Biofuels boom in Africa as British firms lead rush on land for plantations

Controversial fuel crops linked to rising food prices and hunger, as well as increased greenhouse gas emissions

An Ivory Coast nursery for jatropha, a non-edible plant whose oil-rich seeds can be processed into biodiesel. Photograph: Kambou Sia/AFP/Getty Images
British firms have acquired more land in Africa for controversial biofuel plantations than companies from any other country, a Guardian investigation has revealed.

Half of the 3.2m hectares (ha) of biofuel land identified – in countries from Mozambique to Senegal – is linked to 11 British companies, more than any other country.

Liquid fuels made from plants – such as bioethanol – are hailed by some as environmentally-friendly replacements for fossil fuels. Because they compete for land with crop plants, biofuels have also been linked to record food prices and rising hunger. There are also fears they can increase greenhouse gas emissions.

A market has been created by British and EU laws requiring the blending of rising amounts of biofuels into petrol and diesel, but the rules were condemned as unethical and "backfiring badly" in April by a Nuffield Council on Bioethics commission. In the UK, only 31% of biofuels used meet voluntary environmental standards intended to protect water supplies, soil quality and carbon stocks in the source country.

There are no central records of land acquisitions in Africa, but research by the Guardian revealed the scale of the biofuels rush in sub-Saharan Africa – 100 projects and 50 companies in more than 20 countries.

Crest Global Green Energy has the largest recorded landholding, 900,000ha in Mali, Guinea and Senegal. Tom Stuart, the chief executive, said: "It is true in some cases [that biofuels displace food], but in our projects we 'inter-crop', planting as much food as biofuel on the marginal land we have brought into agricultural use. There is a large social element to our projects, with all the local people needing to be in agreement, and that's normally written into contracts at government level."

Another UK company, Sun Biofuels, leased 8,000ha in Tanzania where it grows Jatropha curcas, a non-edible plant whose oil-rich seeds can be processed into biodiesel. "We'll start harvesting and producing in two years," said Peter Auge, office manager in Tanzania. "The main attraction for us is exporting to Europe."

Claims that J curcas use prevents biofuels competing with food because it grows easily on marginal and arid land unsuitable for other agriculture have been challenged even within the industry. "Growing jatropha in a profitable way on dry lands is a myth. It needs water, fertilisers and pesticides to provide high yields," Auge said. Jamidu Katima, at the University of Dar es Salaam, is critical of biofuels guidelines adopted by Tanzania's government in 2010. "There are no plans to build refineries, nor obligations for foreign investors to reserve part of their output for the domestic market," he said.

Another risk is that biofuel use could increase carbon emissions by increasing destruction of forests when displaced local farmers clear land. The Institute of European Environmental Policy recently said carbon released from deforestation linked to biofuels could exceed carbon savings by 35% in 2011 rising to 60% in 2018. Currently, this indirect impact is not considered in European sustainability guidelines.

James Smith, professor of African and Development Studies at Edinburgh University, said: "Private investment is running far ahead of our knowledge of the impacts of biofuels, such as land dispossession. This action is eroding the UK's position of enlightenment on development issues."

Unpublished research by the charity ActionAid, seen by the Guardian, confirms the picture of scores of projects amassing millions of hectares on the east and west coasts of Africa. "I suspect the estimates are actually quite conservative," said Smith.

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat junior transport minister, said: "I consider the sustainability of biofuels to be paramount. No biofuel will count towards our targets unless it meets certain sustainability requirements. But we are pushing [Europe] to go further, to reduce the risk of knock-on effects, including deforestation in new areas."

He added: "Only a tiny proportion – less that 0.1% - of UK biofuel has come from Africa."

As oil prices rise, said Jeremy Woods, a lecturer in bioenergy at Imperial College London, biofuels could boom. "Once oil is over $70 a barrel, conventional and new generation biofuels become cost competitive. When oil and biofuels are competitive, we are into a different world."

Expansion of the biofuels industry has been fuelled by capital raised on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange. In the Guardian survey Italy is the next biggest player with seven companies, followed by Germany (six), France (six) and the US (four). Brazil and China have been acquiring land in Africa for biofuels and food but the investigation identified only a handful of established biofuels projects. The database of biofuels projects in Africa was compiled with the help of the University of California Berkeley's Africa Reporting Project.

Some projects provide local benefits through investment, employment and local use of the produce, but many do not, says Lorenzo Cotula at the International Institute for Environment and Development, who recently analysed 12 contracts from African land deals. "Some of the contracts we analysed only contain vague and unenforceable promises." Some have 100-year leases, at very low or free rent and priority access to water, he added. "Extensive commercial plantations dislocate rural communities from their land", said Cotula. "Instead, self-managed biofuels production can offer cheaper energy and complementary sources of income".

The chief executive of Sun Biofuels, Richard Morgans said: "Our company produces sustainable and ethical biofuels – categorically yes. We would welcome higher sustainability standards, but you do have to balance this with economic development. If you are a local [in Tanzania or Mozambique] and need a job, you probably aren't worried about whether the orangutans sleep at night. It's also insulting to say African governments can't run their own affairs."

A community-based approach is embraced by a few investors. "Our farmers in Mozambique are given seedlings to grow jatropha on their own land with the option to sell the seeds back to us," says Chris Hunter, of UK-based Viridesco. "We help smaller plantations that cater to the developing world markets, as opposed to big monocultures that service the developed world's energy needs".

UK companies were the first into Africa in 2005, but this has not been without problems. D1 Oils froze its export plans and started supplying locally in Malawi and Zambia, following the failure in 2009 of its joint-venture with BP, which doubted jatropha's market potential. Last year GEM Biofuels, operating in Madagascar, suspended its LSE quotation for four months.

The revelation of the central role of UK companies in biofuels coincides with a report from Oxfam forecasting that the price of staple foods will more than double in the next 20 years. The report identifies biofuels as a factor and demands that western governments end biofuel policies that divert food to fuel for cars. "We are sleepwalking towards an age of avoidable crisis," said Oxfam's chief executive, Barbara Stocking. "One in seven people on the planet go hungry every day despite the fact that the world is capable of feeding everyone. The food system must be overhauled."

Biofuels grown in African countries

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	NUMBER OF COMPANIES	COUNTRIES WITH LAND CONCESSIONS
UK	11	Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania, Zambia
Italy	7	Congo Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Senegal,
Germany	6	Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia,
France	6	Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Guinea, Mali, Mozambique Senegal, Togo
USA	4	Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda
Canada	4	DR Congo Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya, Zambia
Scandinavian countries	4	Ghana, Tanzania
Belgium	3	Cameroon, Ethiopia, Tanzania
Switzerland	3	Malawi, Kenya, Sierra Leone
Netherlands	2	Tanzania
Cyprus	1	Ghana, Ivory Coast
UK COMPANY	LAND CONCESSION	COUNTRIES WITH LAND CONCESSIONS
Crest Global Green Energy	900000	Guinea, Mali, Senegal
Gem Biofuels	452500	Madagascar
Equatorial Biofuels plc	80000	Liberia
Kavango Bioenergy Ltd	70000	Namibia
Jatropha africa	50000	Ghana
Cams Group	20000	Tanzania
Principle energy	20000	Mozambique
Sun Biofuels	13000	Mozambique, Tanzania
D1 Oils	5000	Malawi, Zambia
Viridesco	175	Mozambique
Sustainable Agroenergy	n.a.	Senegal
Source: data research, not including unverified projects
Remark: concessions include all negotiated land, whether it is only agreed, formally leased or already used

• 
  
  

Safety a priority at nuclear plant in Byron, Ill.

Byron nuclear plant

The Byron nuclear plant in Illinois is engineered to withstand an earthquake between 6.0 and 6.9 on the Richter scale.

View Gallery

BYRON, ILL. — The earth rocked, the tsunami rolled and Japan’s nuclear disaster got the undivided attention of every nuclear plant operator in the world.

That includes Tim Tulon, who runs the Exelon nuclear power plant in Byron, Ill., about 50 miles southwest of Janesville.

“It was tough to watch,” said Tulon, who prefaces any discussion about the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear complex with the disclaimer that generalities—not specifics—are known about the March 11 disaster.

“It appears the unit survived the quake very well; it did not survive the tsunami.”

The situation in Japan also got the attention of people who want to know if such a disaster could happen in their backyards.

Sitting in his office at the Byron Generating Station, Tulon qualifies his answers, preferring to address specific risks individually.

A repeat of Japan?

It’s not likely, Tulon said.

The Byron plant is engineered to withstand an earthquake between 6.0 and 6.9 on the Richter scale. That’s a design feature for an earthquake centered at the plant site, which means it could withstand a stronger quake with an epicenter hundreds of miles away.

The famed earthquakes of New Madrid, Mo.—450 miles from Byron—registered about 7.5 on the Richter scale when they struck in 1811 and 1812. The U.S. Geological Survey pegs the chances of a reoccurrence in the next 40 years at 7 percent to 10 percent.

“Generally, we’re not thought to be in a seismic zone in Byron,” Tulon said, noting that the plant’s components are protected in reinforced concrete that far exceeds historical earthquake risk data.

At about 870 feet above sea level and 950 miles from the nearest ocean, Byron is not likely to be swamped by a tsunami. If a tsunami did reach Byron, Tulon said, the status of the nuclear plant would be far down the list of catastrophic concerns.

A 19-foot seawall protected the Fukushima plant, but it was no defense for the 46-foot wave that arrived nearly an hour after the earthquake in Japan.

“That was a tremendous challenge to deal with,” Tulon said. “We’re not worried about a tsunami here.”

Flooding

As any neighbor knows, the Rock River often overflows its banks. In 2008, it did so in record style.

The Byron Generating Station is both neighbor and partner with the Rock River, which is the main source of water to cool the plant’s two nuclear reactors and used fuel pool.

The plant is 146 feet above the river. Its highest recorded flood level is 53 feet—93 feet below the plant’s footings.

Tulon said the plant’s emergency systems are protected from water incursion with watertight doors, specially designed flood barriers and key equipment located far above potential flood levels.

A loss of power

The plant’s electricity comes from an independent switchyard that’s connected to the power grid by four transmission lines.

Should that fail, the plant has four diesel generators that would kick on immediately. They could run around the clock for months, and underground tanks that can be refilled as needed fuel the generators that are housed in a separate reinforced concrete rooms.

Four banks of large emergency batteries back up the generators. They are capable of running for at least four hours to provide power for a safe shutdown and cooling of the plant.

Tulon said that the greatest environmental threat to the plant’s power capacity most likely would be in the form of a tornado.

Terrorism

While Tulon won’t say it directly, visitors get the sense that Byron officials are much more concerned about a potential attack from people rather than Mother Nature.

To that end, Exelon is deadly serious about plant security. The company in the last 18 months has spent more than $11 million on detection systems, fencing and barriers at Byron.

That’s on top of millions spent on security upgrades after 9/11, an event that changed the face of security forever.

On a recent visit, the first person a Gazette reporter and photographer saw on the site was carrying an M-16 assault rifle.

Thirty minutes later, the pair cleared an initial security check and entered the first of several turnstiles and checkpoints they would encounter during a plant tour.

The plant has more than 100 officers and supervisors patrolling the facility.

Security is certainly sensed but rarely seen.

“It’s there,” Tulon said. “You will not see all of our security strategy.”

Each August, the plant’s security team engages in what’s called a “Force on Force” drill against a team of former federal special operations agents.

“Everyone has laser-enabled service rifles, and it’s basically a huge game of laser tag,” Tulon said. “They physically try to take the plant.

“We have to win, and we do.”

While the Byron team usually wins, it always walks away with a sense of plant vulnerabilities that need to be shored up.

“The federal government determines the threat levels, and we have to be able to defend against them,” he said.

After 9/11, nuclear plant operators became more concerned about attacks from the air, Tulon said.

Such an attack—a terrorist flying a plane into the 1,800-acre site—could create problems if it happened at non-nuclear portions of the facility, such as the turbine facility or dual, 495-foot-tall cooling towers.

The reactor containment building, however, has thick reinforced concrete walls that Tulon said would crumple an incoming plane.

“That’s something we are always looking at and bringing additional equipment, upgrades and redundancies into play,” he said.

Nuclear fuel storage

The basis for the Byron plant, as well as other nuclear power facilities, are fuel assemblies, also called fuel rods, solid structures made with numerous uranium-filled pellets.

Each eraser-sized pellet produces the same amount of energy as 2.5 tons of wood, three barrels of oil or one ton of coal.

When plants are done with fuel assemblies, they typically are stored in fuel pools, which are steel-lined, concrete vaults filled with water. There, they cool rapidly but continue to be radioactive.

National energy policy designated a site—Yucca Mountain, Nev.—as a national repository for spent fuel assemblies. More than $12 billion dollars and generations of politics later, Yucca Mountain has yet to accept any of the 65,000 tons of spent fuel now stored near reactors in 33 states.

In addition to wet storage, nuclear plants store the spent rods in dry casks, which are round concrete containers lined with steel.

“You can walk right up to them and hug them without any danger of being exposed to radiation,” Tulon said.

The Byron facility—where the safety manual is the gospel—started moving used rods to dry casks last year. It has six that contain a total of 192 used assemblies on its outdoor storage pad. Each cask can withstand heat up to 1,475 degrees and winds up to 360 mph.

Inside the plant, another 2,559 spent fuel assemblies bathe in the pool, which has capacity for nearly 3,000 assemblies.

“The reason most are under water is because we were waiting for a national spent fuel repository to be built,” said Paul Dempsey, Byron’s communications manager. “When it became apparent the government wasn’t going to meet its obligation to do that, we started the dry cask process.”

Since Byron’s two units went online in 1985 and 1987, the facility has generated spent fuel assemblies that would fill a four-car garage, Tulon said.

Volume-wise, that’s considerably less waste than that produced by coals plants, which generate just more than half of the nation’s electricity.

Tulon said nuclear energy has the lowest environmental impact of any major source of electricity, and it is by far the largest source that doesn’t produce greenhouse gases.

“Still, it’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” he said.

Local preparedness

Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

That’s the strategy in Rock County and beyond when it comes to responding to a nuclear incident at the Byron Generation Station about 50 miles southwest of Janesville.

The nuclear plant is required to stage an extensive drill every two years with first responders within a 10-mile radius of the plant. Federal officials grade the drill.

In off years, the plant conducts a wide variety of other drills, said Paul Osgood, a spokesman with Exelon, which owns and operates the Byron facility.

“In a very hypothetical situation, if something were to drift (toward Rock County and Wisconsin), there would be a series of handoffs to other responders,” Osgood said. “We would provide the information, and they would make any declarations.”

In Wisconsin, the Department of Public Health and the Division of Emergency Management have a “Radiological Emergency Preparedness Program” that’s responsible for developing and maintaining and executing nuclear incident emergency plans.

Primarily, those plans are directed at the Kewaunee and Point Beach nuclear plants along Lake Michigan southeast of Green Bay and the Prairie Island plant just across the Mississippi River near Red Wing, Minn.

Lori Getter, public information officer with the emergency management division, said the plans include detailed incident response plans, equipment and trained staff.

The division, she said, is prepared to help counties with a radiological incident.

Getter said that while the state’s response plans primarily target nuclear plants and storage facilities in Wisconsin, they would easily be applied to a situation emanating from the Byron plant.

Shirley Connors, Rock County emergency management coordinator, said county responders and the Local Emergency Planning Committee would use their network to work with the state if the situation warrants.

“The key thing we would do is communicate with the public,” Connors said.

Local hospitals have plans to deal with a nuclear incident, but the plans are targeted more at their own facilities, employees, patients and visitors than the general public.

“People affected by radiation would not likely be transported here, and if they were, they’d likely be segregated outside the facility,” said Morgan Landi, safety and risk manager for Mercy Health System, which operates Mercy Hospital and Trauma Center in Janesville.

Landi said Mercy and other Wisconsin hospitals are not equipped to deal with a widespread nuclear situation. Most, she said, have internal decontamination rooms that are designed for chemical situations involving one or two people.

“We all have mobile decontamination, but all we’re really prepared to do is chemical decontamination,” she said.

Landi said the hospital has internal plans to alert staff that a contamination incident has occurred and the risks it carries.

The hospital, she added, is prepared to work with local, state and federal authorities in response to a nuclear incident.

When it opens early next year, St. Mary’s Janesville Hospital will have an emergency preparedness team modeled after its team at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison.

In the event of a nuclear hazard, the hospital would launch its disaster plan, and the top incident command positions would determine what parts of the plan to enact.

“There would be extensive communication with other health care providers and the state to ensure everyone is working from the same page,” said Steve Van Dinter, a spokesman for SSM Health Care of Wisconsin.

A nuclear hazard would pose a couple of challenges, he said.

“The first would be how to treat the patients coming in that may have been exposed to radiation while also protecting our staff from any hazards,” Van Dinter said. “Secondly, if the radiation plume were to drift north, and patients were in need of evacuation, we would work with hospitals in other parts of the state to find out where there was extra bed capacity and then transport those patients there.”

---

Published at: http://www.GazetteXtra.com/news/2011/may/29/safety-priority-nuclear-plant-byron-ill/

Merkel Coalition to Shut Nuclear Plants

By Rainer Buergin and Brian Parkin bloomberg.com

Germany moved closer to a plan to become the biggest nation to exit nuclear power, with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition endorsing a shutdown of atomic plants by 2022, capping her reversal on energy policy.

EON AG and RWE AG (RWE), the two biggest utilities, led declines on the benchmark DAX stock index, with both dropping more than 2 percent and RWE slumping to its lowest since December 2004 as the government retained a tax on spent fuel rods.

The decision in the early morning hours today by coalition leaders in Berlin underscored Merkel’s flip-flop from a 2009 re- election promise to extend the life of nuclear reactors. She did her about-face after the March meltdown in Japan as the anti- nuclear Green Party gained in polls. Her party lost control of Baden-Wuerttemberg to the Greens in March and finished behind them in a state election for the first time on May 22.

“As far as the government’s credibility is concerned, it was about damage limitation,” said Bernhard Jeggle, a utility analyst with Landesbank Baden Wuerttemberg in Stuttgart. “Those people who wanted to exit nuclear probably voted Green in the first place and will continue to choose the original rather than Merkel’s copy.”

Germany’s BWE renewable energy federation said this year its members were prepared to spend as much as 200 billion euros ($286 billion) by 2020 to develop wind and solar power. Merkel wants to present five or six bills in Cabinet on June 6, including a revamp of feed-in-tariffs for solar, wind and bio- mass power, new building insulation targets and plans to build new “smart” power grids.

Businesses and utilities opposed Merkel’s move, warning of increased costs and less reliable power sources.

Nuclear Supply

Nuclear supplied some 22 percent of German power in 2010, while renewable sources provided 17 percent, the Economy Ministry said. Europeis split on the future of nuclear power, with France and the U.K. planning more reactors while Germany joined Switzerland in setting an exit date and Italy extended a moratorium on plans to re-enter atomic energy.

Germany is Europe’s largest power market, followed by France. Germany last year was a net exporter of power to France, sending 16.1 terawatt hours to the country compared with imports of 9.4 terawatt hours, according to data published by grid operate Reseau de Transport d’Electricite.

“It’s hard to see how they will replace the energy,” Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive officer of French state-owned Areva SA, the world’s biggest maker of nuclear equipment, said on BFM Radio. “I’m not sure there is enough Polish coal, and it creates carbon problems. Alternative energy sources are intermittent sources. I think they will do what Austria did in its time: import nuclear electricity from neighboring countries.”

EON slumped as much as 2.5 percent to 19.52 euros and was down 2.1 percent as of 9:20 a.m. local time in Frankfurt trading, extending the stock’s decline to 15 percent this year. Smaller rival RWE tumbled as much as 2.5 percent.

Fukushima Impact

Merkel in March said she sought to accelerate the shutdown of Germany’s atomic power plants following Japan’s Fukushima disaster, the worst nuclear crisis since 1986. The decision reversed a 2010 plan to extend the operation of the facilities by an average of 12 years.

“The seven oldest reactors that have been placed under a moratorium and the Kruemmel nuclear power plant won’t go back online,” Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen told reporters following the coalition talks. “A second group of six nuclear power plants will go offline at the end of 2021 at the latest and the three most modern power plants will go offline 2022 at the latest.”

Coalition divisions over the timing of a phase-out deepened after the Greens finished ahead of Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the state of Bremen May 22. Merkel said last week she’d await results of an independent feasibility study on a quicker phase- out, to be published today, before setting a date.

Rising Pressure

Merkel’s Free Democrat coalition partners, backed by the BDI industry group, urged her to show flexibility in the run-up to 2022. FDP Chairman Philipp Roesler told reporters that his party advocated a phased shutdown to avert the risk of a power gap. The Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats, sought a 2021 shutdown date.

Roettgen said everybody attending the meeting agreed that “network stability and security of supply has to be guaranteed at every hour and at every level of power consumption,” adding Germany’s network agency will take the necessary measures to guarantee this.

A tax on spent fuel rods introduced this year to cover some of the costs of their disposal as well as help the budget will stay on the statute books, Roettgen said.

Stock Price Fall

EON and RWE are among the worst performers this year on Germany’s 30-member benchmark DAX index (DAX), having dropped 12.5 percent and 17.9 percent respectively.

With the possibility that a federal election in 2013 may result in a new government, Merkel is seeking broad backing for revamping nuclear policy.

Roettgen said there won’t be a revision clause, meaning there’s “clarity about the end” of nuclear power in Germany that can’t be turned back.

The CDU’s “Wirtschaftsrat” or council of affiliated companies, said Merkel’s “go-it-alone” nuclear policy in Europe may add billions of euros to power bills paid by industry and consumers.

“I’ve heard lots about a phase-out of nuclear power but little about the costs of phasing in renewable energy,” its President Kurt Lauk told reporters in Berlin on May 25.

To contact the reporters on this story: Rainer Buergin in Berlin at bparkin@bloomberg.net; Brian Parkin in Berlin at bparkin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net