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South Africa: Biofuel Plans Face Big Cost Challenges
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
27 March 2008
Posted to the web 27 March 2008
Mathabo Le Roux
Johannesburg
A STATE plan to target unused agricultural land in former homelands for development to feed the fledgling biofuels industry will present formidable cost challenges.
The latest draft of the biofuels strategy steers away from tapping into existing large-scale commercial farming operations to feed the biofuels industry. Instead, it opts to create linkages between the first and second economy, and establish new farmers who would grow the crop required for biofuels production.
But it emerged at a conference of the Central Energy Fund yesterday that the plan would require considerable upfront capital to establish the necessary supporting infrastructure.
At van Coller, agricultural engineering services director in the agriculture department, said SA had 4,5-million hectares of underutilised agricultural land that could be developed, with the biofuels industry offering a market for extra crops.
There are about 2,5-million hectares of underutilised land in former homelands, mostly in the east of the country.
With climate change expected to change SA's rainfall patterns, rendering the western parts of the country too dry for farming, it was imperative to target the eastern parts, which were expected to become wetter, for additional agricultural production, he said.
However, homeland areas lacked adequate roads, railway networks and other support infrastructure such as storage facilities , and would have to be developed from scratch at a hefty cost.
Until now there had been no market for crops in underutilised agricultural areas, such as former homelands, Van Coller said. "These will have to be developed, and sustainable production levels will have to be achieved."
Van Coller said the development cost of agricultural land in former homelands was estimated at R15000-R20000 a hectare compared with R5000-R6000 for unutilised commercial land.
This put the cost of the ambitious development plan as high as R50bn before biofuels production started.
He mooted an integrated development plan involving multiple investors to help establish the necessary support infrastructure.
With one permanent job created for every 100ha of land brought into production, the cost of creating these jobs would come with a hefty R2m price tag. But the multiplier effect at secondary production level was expected to be significant, with an estimated 50 jobs created for every new job at farm level.
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Still, the plan was risky, and considerable challenges remained, with the production costs of new farmers as much as 40% higher than those of established farmers.
It was also critical to achieve sustainable production levels and provide access to mechanisation without creating a dependency on grants.
Some caveats on feasibility also remained for the Industrial Development Corporation, which was expected to play a big funding role in building a biofuels sector.
You don't need to wait to grow new crops to get started in Biofuels. According to plantzafrica.com "Typha capensis is such an abundant plant in South Africa, many people regard it as a pest as it is known to spread very fast." Typha is a nuisance all over the African continent, causing flooding and drought, and breeding mosquitoes and other pests. There are millions of Hectares overrun with it. It is both a food plant and a fuel plant. It grows both on valuable land where you need to eradicate it, and on worthless land you can... [Read Full Text]
Has there been any attempt to use Typha capensis and were they successful?
I don't know of anything using Capensis. In the USA we have T Latifolia, T Angustifolia, and T Glauca mostly, and call them cattails. Typha is largely the same worldwide, varying in size, shape of leaves, salt tolerance (drastic variation), but not in structure. There are numerous articles about experiments with our cattails, and they are extremely promising, particularly in the area of ethanol. With the cellulosic ethanol processes coming out, we can expect even better results later. A German group called the Household Energy Project developed a charring device to convert cattails to charcoal,... [Read Full Text]
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