Ben Singer
14 February 2006
Nairobi — Attention Kenyans: Chris Schäke wants your spoilt avocados, and he is willing to pay for them. When you are trying to set up Kenya's first commercially viable biodiesel facility, spoiled avocados, as well as coconuts, palms and other oil-bearing plants are the raw materials you need. And since Schäke's Green Power East Africa Ltd is hoping to produce 60,000 litres per day of the environmentally friendlier fuel by the end of the year, the director needs a lot of avocados.
Alternative
Biodiesel has been turning heads in recent years as a viable alternative to traditional non-renewable fossil diesel. Much focus has been on the fuel's environmental benefits. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) biodiesel - which is made from chemical processing of oil extracted from plants, burning pure biodiesel compared to petro-diesel - releases two-thirds fewer hydrocarbons, about half the carbon monoxide and particle matter, and zero sulphur. These are key component of acid rain.
The fuel is also touted for its practical benefits. It's a good lubricant and since it can run any standard diesel engine - be it car, ship, train or generator - biodiesel is seen as a simpler technology transfer than hydrogen or hybrid fuels that require entirely new engines.
Sceptics point to the high initial cost, and the need to use agricultural acres to produce the raw materials. But the fuel's profile has been raised by the climbing price of oil and the spectre of dwindling oil reserves down the road.
It was the high price of petrol in Europe that got Schäke thinking about alternatives, he said in an interview. An Internet search led him in his current direction.
"I saw there're guys using this strange thing called biodiesel," Mr Schäke said, "so I explored that a little more and I thought, 'Wow! This is the thing!'"
Launch pushed forward
Last year Mr Schäke, who has worked in Kenya for a decade in telecoms, teamed up with an economist friend and a Kenyan engineer experienced in making and promoting biodiesel to form Green Power. The group's plant is in Nairobi's Industrial Area, where Mr Schäke says they are in the "testing and optimising" stage. Although they could begin producing biodiesel soon, the director said they have pushed back their launch dates to ensure a reliable supply of crops. Also, at the scale they want to work, perfecting the process and quality of the fuel is a necessity.
"You can waste a lot of oil very quickly by not doing it correctly," said Mr Schäke. "Like wasting 10 tonnes of oil, this is a lot of money."
The model that Mr Schäke and his team are trying out presents significant challenges. They have yet to pass the Kenya Bureau of Standards quality assessment, for one, and Kenyans may be reluctant to put something new into their fuel tanks. The largest barrier, though, says Mr Schäke, are the logistics of growing and transporting the hundreds of tonnes of oil crops needed to make biodiesel. Mr Stephen Karekezi, director of African Energy Policy Research Network (AFREPREN), said that while he sees the potential in biodiesel as a locally-made renewable fuel, using land to grow new oil crops isn't the best option. He would prefer to see initiatives like a Mumias Sugar Company plan to convert sugar cane to ethanol fuel using existing crops and acreage.
But Andrew Okello, Green Power's main engineer and technical adviser, says that the company is trying to incorporate social development as well as profitability, by encouraging farmers to use arid and semi-arid land currently lying fallow. "Kenya has four million hectares that can be planted with oil crops, sitting waiting for somebody to do something about it," said Mr Okello at Green Power's makeshift offices in downtown Nairobi. But the model is not made for quick profits.
"We can say that most of our profit . . . for the first seven years has to go into creating our supply chain and at the same time what we term our social-commercial project, in that the farmer gets a fair trade dealing with us," he said.
Of the 300 crops that can be turned into biodiesel, Green Power is focusing on four high-oil-yielding varieties: coconut and cotton are well-known; less so are castor and jatropha. The latter, which is grown here for hedges, is a shrub with non-edible beans that yield 65 per cent oil by weight, and Green Power is working with development agencies to provide growers with seeds and seedlings.
Mr Okello said that huge fields of crops like rapeseed, which yield less than half the oil of jatropha, work in Europe and America, where industrial farming is the norm. Kenyan farmers who often have under one to five-acre plots need a different solution that allows them to maintain some food crops, for sale or for sustenance.
"Either they're going to grow the jatropha and cotton as fencing or they're going to intercrop it, but they still need to have something to eat," said Mr Okello.
It's not only crops that can be made into biodiesel. In Europe, where the fuel is commonplace and the EU has placed a 5.75 per cent biodiesel requirement on all diesel, waste restaurant oils have been widely used as raw materials.
There is a Kenyan group currently planning on producing biodiesel from used oils, but Mr Schäke said he doubts this would work here. He said oil is used and re-used by hotels and restaurants until it is black, toxic and "has changed it's chemical properties to an extent that you can't use it for quality biodiesel any more."
Competition is something currently lacking in the Kenyan biodiesel market, but Green Power's director said he hopes his efforts will convince others to take up the cause, thus ensuring a reliable supply of raw materials and an accepting market. "We're not afraid of competition at all," said he noted. "We believe that we have to jointly educate the market so it understands that biodiesel is not just another fly-by-night thing," he said.
While Green Power plans to initially sell the fuel slightly cheaper than normal diesel to lure skittish buyers, Mr Schäke said it was not a budget fuel, and would eventually sell on-par with petro-diesel.
Green Power is targeting small and medium-sized petroleum companies to blend their fuel in various percentages. As in Europe, the fuel would likely sell as B5, B10 or B20 - the numbers indicating the percentage of biodiesel in the mixture.
Policy needed
Unlike in Europe where authorities and ecologically-minded consumers have led multinational oil companies to embrace biodiesel, big petroleum in Kenya shows no sign of joining them yet. The Petroleum Institute of East Africa's (PIEA) general manager George Wachira said that could change if the market was proven and government policy embraced it.
"There is an amount of nascent interest being shown, not by the mainstream oil companies, but by individuals and entities that feel there is a business/environmental case for biodiesel," Mr Wachira said in an e-mail interview.
He added that there is potential for Kenya to use its abundance of marginal lands to produce biodiesel for Europe and other developed countries struggling to meet Kyoto Protocol targets on greenhouse gases.
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