Majority of the energy consumed in Africa is firewood and charcoal. Most of it is not sustainable and therefore contributing to net carbon emissions. This project seeks to address this problem by converting scalable agricultural waste and energy energy grass grown in semi arid areas into briquettes that can supply both industrial and commercial needs as well as domestic energy requirements. Africa is incident to 51% of the global solar rays incident on land on the planet. Biomass is nature's energy battery. Processing biomass by briquetting, standardizes biomass and makes it portable to anywhere in the world as this increases the energy density and reduces transport costs.
The first phase is to process the backlog of sugarcane bagasse waste from sugar millers in the country. This can produce stocks of at least 10 million tonnes of dry bagasse that translates to 40 billion kwh of heat or 10 billion kwh of electricity.
The first phase is for a determined period 6 years. By providing a sustainable option targeted at commercial and industrial users, at a production rate of 9,000 tonnes per day of wet bagasse , will result in saving about 10 million trees over the period and a carbon emissions reduction of 16 million tons of CO2 emissions.
The second phase will involve replacing off grid generators in Africa with portable biomass electricity generators running on sustainable biomass initially from the backlog of agricultural waste and then from drought resistant napier grass grown in semi arid areas. This opens up the possibility of scaling up significantly since most of Africa is grassland and Napier grass is the king of grasses. It will be grown under irrigation using solar and wind energy to power irrigation.
The third phase is integrating future manufacturing with combined heat and power that is completely off grid. Very often manufacturing requires more heat than electricity. We lead with heat and add electricity as a by product
Africa will play a big role in determining the demand for fossil fuels and result in higher carbon emissions as it feeds a population expected to reach 2 billion by 2050. Africa holds the key to deflecting this scenario by developing along the path of sustainable biomass.
In addition to opening up the semi arid lands to productive use, the project will also allow for increased food production where the energy grass is produced and providing the energy needed for post harvest processing.
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