Ethanol Refinery in the Offing

Nigeria’s First Ethanol Refinery: Can the indigenous technology help lower the nation’s carbon footprint and better preserve its natural environment?

–By Yange Ikyaa

Bashir Umar Shehu, a  graduate of petroleum engineering of the Abubakar Tefawa Balewa University, Bauchi has constructed a modular refinery that produces ethanol fuel from sugar cane.

The ethanol fuel so produced, he said, “can be used in powering our generators, our motorcycles, our motor vehicles as substitute for gasoline that we commonly use and that is harmful, pollutes the environment and does not burn efficiently, as gasoline has high emission of greenhouse gases into the environment.”

Pointing to a model of his ethanol refinery, while in a chat with Valuechain, Shehu said that “this particular plant produces ethanol from sugar cane, and what we do with this sugar cane is that we shred it, crush it and extract the juice from sugar cane, and ferment it into ethanol.

“We heat the sugar cane juice and it rises up to condense ethanol, which is 96 percent anhydrous ethanol that burns efficiently without smoke and it burns with a blue flame. This is very efficient and can be used in blend with the commonly used gas. It can also increase the air rate of gasoline, which is 87 percent, and that of ethanol is 119 percent. Mixing this together can give you over 90 percent air rate.”

Shehu’s new technology may be the much awaited means for Nigeria to lower its very carbon footprint and embrace a much cleaner energy path to economic development, while minimizing fuel import losses.

This is because official figures indicate that Nigeria accounts for over 40 per cent of the gas flared annually across Africa, which amounts to about $7 billion in waste. This makes the country to lose over $2.5 billion to gas-flaring annually.

Nigeria also accounts for an estimated two billion standard cubic feet of flared gas, which amounts to about 19 per cent of gas flared globally. The Nigerian legislature has, therefore, set in motion the machinery to review the 39-year-old law which recommends only N10 pcf as fine for gas flaring.

During his time as the Group Managing Director of NNPC, Engr. Funsho Kopolokum, said that Nigeria would be richer by $150 million annually when the bio-fuel initiative of NNPC comes into being.

He stated that the bio-fuel project which is part of the country’s alternative energy development strategy is geared towards utilizing our agricultural potential in cassava and sugar cane to produce ethanol that can serve as a good alternative to petrol currently in use.

Under the initiative, two types of automotive fuels were to be developed, namely ethanol fuel and palm oil diesel. The ethanol is derivable from processed cassava or sugarcane, while the palm-oil diesel is produced by chemical process, which removes glycerin and can be used in any concentration with petroleum based diesel fuel with little or no modification.

As part of the implementation of the project, special research initiatives were to be sponsored by NNPC to boost cassava and palm-oil output within the country, leading to the setting up of several ethanol production plants at an average cost of $60 million each.

NNPC said it had commenced the modification of its import reception facilities located at Port Harcourt and Mosimi area in readiness to distribute the bio-fuel product.

Cooperative agreements were considered with a number of institutions among which are the University of Agriculture, Makurdi, the International lnstitute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, and the Nigerian Cereal Research Institute (NCRI) to execute the research component of the project. The corporation also promised to sponsor research in universities and other research institutions that will lead to high yield of sugarcane and cassava.

There were even reports of Memorandum of Understanding for large scale sugarcane and cassava production Benue and Jigawa States.

Yet, many years down the line, there is nothing tangible to show for such talk about biofuel policy and multiple memoranda of understanding to move them from theory to reality.

Instead, as recent as September 2018, NNPC said it had again signed two Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in China with Nigerian-Chinese consortia to build not less than ten large biofuel complexes across the country.

A statement signed by NNPC’s spokesperson, Ndu Ughamadu, stated that the signing ceremony was held at the Nigerian Embassy in Beijing on the sidelines of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit.

The statement quoted the group managing director, Dr. Maikanti Baru, as saying that the execution of the MoUs would help develop the first biofuel production complex in the country. He also said that the development of not less than three other complexes would commence before the end of 2018.

The two separate MoUs were signed between NNPC and the OBAX-COMPLANT Consortium on one hand and NNPC and CAPEGATE-NANNING Consortium on the other hand.

Repeating the same thing that Kopulokun said over a decade ago, Ugamadu also quoted Baru as saying that “the MoUs signing was aimed at implementing the federal government’s mandate on clean, alternative and renewable energy programmes, particularly automotive biofuel production nationwide.”

“The aspiration for the exploitation of renewable fuel resources in Nigeria is to implement our nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement; part of which requires the blending of 10 per cent by volume of fuel-ethanol in gasoline and 20 per cent by volume of biodiesel in automotive gas oil (diesel) for use in the transportation sector,” Baru stated.

This means that so far, only MoU is in place for a policy that has been heralded for nearly two decades. However, if this dream is actually to be pushed further at this time, there will be a scalable Nigerian refining technology that can readily help the country meet her local content requirements and also develop her indigenous energy purification technological base.