Navigating the energy transition and industrial decarbonisation: Ghana's latest bid to develop an integrated bauxite-to-aluminium industry

Abstract

Research on how countries are positioning and ‘greening’ their heavy industries in response to the ‘global energy transition’ has focused on higher-income countries with established heavy industries, rather than lower-income countries with fledgling industries and aspirations to continue expanding them. Our paper responds to this lacuna by examining Ghana's current plans for, and challenges with, developing an integrated bauxite-to-aluminium industry. Adopting a multiscalar political economy approach, and drawing on research methods including documentary analysis and key informant interviews, we argue that Ghana's challenges stem significantly from the mode of its insertion – or subordination – within the global economy. Like other late-developing countries in the global economic periphery, Ghana is struggling to access the latest ‘green’ technologies or devise a strategy for powering its bauxite-to-aluminium industry because of uncertainties in the ‘green’ taxonomies of core economies in the Global North. Nationally, meanwhile, tentative plans to feed Ghana's aluminium industry with relatively ‘green’ hydropower (also Ghana's cheapest electricity source) are provoking pushback because of the trade-offs involved, while other contestations are emerging around expanding bauxite mining into forest reserves. Collectively, these multiscalar challenges may frustrate Ghana's ambitions once more, even though a bauxite-to-aluminium industry could generate significant economic benefits. Ghana's government can overcome some of these issues by consulting meaningfully with domestic stakeholders around the design of an integrated bauxite-to-aluminium industry. However, at an international level, peripheral economies like Ghana need clarity about how particular energy technologies will be classified by core economies moving forwards, and for climate financing and (green) technology transfer pledges to be honoured.