Africa’s Oil Giant To Become Environmentally Friendly

In his office in Lagos, Alain Salleras, a Frenchman of about 50 for whom biofuels are something of a crusade, is working away at his pet project -- producing ethanol from sweet sorghum in Nigeria.

Salleras, executive director of Global Biofuels Ltd, which has partnered with India's Praj Industries and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for its project, is at pains to pre-empt any questions on the growing controversy over the alleged impact of biofuels on agriculture.

Indeed, if he is to be believed, sweet sorghum has only advantages over sugar cane, another crop often grown for biofuels.
He says sorghum requires one quarter of the water that sugar cane needs, it produces two or three harvests a year, you get far more ethanol per hectare under cultivation -- nearly four times as much in fact -- and there is no wastage.

Even the fibrous residue from the crushed stalks, known as "bagasse," is recycled. This biomass is boiled to produce steam to make electricity.

Global Biofuels has taken on a Nigerian specialist Babatunde Obilana, who spent 20 years with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), working notably on Zimbabwe and Kenya.

Salleras, a former executive with French construction company Vinci, the former Societe General d'Entreprises, and compatriot Jean Lamoliatte aim to be producing their first litre of sorghum-based Nigerian ethanol next summer.

In Ondo state to the west of Lagos the sorghum seeds have been sown at Arigidi Akoko and the processing plant will be built by Praj Industries, a biofuels technology company.

Initally Salleras is expecting daily production of 9,000 litres. That is estimated to rise to 240,000 litres a day when the full 10,000 hectares of sweet sorghum are ready for harvest.

By this summer 300 hectares will be ready for harvest and by April or May of next year between 3,000 and 6,000 will be ready.
This is still a far cry from the 30 million litres of fuel consumed every day in Nigeria, but the boss of Global Biofuels has big ambitions.

In three to five years' time he is aiming to produce five percent of Nigeria's total consumption, that is around 1.5 million litres a day.