Lake Kivu is one of the African Great Lakes. It lies on the border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, and is in the Albertine Rift, the western branch of the East African Rift. Lake Kivu empties into the Ruzizi River, which flows southwards into Lake Tanganyika. In 1894, German officer and colonial ruler Gustav Adolf von Götzen was the first recorded European to visit the lake.
In the past, Lake Kivu drained toward the north, contributing to the White Nile. About 13,000 to 9,000 years ago, volcanic activity blocked Lake Kivu's outlet to the watershed of the Nile. The volcanism produced mountains, including the Virungas, which rose between Lake Kivu and Lake Edward to the north. Water from Lake Kivu was then forced south down the Ruzizi. This, in turn, raised the level of Lake Tanganyika, which overflowed down the Lukuga River.
Lake Kivu is one of three lakes in the world, along with Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun, that undergo limnic eruptions (where overturn of deepwater stratified layers releases dissolved carbon dioxide. The lake's bottom also contains methane, meaning if a limnic eruption occurs, the lives of the two million people living nearby would be in danger.
Lake Kivu is approximately 42 km long and 50 km at its widest. Its irregular shape makes measuring its precise surface area difficult; it has been estimated to cover a total surface area of some 2,700 km2, making it Africa's eighth largest lake. The surface of the lake sits at a height of 1,460 metres above sea level. This lake has a chance of suffering a limnic eruption every 1000 years. The lake has a maximum depth of 475 m and a mean depth of 220 m, making it the world's twentieth deepest lake by maximum depth, and the thirteenth deepest by mean depth.
Lake Kivu has recently been found to contain approximately 55 billion m3 of dissolved biogas at a depth of 300 metres. Until 2004, extraction of the gas was done on a small scale, with the extracted gas being used to run boilers at the Bralirwa brewery in Gisenyi. As far as large-scale exploitation of this resource is concerned, the Rwandan government has negotiated with a number of parties to extract methane from the lake.
In 2011 ContourGlobal, a UK-based energy company focused on emerging markets, secured project financing to initiate a large-scale methane extraction project. The project is run through a local Rwandan entity called KivuWatt, using an offshore barge platform to extract, separate, and clean the gasses obtained from the lake bed before pumping purified methane via an underwater pipeline to onshore gas engines. Stage one of the project, powering three "gensets" along the lake shore and supplying 26 MW of electricity to the local grid, has been completed. The next phase aims to deploy nine additional gensets at 75 MW to create a total capacity of 101 MW.
Activities to do at Lake Kivu are; kayaking, windsurfing, boat cruise, sport fishing, swimming and other land based activities like hiking the surrounding hills, biking along the lake shores, coffee tours around the coffee plantations surrounding the lake and visiting Imbabazi orphanage.