Hot Seat by Jeff Immelt

Author:Jeff Immelt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7 Leaders Compete Around the World

My breakfast companions were youngsters—I think neither had yet hit thirty. Both born in West Africa, the two men were GE’s only executives in Ghana. It was early 2010, and as we took our seats at a Formica four-top at GE’s de facto headquarters at the one-star Holiday Inn at the Accra Airport, I could feel their enthusiasm before they started speaking.

What, they asked, if GE helped Ghana to build an integrated gas-to-power plant? At that time, the country had a population of about 25 million, but only about 2,000 megawatts of power (enough to fuel fewer than 2 million homes). Ghana had just discovered oil and gas reserves in its offshore waters, and it was rich with minerals and agricultural products. It wanted to industrialize, to become modern, but without a dependable power source—blackouts were all too common—there was no way it could. As my colleagues’ words tumbled out with increasing speed, they wanted me to know: they had a plan!

It would be an ambitious project: first, liquefied natural gas (or LNG) would have to be brought onshore; we’d have to build a regasification plant (to turn liquid into gas), and then we’d have to construct the power plant, too, including transmission lines to deliver electricity to populated areas and industrial clusters. Not only would GE have to develop the project, but probably finance it as well. But the difference it would make, they said! All they needed was a little help.

“Look,” they told me, “the government agrees we need a new plant, and they’re willing to give us an off-take agreement”—basically a promise to buy power once the plant was up and running. Shell Oil was willing to invest, they continued. A global investment fund wanted to buy in. The project, they explained, would require an ecosystem of more than ten companies working together. “Both the gas turbines would be GE technology. Can you help make this dream a reality?”

I loved their dedication, and I said I’d do what I could. Before I left Ghana, we signed a memo of understanding with the government to begin something we called Ghana 1000, which would seek to expand the country’s existing power supply by 50 percent. And yet I knew this was going to be an uphill climb. GE at that time was not organized to support this kind of complicated local project. Our people who had the required expertise to pull it off were 2,500 miles away, in the United States. I worried that, without intending to, our US-based bureaucracy would, at best, stymie Ghana 1000 and, at worst, kill it.

Not long after that, I was in Australia, where—thanks to China’s building boom—investors were pouring big dollars into mining and oil and gas. Australia had iron ore, coal, and LNG in abundance. But the country was struggling to get it out of the ground fast enough and to move it where it needed to go. I’ll never forget Steve Sargent, the Aussie who

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