Biopower Africa
Biomass power generation market in Africa is almost unexplored and the potential is huge. The saw mills in Africa produce huge amounts of wood waste and saw dust. These wood mills are facing electricity shortages from grid and 40 – 100% of their electricity requirement is met by inefficient and very old diesel gensets. These are operated at low load resulting in very low efficiency. The waste produced by the wood mills is mostly open burned or dumped.
Though saw dust briquetting and pelletizing are good options, transporting pellets and briquettes is a major problem affecting the viability of such projects. Only in few cases these options are viable.
Rice mills are normally of very small size using outdated technology. They are often not connected with grid and use inefficient and old diesel drives and the efficiency is very low. This results in very high milling cost (around 3- 4 times higher than countries like Thailand)
Palm oil industries often use very old fiber fired steam boilers to produce steam to meet the steam demand for the palm oil production. The electricity requirement is met by the diesel gensets. Empty fruit bunches (EFB) are mainly burnt in the mill itself and the ash produced is used by soap manufacturers.
Sugar industries are also using old and inefficient bagasse fired boilers to produce steam to meet the processing steam demand for the sugar production. The electricity generation is met with diesel gensets. Only few sugar mills of larger capacity go for Cogeneration.
 rice field (and palm trees) |
 paddy transportation to the mill |
 manual threshing |
 sun drying of paddy in a rice mill |
 rice husk dump site |
 EFB open burning |
 wood waste in a saw mill |
 saw dust dump site |
In general, rice, palm oil, sugar and wood sectors in Africa are not very competitive compared to other counties like Thailand and Malaysia, since at present the energy costs are very high as these industries rely more on diesel gensets.
Although several parts of the land is very fertile they are not used for agriculture. On the other hand the agricultural productivity is very low as modern and mechanized practices are not followed. Most of the cases the agricultural works such as harvesting are done manually.
In case of Africa, the biomass potentials are high in wood, rice, sugar and palm oil industries. The lessons learnt in Asia and other countries can be used in Africa, so that, costly mistakes can be avoided.
For the next two decades, Africa has the highest biomass power generation potential in the world. There are two reasons for that:
- The current biomass production used for power generation is less than 5% only and most of them are decayed or burnt
- By improved modern package of practices, agricultural productions can be increased more than 10 times compared to the current level.
In most of the cases, projects in Africa are commercially attractive, as the projects generally replace diesel gensets. For those who know how to manage other risks, by joining hands with domestic investors, Africa offers excellent opportunity to invest.
We have worked with several biomass projects in Africa with sizes ranging from 3 MW to 14 MW. Project developers and investors interested in projects in Africa can contact us.