Researchers map areas suitable for green energy crops

The International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) has completed the initial phase of mapping areas suitable for production of feed stock to the country’s nascent alternative fuel industry, a key step to ensuring the new activity does not compromise food production.

The research identified Western, Central and the Coastal regions as the most suitable for at least 11 feed stocks namely jatropha, croton, sugar cane, cotton, sunflower, canola, sweet sorghum, coconut, pangamia, caster and cassava. 

Speaking at a bio-fuel stakeholders workshop held recently in Nakuru, the project manager for the Policy Innovation Systems for Clean Energy Security (PISCES), Dr Benard Muok, asked the government to relax taxes so as to encourage more investment in bio-fuels.

Such a move, he added, would encourage a shift from fossil fuel to renewable energy that the country requires. 

PISCES is one of the organisations that are refining the Bio-fuel Policy.

“The draft policy calls on the government to adopt competitive pricing and tax incentives to bring in more producers of feed stock that will produce enough to satisfy the industry,” he said.  

Ms Sue Davison, the director of Pipal Ltd, a management consulting firm in Kenya, also proposes the removal of taxes on bio-diesel until such a time that production will be sustainable to meet the country’s fuel demands.

“Zero excise duty on bio-diesel and aligned technologies is a key to promoting viability, so is setting initial feed prices only when production is sustainable.”

Of equal significance, she said, was for the government and the private sector to pilot and scale up the use of ethanol for household energy.

The benefits arising from tax cuts and fair pricing, Dr Muok said, would particularly be felt in the transport industry which has been reeling from galloping petroleum prices as focus shifts to farmers who will now supply green energy producers.

Anticipation that the country will be able to reduce its import bill on fossil fuel with introduction of renewable energy reached its peak when the ministry of energy gazetted regulations for blending petrol with ethanol to produce gasohol in November last year.

The regulations will take effect on March 1, 2010 though the biotech experts told Business Daily that the timing might not be realised.

In the experts’ estimate, mandatory mixtures of bio-fuel into the energy mix can effectively begin in 2012 when the country has enough stocks of the raw material — ethanol.

“Bio-diesel blending may not be immediately feasible,” he said, “The piloting will begin next month before it is rolled out on a national scale.

Dr Muok said the current stocks of ethanol held by Nyanza-based Spectre International and Agrochemical and Food Corporation estimated at 120 million litres would be sufficient for piloting.

The expected privatisation of sugar industries in the region is expected to introduce a rigorous diversification policy that will see the firms produce chiefly ethanol and power besides sugar.

Ethanol from these firms then would drive the changeover to renewable energy as well as other feedstocks whose suitability mapping are being done by ICRAF, he said.

Galloping global oil prices have seen pump prices in the country increase by 20 per cent since August, 2009, with industry observers predicting a worsening situation.

Consequently, the draft Policy argues, a lot of focus needs to shift to bio-fuels to save the country from dwindling global oil reserves and unpredictable fuel prices.

The policy notes that the total import bill of petrol products increased by 7.1 per cent from Sh113.7 billion in 2006 to Sh121.8 billion in 2007, while global oil prices passed the $100 a barrel mark during the period.

Mr Isaac Kalua, the chairman of the Kenya Bio-diesel Association and chair of Green Africa Foundation, said lack of a policy in the past was the reason the country was experiencing the depressing effects of unpredictable world oil prices.

Kenya started working on a bio-fuel policy in 1977, a year after Brazil yet today Brazil obtains 56 per cent of its energy needs from renewable resources.

In Africa and Kenya in particular, development of bio-fuel stagnated due to weak or simply lack of policies, Kalua said.

But owing to a well-grounded policy, only Brazil produces ethanol profitably when other global prices are right, he added.

“We must now put our efforts together to consolidate all the scattered documents on renewable energy and begin looking at bio-fuel production as a business venture.”