Sustainable Innovation: The Ethanol Stove

Many of the 1.2 million people living in Maputo, Mozambique's capital, have a clean energy problem.

Charcoal, the main source of fuel, harvested from the old-growth forests in the north of the East African country, is slowly running out. Because the forests are receding, the cost of a bag of cooking charcoal is rising.  The fuel - used in many places in sub-Saharan Africa - has other drawbacks, of course. Using it in enclosed spaces, like, say, the typical home in Maputo, leads to asthma and other pulmonary maladies. Just as importantly, the energy is not renewable: once the old forest is used up, the ravaged land can end up worthless.

CleanStar Mozambique is trying to fix the problem with a solution that has community farming, bio fuel and a little metal stove at its core.

“It is a complex design, but we think that is a strength of the project,” said Johan Melchior of Novozyme, a founding corporate partner of CleanStar.

The project's $20 mil lion in initial funding and support comes from investment funds (including George Soros'), Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Novozyme and ICM. Most ambitious, perhaps, is its creators aim to make it a self-sustaining business by 2014.

“The core of our philosophy is that we want to do good by doing good business. We are not philanthropy,” said Anders Tuxen of Novozyme, who helps coordinate the project.

The charcoal market in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to be worth $10 billion, according to experts, giving plenty of financial incentive to bring clean energy to the continent. The business model is based on the production of sustainably produced biofuel. To be successful however, the business model itself had to be sustainable.

“Part of the trust building is explaining that we want to be here for the long term,” said Bill Rustrick, the chief executive of CleanStar Mozambique.

At the heart of the project is a biofuel-processing plant - operationa l since May, but just now licensed to produce - that is capable of producing 2.5 million liters, or 660,400 gallons, of ethanol a year from the processed roots of the cassava plant. The ethanol will be sold in Maputo, along with a small cooking stove subsidized by the project.

(The stoves, which are branded Ndzilo, which means fire, are currently made in Sweden, but CleanStar says it wants to move production to Durban, South Africa.)

The advantages to the consumers of using ethanol and the stoves is a healthier, cleaner-burning, hotter cooking fuel that is more easily transported and cheaper.

But how the crop that is turned into the biofuel is cultivated is just as important to the feasibility of the project, explained Mr. Rustrick in a telephone interview from Maputo.

As our colleagues at the Green blog explained earlier this year, local farmers are being trained in crop rotation. They are encouraged to grow cassava on one-third of their land and a m ixture of legumes, soybeans and other food-crops on the remaining two thirds. While many farmers do this on their own strips of land, the project also coordinates with communities to allot plots of land to local farmers - often in the areas where the original forest has been slashed and burned.

The project's community farming aim is to produce enough cassava for the biofuel plant (and another, bigger one to come) while producing a surplus of food. Using modern farming practices local farmers harvest both for sustenance and income, says Mr. Rustrick. The farmers bring the cassava to local processing centers to sell to CleanStar. Any surplus in the harvest can be sold on the market. Once it is fully operational, around 5,000 farmers, helpers and technicians are going to be tending roughly that many hectares of land, or about 12,000 acres, to ensure not just a supply of cassava for fuel but also food crops.

This promotional video explains the project:

Novozym es - one of the world's largest producers of industrial process enzymes - supplies the enzymes needed for the biofuel conversion.  ICM, an American bio-plant engineering company built the plant. Bank of America/Merrill Lynch provided a start-up grant for an option on carbon credits that this project has the potential of earning.

Mozambique was chosen because coal prices were especially high in Maputo, but this project has the potential to work in many other parts of the world where charcoal is used for cooking fuel.

“It is a proof of concept for something that can be replicated in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Mr. Tuxen.

One difficulty in developing the project was strict government regulations in Mozambique. Because the cassava root, the constituent source of biofuel is also a food crop there, the government worried that production of plants for fuel could affect the local food-production chain.

“There were a lot of questions about food security, ” said Mr. Rustrick.

However, Mr. Rustrick explains that farmers are not forced to sell their cassava to the project. If they can find a better price elsewhere - and they certainly can when the root is being used for food in lean times - they just sell it to the highest bidder.

The project is supposed to be self-sustaining by the end of 2014, by which time 20 percent of Maputo will have access to the little metal stoves and the locally produced biofuel.

What do you think about CleanStar Mozambique? Is a for-profit project business venture in sub-Saharan Africa the best way to bring clean energy to the Continent?