Zimbabwe to revive sugar ethanol industry in emergency move to offset energy price increases

In Zimbabwe, the government is attempting to revive the sugar ethanol industry on an emergency basis to combat the effects of energy price increases. Sugar cane ethanol operations were generally shut down in 1992 throughout the country by the Mugabe government, but the Energy and Power Minister said that Zimbabwe expected to produce 6.6 Mgy in 2008. Before the ban on ethanol, Triangle Limited had produced 10.6 Mgy of ethanol annually, but this had been scaled back to nominal production for industrial uses.

In Zimbabwe, the National Oil Company will release 30 million jatropha plant seedlings by March to farmers. The jatropha seedlings will be used to provide 87,000 hectares of jatropha, which would be used as a source for jatropha oil biodiesel production. 22 million seedlings had previously been provided for planting.

The development of Zimbabwe’s biodiesel capacity was recently discussed in a Biofuels Digest profile on Zimbabwe, titled “Zimbabwe’s biodiesel strategy: Mugabe triumph or tragicomedy?”
Zimbabwe has targeted up to 1 percent of the fiscal 2008 National Budget for research, development and biotechnology projects. Zim-skeptics have pointed out certain flaws in the Zimbabwe biodiesel plan, including its dependence on jatropha feedstocks before the first harvest. A Biofuels Digest reader writes in Zim Review:

I’m being even more long-winded than usual, but you can see where I’m going with this. While I would very much like to see Zimbabwe making serious headway with biofuels, I am “reserving” judgment on what is being painted as a brilliant triumph by the Reserve Bank long before we have any serious jatropha harvests! Actually, the prematurely high projected yields for a process that would take years of experimentation to get right even if these were normal times in Zimbabwe, and the secrecy about so many other basic details to do with this factory make me doubt what exactly the “launch” signified, if anything at all.

Does “launch” here biodiesel is now being regularly produced, or does it mean something much less?

I have many other questions, but already I am inclined to believe the “launch” was more publicity stunt than anything concrete.

After the recent embarrassment of being conned by some crooked smooth operator who convinced them diesel could be squeezed out of a rock, I wonder if Mugabe & Co. have not fallen for yet another fuel scam.

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