GROWING ENERGY IN KENYA
One sunny morning two years ago, Andrew Okello, technical director of Biodiesel Technologies, gathered a crowd in Kenya's capital city of Nairobi. A generator was running and an assortment of tanks and plastic buckets containing colored liquids were connected by garden hose-like tubing. Okello even used a recycled plastic bottle - not a beaker or some other scientific glassware - to display his pride and joy, a yellowish liquid that turned out to be the biodiesel that was powering the generator. It had been made from avocados collected as rejects from the local open-air market.
Okello used the same avocado-derived diesel to fuel to a 14-seat, public-service van, and drove a small group around the city. The van ran on the biodiesel. It felt the same, sounded the same. The smell, though, was different. Instead of diesel fumes, it smelled like something was cooking, maybe getting burned.
Biodiesel is simply any diesel fuel prepared from biological matter, as opposed to petroleum. It can be made from a long list of raw materials, including animal fats, vegetable oils of all sorts, even oil from algae. German engineer Rudolf Diesel designed his engine in the late 1890s to work on a variety of fuels, including coal dust. The engine he displayed at the 1900 World Exposition in Paris ran on peanut oil, another form of biodiesel.
Even a hobbyist can make biodiesel fairly easily. In the case of avocados, the "meat" gets pressed and filtered to extract the oil. This can also be done with other fruits, such as the meat from a coconut, or a wide variety of vegetables, most commonly soy beans. The extracted oil is usually heated or stirred with a drying agent, such as magnesium sulfate, to remove as much water as possible. The next step treats the organic oil with alcohol, usually methanol, and a catalyst, such as sodium hydroxide. This breaks down the oil, replacing glycerin with alcohol, which is a process called transesterification. The result is a fatty acid methyl ester and glycerin, which sinks so the biodiesel can be decanted from the top. The decanted liquid consists of biodiesel and residual alcohol, which must be removed through distillation or chemical means. The whole process is akin to making moonshine.
It is also possible to use biological matter, such as corn, to make bioethanol, which can be blended with gasoline. This idea is no newer than biodiesel: In the early 1900s, Henry Ford designed his Model T so that it could run on corn- or hemp-based ethanol.
THE KENYAN EXPERIENCE
Although companies in Kenya have plans to produce significant volumes of biofuel, none have yet done so. It looked like Green Power East Africa would be first to produce commercial quantities, when its plant came online in 2006. That plant mainly uses cotton seeds for raw material and that caused trouble. Gregor von Drabich of Green Power East Africa, says, "Currently, we have problems getting enough cotton seeds at a fair price." He adds that Green Power East Africa's plant could potentially make 12 tons of biodiesel every day, but it has only reached 10% of that volume so far. Worse still, Green Power East Africa has temporarily shut down the plant, because of a lack for affordable raw materials. As a result, the company has tested alternative sources for making biodiesel. Drabich says, "We have tested soy bean, sunflower, castor, avocado, coconut, and jatropha, which holds a huge potential in the future."
Biodiesel Technologies feels the same pressure to find a sustainable supply of raw materials. Consequently, it only makes biodiesel when someone provides the materials or pays in advance for the processing. For example, Okello says that occasionally a group of farmers provides canola oil for him to process.
Appreciating the need for a sustained supply Okello is working with owners of small farms in Kenya's Coast Province. The farmers are being taught to grow jatropha and coconut, which produce high volumes of raw materials. "These crops and select others have high caloric value, hence their choice," Okello says.
Jatropha is especially interesting: It produces dry, black poisonous nuts that are about 35% oil. In the past, jatropha was planted primarily to stop erosion and prevent land from turning to desert. It grows in very poor soil, and an established plant can produce nuts for half a century. But as Drabich points out, "Jatropha is only starting up in Kenya now."
Sugarcane is another possible source of biofuel. Peter Kegode, an agricultural economist who serves as chairman of the Sugar Campaign for Change sees it as a driver of Africa's coming economic boom. "Forget information communication technology. Biodiesel is what can make Africa leapfrog into a developed economy," says Kegode. According to Sugar Campaign for Change's Web site, Approximately 5 million people depend on sugarcane farming in Kenya either directly or indirectly. Kegode is one of many in Kenya talking up the potential of a biofuels industry to create jobs.
But even if Kenya could develop a viable biofuels industry, that doesn't necessarily mean that it should. "Kenya, with its food problems, would be better served to invest in food production," says David Pimentel of Cornell University. "Kenya also has a fuel-wood shortage and tends to burn crop residues. Removing and burning crop residues leaves the soil exposed to increased wind and water erosion. This devastates the productivity of the soil."
Africa Builds Up for Biofuel
Projects across Africa aim to enhance biofuel production and use. In South Africa, finance minister Trevor Manuel proposed that the government provide incentives to boost synthetic-fuel and biofuel investments. In Nigeria, Lemna International and other companies recently signed contracts to build biofuel-production factories. Similar projects are underway in Swaziland. Also in November 2006, Senegal partnered with Brazil and India, to cooperate in biofuels production. In Malawi, the government put laws in place that require 5% of all fuel to be environmentally friendly biofuel.
The biofuels industry in Africa should also benefit from a series of recent projects. In South Africa, for example, Ethanol Africa is investing $1 billion to build biofuel plants, which will produce bioethanol and biodiesel from corn. In Uganda, the Mukono Flower Firm announced plans to build a $20,000 biodiesel plant. In addition, Marli Investment Zambia plans to spend about $16 million on a plant that will produce biodiesel from jatropha. Some of the African companies have even spread across the continent. The Kenya-based, vegetable-oil company Bidco, for example, plans to expand its investment in Uganda to include a $30 million biodiesel-manufacturing plant.
These examples, however, largely depict plans and promises. The real key to this industry in Africa is results, which are rare at the moment.
A COMPETITIVE PRODUCT?
The marketability of biodiesel is also in doubt. Cost, net energy production, environmental impact, and practical problems threaten to kill Kenya's biofuel business in its infancy. With no company making any significant volumes of biodiesel in the country, no one can be sure whether it will be priced competitively with petroleum in Kenya. But internationally, biodiesel is not cheaper. A June 2005, publication of the US Environmental Protection Agency states, "While costs vary by location, [a 20% biodiesel-80% petroleum diesel] blend generally costs about 20 cents per gallon more than regular diesel fuel. [Pure biodiesel] generally costs about $1 more per gallon than regular diesel fuel."
Consequently some of the would-be entrepreneurs in Kenyan biofuels say that the industry needs tax incentives to survive and grow. If given five tax-free years, Drabich says, "we can then do our investment plans and expand quickly." He also suggests that Kenya's government should follow the lead of other countries - including Brazil and the United States, as well as the European Union - by mandating that over time some percentage, say 5%, of diesel sold must be biodiesel.
Louis Strydom disagrees. His published article on the EcoWorld web site about the conditions that must be met to build a biofuels industry. Instead of begging for help, he stated: "The project should be sufficiently viable not to require any kind of subsidies, thus not requiring government support to keep the projects afloat." He added, "All subsidies come from the consumer at the end of the day and thus the more viable the project can be without subsidies the more the benefit to governments and their citizens." Strydom is not an independent observer. He's spent the past couple years trying to create a jatropha plantation - nearly a quarter-million acres - and a biodiesel refinery in Kenya. Although he continues that effort, he believes that his project - and other biofuels project - should not rely on outside support.
An area of contention is the net energy from biofuels, that is, the ratio of energy input to energy output. In 2005, Pimental and Tad Patzek of the University of California, Berkeley, reported in Natural Resources Research on the net energy provided from various raw materials turned into biofuels. "Our assessment of soybean, sunflower, and canola, all indicate that it takes more fossil energy to produce a liter of biodiesel than the energy in the liter of biodiesel," says Pimentel. "This is based on including all the energy inputs, not omitting some of the energy inputs."
For example, Pimentel and Patzek reported that using sunflowers took 118% more energy than it produced. Contrast that with a recent EPA publication which states: "Biodiesel has a positive energy balance. For every unit of energy needed to produce a gallon of biodiesel, 3.24 units of energy are gained." Net energy depends on exactly how a crop gets grown, harvested, and processed, accounting for some of the disagreement. Measuring the net energy produced from a range of biofuels, and therefore of their viability, could take some time to determine.
There are also question-marks over the environmental friendliness of biofuels. According to the US Department of Energy, biodiesel is cleaner. For example, burning 100% biodiesel would produce only 25% as much carbon dioxide as burning petroleum-based diesel. In contrast, the EPA believes that burning pure biodiesel can produce as much as 10% more nitrogen oxides than petroleum-based diesel.
Beyond the struggles of actually producing biofuels, companies will also face marketing challenges. Okello's van-driving demonstration in Nairobi might have sputtered into defeat, if he had continued it long enough. This is because biodiesel often turns out to be a better solvent than petroleum diesel. So if a customer switches from petroleum diesel to biodiesel, it can dissolve deposits in fuel lines that can plug the fuel filter. As a result, most car manufacturers recommend that drivers change the fuel filter after switching to biodiesel, usually after the first 800 miles. That can usually be done for less than $75, and even the while-you-wait, oil-change companies do it. Although not an insignificant cost, especially in Africa, it is a one-time fix if the owner keeps using biodiesel.
A diesel engine might run fine on some blends of biodiesel - especially ones like B5, which is 5% biodiesel and 95% petroleum-based diesel - but not on pure biodiesel. Many of them now list biodiesel information; For example, Volkswagen guidelines state that its diesel engines work fine with blends that contain no more than 5% biodiesel, adding: "Never use any fuel, whether diesel, B5 biodiesel, or otherwise, that fails to meet the latest petroleum industry specifications or that is not purchased from a commercial retail diesel pump."
Despite the ongoing struggles, and the apparent distance of success, Kenya will keep pursuing the biofuel industry. It is a useful testbed for the agricultural, technological and environmental challenges that will face other developing countries intent on finding new sources of energy and income.
