$300 million Tanzania Ethanol project cancelled

[Alpha]

I don't have access to the entire article if anyone does please post it. The Financial Crisis is begining to reach our shores.

TANZANIA
Ethanol project goes up in smoke
Another victim of the financial crisis, Swedish Ethanol Chemistry AB (Sekab) is shelving its plan to invest up to $300 million in Tanzania to produce around a hundred million litres of ethanol a year from 2012 using the output of an immense cane plantation. (...)

Ethanol project goes up in smoke - THE INDIAN OCEAN NEWSLETTER

 

[Koba]

...nilijua from the get go wasingeenda popote,nafikiri wind and natural gas zingeweza kuwa solution kubwa sana kwa matatizo yetu ya energy,tuna gas kibao sijui kwanini hata umeme hatuna wa kutosha..ila ukiangalia deep policy zetu za energy ni matatizo makubwa sana na hatuna viongozi wanaoona mbele.

 

[Koba]

Angalia viongozi wenye vision kama hawa sio blah blah...


Rwanda’s Mission Impossible: Let’s do without aid

President Paul Kagame.

By SHYAKA KANUMA Posted Saturday, February 21 2009 at 09:58

No one has ever accused President Kagame or his administration of a lack of ambition.

This is a government that has made it a habit to undertake seemingly impossible tasks and more or less succeed in most of them.

Take the example of the almost quixotic goal of harnessing the methane gas in Lake Kivu for electricity.

The gas has been bubbling up from the bottom of the lake for thousands of years and no one ever thought to use it for anything.

Up to now, it actually has been something of a time bomb, given what happened in Cameroon in 1986, when Lake Nyos suddenly emitted a large cloud of carbon dioxide, killing 1,700 people.

Enter the administration of Kagame, which instead saw an opportunity in a problem.

The one beer brewing firm in the country, Bralirwa, had years ago figured out a way to run their Gisenyi factory with a generator running on the gas. The Rwandan president learned about it and the rest, as they say, is history.

His government immediately commissioned a task force to look into the possibility of commercial generation of power from Kivu.

There were many sceptics, both locally and internationally, who asserted that Rwanda was on a wild goose chase here; that since nowhere else in the world had commercial quantities of power ever been produced from methane, it wouldn’t happen in Rwanda either.

But Kagame gave the task force no option of failure; if a brewing firm could produce a tiny quantity of power to run its factory, then a government could surely produce enough to satisfy at least some of its needs.

International firms that claimed to have, experience in building power plants using non-conventional sources like hydro were contracted.

One firm, the now infamous Dane Associates, which claimed to have a base in Scotland, turned out to be a briefcase company that had never built a single power plant anywhere.

The government then contracted the Israel-based Ludan Technologies, to build a pilot plant on Kivu with a capacity of five megawatts.

The Israelis built the plant but hit a snag. The minimum percentage of purity of the gas needed to fire the plant’s generators is 70 per cent. But their plant could purify it to only 25 per cent. The Israelis left in frustration.

But the Rwandans were not about to contemplate failure.

The Ministry of Infrastructure quickly assembled a team of the country’s best engineers led by Alexis Kabuto, a young, German-trained hydraulic engineer to improvise until the required levels of gas purity were attained.

The local engineers tinkered around the plant and actually found a way to make it attain 90 per cent of the required purity.

They fired the generators with it and in November last year Rwanda began enjoying the fruits of these efforts — the experimental plant began producing two megawatts of electricity, enough for all the needs of Gisenyi town.

It had cost the government of Rwanda upwards of 10 million euros ($12 million). Now investors, local and foreign, are lining up for a bit of the action.

But most importantly, gas with the potential to blow up and asphyxiate everyone within the vicinity of the lake now never will; within 50 years, it will instead have been used up to power Rwandan businesses and homes.

Another of this government’s declared ambitions it to become the IT hub of the region.

Five years ago, it set up the semi-autonomous Rwanda Information Technology Agency (RITA), which, among other things, is busy digging ditches all over the Rwandan landscape and laying a high-speed fibre-optic cable that should cover the entire country in a few years. Pretty big ambitions for a small African country, one will say.

When you talk to Nkubito Bakuramutsa, a 30-something whiz kid headhunted from California’s Silicon Valley to run RITA (which is now merged into the newly set up Rwanda Development Board along with several other government agencies) you get the feeling this man means everything he says about building the required national infrastructure to nurture a truly competitive IT industry.

But it is with the recent declaration of the government of Rwanda that they want to break free of dependency on foreign aid that one begins to wonder whether these people haven’t finally forgotten where they are.

We are a landlocked country with no resources to speak of and with a largely peasant population, most of whom cannot read or write.

How do you contemplate breaking free of dependency on foreign aid when even much better endowed nations such as South Africa still depend on aid to meet some of their needs?

But the Rwandan president and his officials seem dead serious about it. It will be interesting to see where their efforts lead us.

 

[Alpha]

...nilijua from the get go wasingeenda popote,nafikiri wind and natural gas zingeweza kuwa solution kubwa sana kwa matatizo yetu ya energy,tuna gas kibao sijui kwanini hata umeme hatuna wa kutosha..ila ukiangalia deep policy zetu za energy ni matatizo makubwa sana na hatuna viongozi wanaoona mbele.

I think most of the ethanol was to be for export.

 

[Zungu Pule]

Alpha, are you sure SEKAB is abandoning the plan because of the financial crisis? Notice that serious environmentalists globally are against biofuel (ethanol & biodiesel) due to the associated negative impacts. Within Tanzania, only Ministry of Industry was supporting investments on biofuel (unknowingly or intentionally). Conservation organizations and other environmental specialists were/and still are skeptical, mainly due to the fact that the country lacks a comprehensive policy to guide the delicate investments on biofuel. If you are following the matter, you should have noticed that nobody is talking about biofuel as a potential alternative to fossil fuel anymore. As a result, biofuel is among the riskiest area to invest. Since we are naturally risk averse, how stupid one is to tie scarce resources on biofuel production?

 

[Kaizer]

Alpha, are you sure SEKAB is abandoning the plan because of the financial crisis? Notice that serious environmentalists globally are against biofuel (ethanol & biodiesel) due to the associated negative impacts. Within Tanzania, only Ministry of Industry was supporting investments on biofuel (unknowingly or intentionally). Conservation organizations and other environmental specialists were/and still are skeptical, mainly due to the fact that the country lacks a comprehensive policy to guide the delicate investments on biofuel. If you are following the matter, you should have noticed that nobody is talking about biofuel as a potential alternative to fossil fuel anymore. As a result, biofuel is among the riskiest area to invest. Since we are naturally risk averse, how stupid one is to tie scarce resources on biofuel production?

I completely agree with you on this, I think if at all they have pulled out is a result of a mounting pressure on this issues of biofuels. So many uncertainties, and the fact that we have 'enough land' doesnt mean we should use it for biofuels.....good for us if they can pack and go

 

[Petu Hapa]

Zungu, it quite common for our government not to think the implication of investment we seek to embrace. If they thought so, Sekab will not been permitted to search for possible land for investment, and their importance later defended by Karamagi, when civil society organizations started questioning the danger of allowing ethanol investors.

Well! Should we be glad the ethanol question is being dropped with Sekab? If yes why and for the interest of whom? If you ask me, the ethanol confusion in it’s currently approaches, it is not beneficial for Tanzania at all – there is lot of land conflict emerging between state and citizens as well as institutions and citizens, but worse among pastoralists and farmers. There were also projections on food crises and environment hazards if ethanol project was to mature, and its possible implication to the national economy as the government had no policy to guide it production.

You know, whenever, I think about ethanol, I am laughing to myself and then get angry and letter puzzled. I remain to wonder what the hell our government is thinking to attempt biofuel projects. The country which can not even produce enough food for its citizens, want to use plants for energy? The country which does not have industrial capacities wants to start ethanol production, while it consumption capacity of ethanol is questionable. Now for who’s interest are we to produce and for what cost?

Of course, the question of alternative energies is vibrant in many countries of the in the world, more specifically, Europe and Latin America. However, their interests to the production are quite clear. Putting the oil crises and political context of Middle East in equation, where the hegemony of “Uncle Sam” and positionalities buddies’ shows fluidity in the future, definitely the search of other land outside the boarders became relevant. They need to find alternatives to future energy crises, but at the same time not avoid it crises as pointed out by Zungu. So it is not only a crisis, rather it is political and power question. Recently, President Obama, urged America must diversify its energy policy, while Fidel have been warning poor countries not to became producers of ethnos while our home are characterized with hunger. Now, Tanzania needs to articulate what its stands in the international economy, before bring us miserly in our state of confusion.

So, should I be happy with only Sweden withdraw, I believe in this matter is Sekab company! Was he the only investor? Where are the other investors? … The folks of Ethanol are far from leaving my friends … hilo …. Tunalo. Even Sekab will still around a bit because they have significant piece of land – what are they going to do with it?

 

[Kang]

Its because of the falling Oil prices, when oil was at about $150 per barrel Ethanol could compete, now Oil is at $45 and ethanol is no longer viable.

 

[Kleptomaniacs]

Wacha waondoke,it is a blessing in disguise for some of us who have been campaigning against biofuels! land grabbing, hoarding was going to be the order of the day as our money hungry leaders were not even keen to environment or whatever they were even ready to operate without a policy or guidelines! bado kuna wengine wanaendelea kuharibu mazingira yetu na kunyakua ardhi huko Kilwa! Aluta Continua mpaka wote wang'oke!

 

[Kleptomaniacs]

Tatizo la kuwa na viongozi wasioona zaidi ya urefu wa pua zao! gas ya songosongo, upepo wa Same, Jua mwaka mzima acha hiyo, nyuklia! kwani vp situna hiyo uranium? na sisi tunafanya kama iran au Korea kaskazini wakitufatilia tunawaambia ni kwa ajili ya matumizi ya umeme! domestic sio silaha! we are peace loving creatures we strike only when we are proveked!

 

[Kleptomaniacs]

Soma ripoti hii ukitaka kujua upuuzi wa haya madude!
the false promise of
biofuels
A SPECIAL REPORT FROM
the international forum on globalization
and the institute for policy studies
By Jack Santa Barbara
Director, The Sustainable Scale Project
Chair, Alternative Energy Working Group of
the International Forum on Globalization
september 2007

 

[Tikerra]

This is a blessing,Idon't regret an inch,kwanza ulikuwa mkakati mmoja wapo wa kutufanya tuwe maskini na watumwa katika nchi yetu na kuhakikisha kwamba dunia haipati chakula cha kutosha!

WATANZANIA SIO WAJINGA TENA TUNAJUA,KILA LINALO ENDELEA, HATA LILILO AMULIWA GIZANI!

I don't have access to the entire article if anyone does please post it. The Financial Crisis is begining to reach our shores.



Ethanol project goes up in smoke - THE INDIAN OCEAN NEWSLETTER