Tor Anders Petteroe Company

Zambia is a country that’s hugely reliant on the import of fossil fuels and is a long way from being able to honour the SADC and Paris Accord targets for green fuel.

It also has one of the lowest GDPs per capita in Africa and over a million homes that rely on subsistence farming to get by.

Zambia is home to only one refinery, which is located in Ndola. It’s currently closed and undergoing a $400 million refurbishment plan. The Indeni Petroleum Refinery generally completes short-term fuel supply contracts when it is open.

The refinery was dubbed “inefficient and technologically unsuited for current fuel needs” by the World Bank, leaving the country some way behind in terms of a fuel industry, fossil or otherwise. With its closure, the country is importing all of its fuel.

Other Potential Fuels

With all fuel being imported, Zambia would do well to have other sources of fuel and even an operational refinery.

Greener options are available and energy crops are a great way to create feedstock for syngas and clean diesel.

Through pyrolysis, energy crops can be broken down into clean diesel, which is chemically identical to the version made from fossil fuels. This means that clean diesel can actually be mixed with traditional diesel and even help Zambia meet the targets set by the Paris Accord.

The best of these energy crops is the miscanthus giganteus, a perennial hybrid of grasses native to Asia. The cultivation of this plant is rather expensive, but once established, it requires very little maintenance, can be harvested yearly and will last over 25 years.

The plant offers a high yield and is very calorific. It can be used to create solid, liquid, or gaseous green fuels in as pellets, green diesel, syngas, etc.

One company has decided this is the way to solve a lot of Zambia’s problems.

SavSmart Biomass

With founding investors like Michael Silver and Tor Anders Petterøe, local and international NGOs, several universities from the US and Zambia, and specialists in refining organic compounds into syngas, SavSmart Biomass is setting up miscanthus giganteus plantations in the northeast of the country to harvest the plant to turn it into biomass and biofuels.

Not only will this help with Zambia’s green targets and the difficulties it faces with domestic fuel production, but it’ll also help to address another one of the country’s biggest problems: deforestation.

Zambia has the highest rates of deforestation in the world due to large amounts of its population living off the grid and using charcoal for heating and cooking. The biomass produced from the miscanthus giganteus plantations can be used as fuel for heat and generating electricity and can also provide alternative sources of income for local charcoal producers.

As the project and capacity expand, Zambia will be able to wean itself off of charcoal while also producing greener fuels at the same time.

With the plantations, nursery, and planned syngas refinery, SavSmart Biomass is expected to create hundreds of jobs in Muchinga Province.