting methane. However, this is a dangerous job and must be done professionally and correctly. If something goes wrong, anything can collide at night.
Processes and instructions are prepared in Centurion and then sent to Rwanda for execution. They include; including safety and environmental management procedures. The industry knows that working safely and responsibly is the most cost-effective.
Apart from professional engineers, Arin’s team also includes assembly and welding testers. If not appropriately rotated, something large and valuable could fall, wasting time reconfiguring jobs, not to mention the cost of rebuilding a broken installation. The same goes for welding. Failure of the weld seam can result in the joint being welded again, but in the worst-case scenario, major damage resulting in death or major damage.