Christian Dadzie ’25 MEM: Engineering a Cleaner Future

Before attending the Yale School of the Environment, Christian Dadzie ’25 MEM worked as an operations engineer in Ghana’s oil and gas sector, supporting project readiness for offshore field development.  

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Although energy production is a major source of revenue in Ghana — with petroleum revenue reaching US$1.35 billion in 2024 — energy access remains a challenge in the country. In the capital city of Accra, where Dadzie grew up, residents frequently would be alerted to upcoming power outages, and solving the nations’ energy issues became his focus. While studying petroleum engineering at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Dadzie also became interested in waste management. For a class on community solutions, he investigated a method to convert solid waste from power production to energy use in bioreactor landfills, which helps mitigate methane gas emissions and convert it to biomass.

“That was the beginning of my interest in sustainability,” Dadzie recalled.

His work as an operations engineer for Aker Energy led him to consider how he could use his experience to engage the private sector in alternative energy.

“I was interested in the interplay between the need for economic development versus our dependence on fossil fuels,” Dadzie said. “We need to transition to cleaner fuels, and I thought, about how I could contribute to that balance.”

In 2023, his growing interest in sustainability and accelerating Ghana’s energy transition inspired him to apply to the then newly launched Three Cairns Scholars program at YSE as a member of its inaugural cohort. The range of knowledge he has acquired in  courses encompassing everything from policy to economics to data management has altered his approach to tackling environmental challenges, he noted.

“Christian did an innovative term project that combined ideas of clean cooking with circular economy for my course, Energy and Development. He analyzed the potential to use municipal waste to generate methane that could then be circulated in the village as cooking fuel,” said Narasimha Rao, professor of energy systems.

Dadzie also worked on several energy-related projects at YSE, including an independent study on emerging battery energy storage technologies and markets in New England and New York through the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale (CBEY) and Avangrid, and he was part of a team that assessed whether Connecticut state agencies were on track to meet net zero goals.

As co-leader of the Energy Student Interest Group, Dadzie assisted CBEY in the planning of its annual Clean Energy Conference.

“Christian lifts the spirits of those around him through his kindness, joyfulness, and gratitude. In his work with the YSE Energy Learning Community and the Yale Clean Energy Conference, he shined as a collaborative leader always willing to go the extra mile for a teammate, a guest, or a colleague,” said CBEY clean energy coordinator Julia Nojeim ’21 MEM.

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This summer, Dadzie will be working at BrandSafeway through an internship with the Environmental Defense Fund. He will develop recommendations to reduce fuel use, the largest contributor to the company’s Scope 1 emissions.

He is specifically interested in pursuing data-driven solutions to the energy transition, having sharpened his skills at YSE in using Python and GIS.

“I would love to use data to explore trends in energy infrastructure and access and use those insights to contribute to policy decision-making,” Dadzie said.

However, data and technology alone are not going to facilitate the transition, he noted.  

“One thing I've really learned here, and I think has been a core message from my studies, is that technical engineering solutions are good, but you cannot isolate them from the context in which you implement them,” Dadzie said. “To be able to really develop context-specific solutions, you need to make sure that you team up with people with the experience and the expertise in various sectors and from diverse perspectives.”