Biofuel feedstock from small farmers: CEC

The Jatropha farmers who gathered to meet the BIF team last month at Kapiri Mposhi in central Zambia are optimists. Several years ago, organisations came and encouraged them to plant Jatropha, in the belief that a good income could be made from selling the bushes’ oily nuts as feedstock for biofuel production. Today, they continue to maintain their Jatropha fields, even though no reliable market for the crop ever materialised. Neighbours laugh at them for persisting with the crop; one farmer told us how his wife had urged him to rip up the “useless” bushes. Some farmers’ co-operatives have developed a profitable business making soap from the oil, but the quantities of oil required to satisfy local soap demand are tiny compared with the potential market for fuel.

Now, a proper market for their crop may finally be about to appear. Copperbelt Energy Corporation (CEC), which generates and distributes electricity for the Zambian mining industry, has invested in a new biodiesel plant capable of producing a million litres of fuel per year. By replacing imported fuel with biodiesel, CEC hopes to save money, improve its security of supply and cut carbon emissions, while providing local smallholder farmers with the long-awaited market for their oil crops. The production of biodiesel also has useful by-products: the ‘cake’ left behind when the oil has been pressed out of the nuts may find uses as an organic fertiliser or as an eco-friendly substitute for charcoal, and the glycerol left behind in the refining process can be used in cosmetics and detergents.

Producing a million litres of biodiesel will take an awful lot of feedstock, however. The Jatropha growers are business-minded and well-organised, but their farms are widely scattered and many of their fields are in poor condition. Organising an adequate supply of feedstock, at a price high enough to make it worthwhile for the farmers to carry out the labour-intensive business of harvesting and shelling the nuts but low enough for the biodiesel to be competitive with imported fuel, will be a considerable challenge. New infrastructure for processing and storing nuts may be required, and other oil sources such as castor and cotton seed may have to be explored alongside Jatropha.

Figuring out how to connect up CEC and the farmers in a workable and sustainable supply chain will need expertise and innovative thinking, and this is where the Business Innovation Facility comes in. The first phase of support from BIF, an assessment of the availability of suitable feedstock, has already been carried out. Subsequent phases of BIF support will help CEC put together a business plan, identify sources of finance for the necessary infrastructure investment, build capacity among farmers’ associations to function as effective suppliers to CEC, and assess the environmental impact of the business. If successful, the initiative will provide a new income source to over 1300 small farmers – and their optimism will finally prove justified.

For more information about this project, see the the PROJECT PROFILE.

Source: The Practitioner Hub