No End in Sight to Rwanda’s Wait for Biodiesel Plant
By Kabona Esiara (The East African) A biodiesel project that was seen as one of Rwanda’s solutions to its high energy bill has run into trouble.
The government launched the pilot biodiesel and bioethanol production plant in Mulindi in Kigali in the hope it would reduce its dependency on fossil fuels, whose prices are unpredictable.
However, seven years later, the pilot plant constructed at a cost of about 200,000 euros, and partly funded by the Swedish government, failed to attract investors.
The government then registered the Rwanda Biodiesel Company to be managed under a public private partnership to start commercial production of biodiesel. The company still remains only on paper.
Scientists at the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (IRST) blame the stalling of the project on the Ministry of Education, which they accuse of sitting on a policy that is crucial to promotion of biodiesel exploration, production and use. They formulated the policy and asked the ministry to present it to the Cabinet. This is yet to be done.
…Without new investors, the project is producing just 2,000 litres of biofuel daily against a projection of 50,000 litres, which would have cut Rwanda’s fossil fuel imports by 15 per cent.
Biodiesel is obtained from Jatropha and Moringa trees, and farmers who had been encouraged to grow some of these plants to cash in on the project now have no market. READ MORE
