Afghanistan has one of the world's highest rates of childhood lead exposure, which causes permanent brain damage. Nearly all children here have significant lead poisoning. Researchers in the US have found the source of the lead. But nobody has told the Afghan public. Thread.

But the TAPI concept, which is that power plants should be built locally to burn imported gas, isn't realistic under current circumstances. If there's going to be large-scale investment to supply Afghanistan and Pakistan with electricity, it has to be done another way. [end].

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Afghanistan bears almost no responsibility for the broader problem of climate change, and it badly needs more electricity for basic humanitarian reasons. Building gas-fired power plants to meet those needs is justified, even if it contributes to global warming to a minor extent.

Even if the Taliban resolve their differences with the West over human rights issues, which hardly seems likely in the near future, donor-supported fossil fuel projects are politically toxic nowadays. That's somewhat unfair, because natural gas is relatively climate-friendly.

So it's hard to see how a gas pipeline spanning four countries might ever attract capital on a commercial basis. TAPI was always expected to rely on concessional finance from the ADB and other multilateral lenders. But in the current international environment, that's unlikely.

If they sell power to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India over high-voltage cables, there's no danger of their plants being expropriated or attacked. The only infrastructure they'd need to build in high-risk areas (yes, that means Pakistan too) would be for the transmission itself.

And any investment in Afghanistan under the IEA willhave to meet a very high hurdle rate. Building power plants in Turkmenistan, on the other hand, isn't all that risky. The country's government can easily afford it, and in fact they have surplus generating capacity already.

It's understandable that the Taliban want to see power plants built in Afghanistan to use Turkmenistan's natural gas. They'd be glad to see large-scale investment of any kind. But when investors make decisions about project finance, they need to calculate the political risk.

When you pipe gas across international borders, the combined-cycle power plants that use it need to be built in the countries that use the power. If new technology allows you to export electricity itself, there's no need for that. The plants can be built right at the gasfields.

The progress China has made in this area should bring down costs dramatically in the future, as it has for solar panels and lithium-ion batteries. There's also another consideration that makes the TAPI pipeline less attractive than an ultra-high-voltage power line may become.

Turkmenistan's energy resource is natural gas, not coal or renewables. Moving the gas itself by pipeline is an established technology, and it's currently cheaper than ultra-high-voltage power transmission. But new technologies are always more expensive, because they're new.

Most of China's coal is in the north. Major wind, solar and hydropower resources are mainly in the west. But the population is largely in the coastal south and east. So ideally, you generate power where the energy is (carbon-free, ideally) and send it where it's needed by wire.

This is a survey of China's recent progress in building ultra-high-voltage transmission lines, which can carry power across long distances with very little loss from electrical resistance:. China faces a problem much like that of South and Central Asia.

People are probably tired of seeing me tweet that the TAPI pipeline, intended to deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to India via Afghanistan, is never going to be built. The BBC has a good article today giving one reason why it probably won't happen. Thread.

With Braidi now holding a formal role at the Fund, we can be a little more confident that we know what's going on. The real problem, though, is that nothing seems to be going on. The money is still just sitting there, and it seems unlikely that will change any time soon. [end].

There must also have been a subsequent meeting at which Braidi's own appointment was confirmed, so we can look forward to hearing about that too. It's been surprising to see this level of carelessness in managing an entity with nearly four billion dollars in Afghan state assets.

So we can expect (or at least hope) that the minutes of the Board's 28 June meeting will be posted soon, with Braidi taking responsibility for their contents. That was the last meeting Dall'Olio attended. It's been more than four months now, and all we have is a press statement.

And if there's anything wrong with the minutes of the meetings at which Dall'Olio was "secretary", he's probably not on the hook either. But Guillaume Braidi is. Going forward I assume his signature will appear on the posted minutes, which have always been unsigned until now.

The "secretary" at that meeting was identified as Caitlin Behles, a lawyer for the US Treasury Department. But since she wasn't formally appointed 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘪𝘭, I don't think she can be held legally responsible for misrepresenting what took place.

That meeting took place on 16 February 2023, when the Fund's trustees tidied up their botched attempt to appoint Andy Baukol to the Board. But as I wrote in this rather tedious thread from July 2023, the minutes didn't acknowledge what actually happened:.

I don't think Andrea Dall'Olio was ever formally appointed to that position. The Fund's website described him as its "executive secretary" but the Commercial Registry never did. That's fortunate, because the Fund appears to have falsified the minutes of its second board meeting.