Angola has been riven by conflict and it’s more than three decades since the government subsided sugar cane production, but now a 30,000 hectare area of land is to be planted with sugar cane in a dual attempt to establish a biofuel industry and to rebuild the poor agricultural sector which suffered after years of conflict.

Oil rich but food poor

Angola’s economy has been largely dependent on oil and diamonds since the civil war ended in 2002. Now the government aims to recreate some farming sectors. The country used to produce sugar, but for many years the entire sugar consumption of Angola has been imported. Now, in an attempt to decentralise industry away from Luanda, to boost farming and to create new jobs, the sugar cane project is taking shape.

It’s hoped the plantation will produce 280,000 tonnes of sugar from its own processing plant, and that the waste will be used, along with the ethanol harvested from the cane residue, to produce around 217 megawatts a year of electricity.

Foreign investment fears

While this is a multi-layered project, the tendency of African nations to invest in non-food crop is worrying the FAO which says that private and foreign ownership of large tracts of African land could destabilise local communities who will be deprived of access to water, food and other natural resources. The company managing the project, Biocom, is a three way partnership between Brazil’s Odebrecht, Angola’s Damer, and Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company. African governments need support to build the agricultural infrastructure that will allow them to become food secure, but partnership processes like this one are often viewed with suspicion by local people who fear that they will lose their land, or that the crops will be grown or processed in ways that have been outlawed in the developed world.

Sugar cane courtesy of Cristobal Alvarado Minic at Flickr under a creative commons license

The energy giant BP and Martek Biosciences, a Maryland based company that uses micro algae to produce oil-based nutritional and dietary supplements, signed a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) earlier this month to produce microbial oils for biofuels applications.

Under this agreement, BP will provide the cash — up to $10 million for just the first phase — and Martek will provide the research expertise in algae fermentation technology. The idea is to develop a cost effective method of converting basic sugars derived from biomass into lipids, or microbial oils, with fermentation microorganisms. Chemical and thermocatalytic processes would then convert the oils into various types of biofuels.

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Without Brazil, Can America Reduce Gas Consumption 20% Over Ten Years?

This ambitious “twenty-in-ten” gasoline reduction is the Bush administration’s goal. But without Brazil’s ethanol it may be an uphill battle. With US corn setting record prices this year, it’s no surprise ethanol made from US corn is $2.90 a gallon while ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane is less than half the price at $1.40 a gallon. Even after the tariff, Brazil’s ethanol would be almost a dollar a gallon cheaper than ethanol produced domestically from corn.

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Corn ethanol is also causing some very interesting political discussions that result in strange bedfellow alliances on all sides of the argument. Conservative and liberal labels have no real meaning in this discussion; even regional boundaries are being made fuzzy by the varying impacts of the market changes.

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Ethanol is an alternative biofuel that can be made from corn, sugar cane, or switchgrass. In fact, Henry Ford’s first mass-produced automobile was designed to run off of 100% ethanol, so the fuel has a long history in the car industry. When added to gasoline, ethanol reduces ozone formation by lowering volatile organic compounds and hydrocarbon emissions.  This all sounds good, but there is controversy surrounding corn-based ethanol. Michael Grunwald of Time reports that one person could be fed for a year “on the corn needed to fill an ethanol-fueled SUV”. Some research demonstrates that the production of corn ethanol consumes more energy than it yields, and there is concern that corn-based ethanol is raising the price of food, although the USDA denies the increase is significant.

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You might want to try Ecoflame. Their Warming Gel serves the same purpose, but is made from sugar cane derived ethanol, rather then coal or petroleum based as many conventional options are, and the packaging itself is recyclable, the label made from sugar cane. The first question that comes to my mind is, where does this sugarcane come from? Is it harvested sustainably? Yes it’s a renewable resource, but does it consume more then its fair share of resources to be made?

That said, it’s non toxic, and has no toxic emissions. The same cannot be said for the others, that require ventilation in order to not be damaging to you.

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