At the Asoke community I was living in for the last month, the community has a cassava, electric plant and the leader of the project K. Kheanfa is currently advising on a very large project in Laos ($100 million) and is in the initial stages of advising a Chinese official. If you would like, I can put you in touch with him.

Linda Nowakowski said:

At the Asoke community I was living in for the last month, the community has a cassava, electric plant and the leader of the project K. Kheanfa is currently advising on a very large project in Laos ($100 million) and is in the initial stages of advising a Chinese official. If you would like, I can put you in touch with him.

Thanks, Linda, that would be great. The plants I have been looking at to date are small - £300k-£600k - but they would provide ethanol conversion for 200-300 hectares of cassava, producing 3000-4000 litres per day of ethanol.

Geez, I wish I had something not quite off topic to say. This recent article from Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique in All Africa (All Africa puts articles behind a subscription wall after a time, but it works now) mentions an International Symposium on Tropical Roots and Tubers--I love the sounds of that. And the article deals with the big question about bio-fuels over the choice between food and energy.

With the planning around Opok Farm Village and LiA the issue of energy has come up and also the nitty gritty of coops around a soap making project. Putting not like things together, I was very interested to explore Piedmont Biofuels. Now they make bio-diesel not ethanol, and Pittsboro, NC is a long ways away from Kaduna or Gulu, but it was very interesting to see how the Coop to produce bio-diesel has generated other cooperative efforts around them. It seems that the bio-diesel plant not only produces energy, but has energized local economic relationships near Pittsboro.

"Think globally, act locally" is often said without regard to the Web of communication that Rene Dubos envisioned; we tend to miss the "think global" part. So this thread, putting it out, is a good example of what makes Ned so cool. I live a long way from Kaduna, Gulu, and Pittsboro, but we need energy here too. All the hammering out of details will of course have to reflect the locality, but the broad problems to solve are quite related in every location, so we can learn from one another.

I visited a farm today where the man single handed makes 1000 L of bio-diesel a day, every day using cassava that he grows himself. The market price retail for bio-diesel here is 18 baht a liter. I didn't catch how much he gets wholesale but even at 50% he would make 9,000 baht a day which is 2,000 baht a day more than the average Thai makes in a month. A PhD professor at the University only makes 10,000 baht a month and I am incredibly well paid compared to Thais and I make nothin geven close to 9,000 baht a day.

I would be very interested in any information regarding the relative merits of ethanol and biodiesel production. A UK friend of mine also makes biodiesel (from oil seed rape, I think) and clearly the process is much more straightforward, as he does it in his garage (and puts it in his car). Is ethanol more scaleable or perhaps does it demand a higher price?

I don't claim any expertise in biofuels! But Ben's question about the relative merits of ethanol and biodiesel is interesting and important.

Clearly there are lots of interrelated issues, some of which are particular to geographic regions. Because there are many economies of scale involved, governments often take a position favoring either biodiesel or ethanol.

From what I've gleaned, Nigeria takes a position which leans towards ethanol. One of the issues is that gasohol, that is a formulation of gasoline and ethanol requires engines which will run on them. Many vehicles already on the road are flex-fuel, they can run on gasohol.

Cassava can be used as a feedstock for biodiesel, but it requires a process called Thermal depolymerization which among other things requires heating the feedstock to high temperatures under pressure. So it's a relatively capital intensive process. It should be noted that seed oil production on a scale to produce biofuels is also a fairly capital intensive operation.

As Ben points out the operation under consideration is a relatively small capital affair. Ethanol can be made from cassava in this sort of enterprise. Ethanol also fits in with the Nigerian energy strategy. However there is concern about the ability of Nigeria to increase production of cassava and sugar cane to meet their targets and the impacts upon the food supply.

Part of the calculation about ethanol is the anticipation of the development of enzymes to break down cellulose to render sugar for alcohol, so instead of the kernels of maize being used, the stocks might be. Cellulosic alcohol is something much studied. Both Canada and China have plants producing cellulosic alcohol presently, but the efficient processing of cellulose is yet to be perfected, and certainly isn't a small-scale enterprise.

Biodiesel is generally made from vegetable oil. People in America eat so many fried foods that the waste oil from cooking has actually jump-started interest in making biodiesel here. Obviously a car which runs on gasoline will not run on diesel and vice versa. However there are many diesel engines, and other devices which operate using biodiesel as fuel. So biodiesel is a very useful fuel and it has the advantage of requiring relatively less energy to produce than ethanol.

With a supply of vegetable oil it's not a terribly capital intensive process to make biodiesel. However processing soybeans, rapeseed, and other oil bearing crops into oil on an industrial scale is a capital intensive enterprise.

It is not surprising to me that Nigeria as an oil producing country would favor the development of ethanol as part of their energy policy. It fits well with the existing delivery mechanisms as well as oil company objectives. Implementing this policy also impacts Nigerian agricultural policies; for one thing they need to grow more cassava.

On a small scale, even in Nigeria, it would seem that either ethanol or biodiesel could be an attractive enterprise given the right alignment of factors. Seed oil production is key to biodiesel. Ethanol can be made from a variety of crops which yield sugar, eg. cassava, sugar cane, sorghum, etc. My, admittedly ignorant, hunch is that there are fewer obstacles in the road for ethanol production in Kaduna than there are for biodiesel.

Wow, John, thanks!

Interestingly, we have been considering a combination view. Whilst an Ethanol plant is reasonably priced it is still well out of the range of most farmers, at least if they operate singly, hence the need to find an investor or two.

However, Jatropha is a crop that can be planted to safeguard cassava from pests and also produce biodiesel and from what I understand produce for soaps etc. It seems rather more conducive to the many small cooperatives that exist. Having said that, I will also look into the Thermal Depolymerisation plant option.

You are certainly right about the concern for cassava under production. One recent plant had to close because its activity caused the local price of cassava to escalate to such an extent that it could no longer afford to buy it.

Ben, I really love to watch you think! Looking up Jatropha I saw such headlines as Poison plant could help to cure the planet. The headline isn't so bad, but I think that it rather encourages a habit of thinking we're going to find a silver bullet to the engery supply problem. Most people who've looked at the problem predict that we're going to have to go to a mix of energy solutions.

One of the things that seemed really attractive to me about Jatropha is that a business of producing seedlings is something that could start with very little capital. It's hard to convince farmers to grow a crop when they don't see an established market for it. That's a real catch 22 for new crops everywhere. But since Jatropha has uses against pests and since the oil can be used directly for burning, there's already some anticipated value which makes a toehold for the crop to become planted. It looks like oil can be recovered from the plants simply by cold pressing which really helps to make value without a big capital investment.

The combination view you're considering really has a lot going for it. It's remarkable that growing Jatropha might increase cassava production.

I'm sure I'm not alone in being willing to do specific research on this project, so be sure to let us know what to do. Clearly the story of what you're doing is a story very relevant to others in different places.

The approach that we are taking in Nigeria is, I think, interesting, as we are tackling a whole chiefdom area in one go. The reason for this is that the project is being supported in these early stages by a politician, who set up a foundation for the chiefdom from which he hailed, whilst he was a member of the government.

What we hope to achieve is some success in this chiefdom, which will encourage other chiefdoms to follow suit, as most have generated at least one successful politician. In terms of numbers of people, we believe there to be around 30,000 in this particular chiefdom and most would benefit from such a plant, which to me seems to be pretty good investment, when they are producing a product which is in high demand and will be for the foreseeable future.

In addition to this, a lot of new cassava strains are being developed, some of which are high producers of ethanol, or especially productive and disease-resistant. USAID has been very helpful in making these new strains available. Interestingly, though, they are not being used in Kaduna, as the tendrils of USAID have not yet expanded to this area quite yet (at least not to my knowledge). Therefore the project will not just deliver a new processing business, but also improved agricultural seeds and produce.

If people are happy to help on the research here, I would be interested in how best to tackle the issue of finding an investor and from where they are likely to come from. Nigeria and rest of the world banks don't seem to mix very well, so, using the land as collateral perhaps, would a bank be interested in investing in such a low risk project?

If I can I will upload some photographs, so people can gain some insight into the type of land, as this may have some bearing on crop selection.

Anyway, I will keep this thread posted with any information and progress we make.

A little more information available at http://www.nfiafrica.org/id29.ht ml while I figure out how to add photographs into postings...

Any ideas on how best to find investors would still be appreciated.