Toby Rice made his fortune unlocking a gusher of natural gas in Appalachia. He has a bold new ambition: bringing energy to millions of people in impoverished nations.
Rice, the chief executive officer of EQT, one of the largest natural-gas producers in the U.S., is a co-founder of Energy Corps, a nonprofit that aims to help developing nations such as Ghana, Zambia and Burundi build out their energy infrastructure and prosper.
Unlike other philanthropic initiatives that emphasize renewables to energize impoverished societies, Energy Corps sees a role for a broader spectrum of solutions—from fossil fuels to solar panels and nuclear plants. Notably, this approach has been endorsed by the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the richest and oldest foundations in the U.S., in the form of a $200,000 grant.
Toby and Aileen Rice have personally contributed $3 million to Energy Corps and plan to boost their giving over time. The initiative hopes to raise $10 million this year from energy companies, family offices and private individuals.
From his perch at Pittsburgh-based EQT, a company with market capitalization of $36 billion, Toby Rice has preached the benefits of selling more American natural gas across the globe to reduce emissions and strengthen the security of the U.S. and its allies. Now he is wading into a debate: Should impoverished societies be encouraged to rely on polluting fossil fuels to improve their fortunes, or leapfrog to intermittent renewables?
In an interview, Rice said developing nations have benefited little from the trillions of dollars spent to combat climate change. Building energy access in a pragmatic way would boost prosperity and protect those nations from the effects of global warming, he said.
“We’re deploying renewables where it makes sense; we’re doing hydrocarbon solutions where it makes sense,” he said. “It’s going to be an all-of-the-above approach.”
Rice’s comments echo a view in the U.S. that the pursuit of net-zero goals has come at the expense of addressing global poverty. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said climate change isn’t as pressing an issue as improving lives globally. The billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates wrote in a recent memo that climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else but that the biggest problems they face are poverty and disease.
“Right now in climate we have these two extremes: ‘It’s nothing, ignore it,’ and ‘It’s the end of the Earth and more important than everything else.’ And both of those are just wrong,” Gates said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year.
Some climate advocates have said the fossil-fuel industry is fostering a dependence on hydrocarbons that will hurt poor nations. The World Bank estimates that unabated climate change might push an additional 132 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.
Oil-and-gas executives have long said their products enable modern civilization. In recent years, they have focused more attention on the lack of access to modern energy services and products. Energy Corps was a participant at the Energy Poverty Summit, a private event hosted last year by Mike Howard, CEO of the private oil-and-gas company Howard Energy Partners, at a swanky Texas ranch where he is a member.
Andrew Herscowitz, the chief executive of a unit established by a charitable offshoot of the Rockefeller Foundation to help 300 million Africans gain access to electricity by 2030, was invited to the summit. He said he found Energy Corps’s approach to addressing energy poverty refreshing.
“A lot of the big philanthropies, you know, they’ll spend inordinate amounts of resources trying to retire a handful of coal plants in one country,” he said. “People became so dogmatic about, ‘We will only spend money on these things’ that they’re not actually solving the actual issue.”
Herscowitz said he would serve on Energy Corps’s board and recuse himself from future matters involving it and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Support from that foundation, although modest, is a big get for Rice’s nascent nonprofit. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, the monopoly that spawned Exxon Mobil and other companies; he established the Rockefeller Foundation in perpetuity in 1913. The philanthropy has disbursed tens of millions of dollars to support businesses that help reduce carbon emissions as well as to fund climate initiatives.
The Rockefellers “got their opportunity from the oil-and-gas industry to make an impact back in the day, and they’ve translated that success into making an even greater impact in the world,” Rice said. “That’s kind of exactly what we’re trying to do with Energy Corps.”
Energy Corps has already doled out grants to the Bettering Human Lives Foundation, a nonprofit Wright launched in 2024 to increase access to clean cooking fuels, and the Switch Energy Alliance, a nonprofit that develops educational programs and has received funding from the oil-and-gas industry. Its chairman, Scott Tinker, is co-founder of Energy Corps. Other recipients include Innovation: Africa, which delivers solar-powered clean water to sub-Saharan Africa, and IEA Ghana, a think tank, to help it explore ways to build nuclear plants in West Africa.
Rice’s nonprofit has a goal to help create access to 50 megawatt-hours of energy per person annually to enable $50,000 in global gross domestic product per capita within 50 years.
Americans consumed about 82 megawatt-hours of energy per person in 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Tisha Schuller, head of Energy Corps, said the nonprofit is well-positioned in the current political environment to participate in pragmatic conversations regarding priorities for energy development. Still, she said, she expects some pushback.
“I think that there is going to be a lot of skepticism about the energy industry participating in this space,” she said. “So we need to deliver.”
Write to Benoît Morenne at benoit.morenne@wsj.com