Just finished reading an article from the Biofuels Review about the Sub Saharan African biofuels market and it got me thinking in two different directions.
First, on a tangent, wouldn’t Sub Saharan Africa be an ideal place for developing solar thermal systems a la the aforementioned Ausra? Granted, there are various externalities and difficulties involved in placing cutting edge tech in developing countries, but wouldn’t this also be putting these technologies to best use?
I am of the opinion that developing countries are an ideal environment in which to prove the validity and scalability of new clean technologies — especially ones that purport to produce cheap electricity from naturally abundant resources. I also believe that this sort of environment would aid to shape these technologies into more intuitive developments that rely on simple, elegant design rather than wasteful, convoluted design that is more concerned with propriety than overall function.
But then again, I’m an editor in Manhattan, not an engineer in Palo Alto or an entrepreneur on the ground in Senegal. What do you think?
Along the lines of biofuels development, I would like to see more emphasis placed on location-appropriate feedstocks. In the case of Sub Saharan Africa, jatropha appears the most well-intentioned and robust choice for the time being. There is even a jatropha-based biodiesel distance training program being offered by the Indian Centre for Promotion and Biodiesel that seems aptly suited to African development.
Jatropha can grow in desert sand, can produce four times the amount of biodiesel per given area than soybeans while leaving behind a formidable amount of biomass that can then be used for mulch, animal feed or alcohol-based biofuels. These crops also function in remediating and rehabilitating damaged land and can serve as a foundational crop for aiding in the successful introduction of various other agricultural plants.
Corn simply does not compute in comparison.
