Green Electricity, Powered by the African Bush!
It sounded to me like the biblical story of Moses and the Burning Bush. As an African who maintains a second home (nearly all of us do) somewhere deep in the African bush, what more use of the bush could I think of other than to put my livestock to graze in the scorching sun whole day, then return home with a few dry wood sticks to light up the yard fire under the twilight moon while ebbing away at my favorite roast corn cob? Or where the wild animals make their homes?
Aha, the African Bush! Savor a-bush-to-electricity energy project in the African hinterland! What’s the connection? Well, it controls the wildlife habitat in a positive way that ensures an ecological balance in the Namibian bush, provides a source of livelihood to surrounding communities by opening more space in the farmlands as a way of community conservation and powers local homes and businesses by feeding the electricity grid!
I like what they called the project: CBEND or Combating Bush Encroachment for Namibia’s Development because an 1MW electricity plant will be entirely powered by harvested invader bush and the electricity produced will be supplied to the national grid using technology dubbed wood gasification.
Ten million hectares of land containing up to 10,000 bushes per hectare will be freed to produce between 5 to 25 tons of biomass per hectare in a bush thinning process that allows re-growth from the roots with a repeat maturity period of 10 to 15 years. This translates to 125 million tons of biomass or 500 TWh.
Like I mentioned earlier, Africans hold their cattle so dear and overgrown bush can be a hindrance to their productivity with less grass available for the animals to feed on. Namibians, who import most of their electicity from neighboring South Africa, would improve on energy self-sufficiency. But the bush still remains a major energy source - firewood and charcoal - and most families probably have never heard of bush chips or briquettes.
The CCF or Cheetah Conservation Fund and the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia collaborated in this project. The bush chip production trials for this study were conducted in 2007 on a 36,000 acre CCF farm, 200 kilometers from the capital, Windhoek, where wood chips for briquettes are made in a factory within the facility.
The wood gasification process is based on the Johansson Gas Producer System, a technological principle where all tar is cracked at extremely high temparatures ensuring that the gas produced is free from tar.
In the CCF chip production process, the bushes are cut by axe. After cutting, the bushes are carried to the side of the skid road. The skid roads are 50 metres apart. The bushes are placed in piles by the skid road, where they are dried to 15-20% moisture content.
In Namibian weather conditions, it takes two to three weeks of drying for the bush to achieve this moisture content. When the bush is sufficiently dry, it is chipped in a drum chipper. The chipper blows the chips straight into a tractor trailer, which takes them to the briquette factory 40 km away. Two trailers equipped with tipping gear are attached to the tractor.
After thinning, 200-250 bushes remained in the cutting area. The average yield in the test plots was 7 tonnes per hectare. The productivity of chipping was 20.1 tonnes per day and of road transport 10.5 tonnes per day, when the transportation distance was 50 km.
The bioplant of 5 MW under review uses 32,000 tonnes of chips per year at a moisture content of 20%. To produce this amount using the existing production chain requires 198 men, in addition to the machines. The production cost of the chips, calculated for a transport distance of 30 km, is €5.1/MWh. Chipping costs are the largest individual cost item.
What’s more; the wood logs are marketed under the trade name Bushblok and when you purchase them, you will be helping in the effort geared towards the production of economically viable and environmentally friendly electricity from non toxic materials and at the same time ensure the long term survival of the cheetah and other indigenous species, in turn participating in wildlife conservation. Now that’s some green electricity, powered by the African bush!
Sources and further reading: BR, CCF, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland
Image courtesy of Flickr
This is very good news. As I understand it, throughout the countryside in many African countries, food is is traditionally cooked over an open fire. I have heard that wood for these fires generally comes from trees. The problem with this, which they are experiencing especially, I think, in Madagascar and Tanzania, is that they’re running out of trees for wood. This also causes deforestation. If fuel can be obtained from bush, that seems like a significant improvement.
Also, I have Tanzanian friends who work in the countryside on a couple of related projects through Roots & Shoots. One project is to grow tree nursuries. The other is to sell or donate more fuel-efficient stoves. These are really just stoves that have walls so that the heat does not escape out the side of the fire.
Great post. Thanks for the news!
[...] What plants might be grown, just for bio-fuel? - Today, 10:14 AM Just African Bush? Green Electricity, Powered by the African Bush! : EcoWorldly It seems destructive, yet they say it is a good idea. Perhaps you need to be there to [...]
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[...] Green electricity, powered by the African bush!By Sam Aola Ooko The wood gasification process is based on the Johansson Gas Producer System, a technological principle that all tar is cracked at extremely high temparatures ensuring that the gas produced is free from tar. …EcoWorldly - http://ecoworldly.com [...]
hey wat up i think we should conserve the electricity because it burns up alot of coal every tome you flip on a light switch so start conserving