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ethanol blend for petrol engines. For much of the 1980s we used this blend and it worked well, especially in more “modern” cars, those built since the 1960s and designed for fuels with higher octane ratings and more modern plastics for hoses.
Biofuels have had their fans and critics for decades.
One set of criticisms arise from the weird US determination to make its ethanol from maize. The energy conversions simply do not work with this feedstock, since more energy is needed to produce the maize than the fuel actually gives when burned in an ignition-spark engine.
So there is no “green” advantage in using ethanol produced from maize; it is simply a mechanism for US politicians from the mid-west to subsidise the growing of maize no one wants to eat. Obviously in time people will want to eat that grain, and so the economics of maize-produced ethanol will be unsustainable.
When sugarcane is used as a feedstock, then the economics become far more interesting. Here it is possible to produce up to 10 times the energy from alcohol as is actually used to produce that alcohol, and much of that production energy can come from the cane waste after the sugar is extracted.
Brazil has long been the leader in using this technology. From the 1970s that country switched large sections of its vehicle fleet from petrol to ethanol, unfortunately using non-sustainable subsidies to do so.
When the subsidies were removed petrol became cheaper and Brazilians switched back to gasoline. But early last decade the Brazilians became a lot smarter.
The vehicle market in that country is so large that it was worthwhile for car makers to develop the technology needed to produce engines that can run on ethanol, petrol or any convenient mixture of the two. Brazilian drivers, and 88 percent of their cars are now powered with these flexi-engines, can change the fuel or the fuel mix every time they fill their tank.
Most actually buy the cheaper fuel, taking into account the fact that a litre of ethanol holds less energy than a litre of petrol. The calculations are done for them. That technology is now so proven that the United States even has an agreement with Brazil to make such engines under licence, a case of a developing country exporting technology.
With a general view that petroleum prices are bound to continue rising, alcohol produced from sugar can easily compete without subsidies and most fans of biofuels see this being the way forward. Subsidies simply create many wrong decisions, as Brazil once found and the Americans are starting to find now.
Zimbabwe is not even thinking about subsidies. Most economists reckon that at the very least Chisumbanje ethanol will be no more expensive than imported petrol and will produce several advantages.
Cane farmers will have a larger market than the sugar industry can provide. We need to remember that most sugar has to be sold very cheaply because of international oversupply.
There is room in the Lowveld for tens of thousands of more Zimbabweans to earn a decent living growing cane; the problem in the past has been to find markets in the long term for that extra sugar.
Secondly there are jobs; someone has to work in that ethanol plant and in any future plants. At present the only large scale employment in the fuel industry is manning a petrol pump. The skilled jobs are in other countries where the oil is extracted and refined.
Thirdly Zimbabwe can start earning some green credits.
Sugar-ethanol, with the high conversion factor and the use of cane residue to provide the processing energy, is close to being carbon free. The carbon is recycled almost entirely so adding nothing to the global load.
And fourthly a factor we tend to forget since we switched to the US dollar as our ordinary currency, Zimbabwe’s balance of payments.
While we can pay for as much imported fuel as we like using the same currency that motorists use when they buy petrol at a pump, a good chunk of that money goes out of the country, effectively making Zimbabwe poorer.
Ethanol keeps the money in the country. Admittedly most is kept as wages of the people who make the stuff, the profits of the farmers who grow the cane, and the return on investment of those who own the plant. But that money circulates within the country and makes Zimbabwe as a whole richer.
The downside is small. Some say the land should be used for food rather than fuel.
But there is enough land for both in the Lowveld and in any case the economics of irrigation mean that sugar is one of the few crops that are profitable to grow in that part of Zimbabwe. But when maize prices rise in time we can also grow maize there.
With Chisumbanje, Zimbabwe is using a proven technology, and one that allows a locally-produced fuel to be produced and used without subsidies.
Our altitude allows a mixture as high as 25 percent ethanol in petrol without new engines or modifications to existing engines, and we see no reason why in time we cannot import Brazilian engines instead of Japanese or South African engines for our new cars.