EFFORTPOST You guys ever heard of the failed Ethanol factories in South Africa ??

Greetings Dramastrags1!

Back in 2006 some farmers in Safrica had the galaxy brained idea to invest massively into what would be described in Afrikaans newspapers as Etanol!

Now I was like 13-14 years old approximately when this fricking shitshow went down in the Free State, Northern Cape and Gauteng provinces, so please forgive me if this is likely the least accurate Longpost I have ever posted. I was only a rugrat, and my memory is hazy additionally Google fricking sux donkey balz and is literally getting worse by the year.

Combined with linkrot, and that most best news of the past was on Newspapers, and not web articles, I have to try and piece this together into something resembling truth.

Back in the year 2000, a Boer farmer came back from Burgerland, where he had attended a conference on creating biofuel from agricultural produce, for the sake of combatting Climate Change, and to create a future substitute for the finite coal and liquid dinosaur we use to fuel our cars and electrical generators.

In 2006, Al Gore and his Inconvenient Truth was big in the conscience of Safrikans at least (no idea how he was viewed back home), and a lot of people were discussing the necessity of preparing for a post oil/coal world. At that moment in time, a lot of people also feared that the scum in the Arab-Oil countries was too dominant in their monopolistic supply of oil, and had the earth entire's balls in their hands. Regardless of where RSA would find itself in an ideological conflict, it wasn't a nice feeling , considering 99% of RSA both back then and now was generated via burning coal.

Additionally at that moment in time, RSA's trains and railway system was degrading at the speed of light, and lorries were becomming the main form of transport of goods to all inland villages and towns and cities, and would be especially vulnerable to any chainsupply disruption, you know the same way Europe cucked itself when it made itself dependent on Russian gas prior to the Ukraine invasion.

Well the farmer Hannes Haasbroek (surname literally translated as rabbit-pants ) had been raving for 6 years at this point about the benefits of biofuel, especially Ethanol, as the Amerikan conference he had attented the agriculture conference in the United States six years ago, and was inspired by the novel and potentially lucrative idea of distilling maize into bioethanol fuel for vehicles.

The reason being that South Africa was a massive producer and exporter of both White Maize, Sweet Maize, and Yellow Maize, and thus had the already pre-existing agricultural resources and farmlands ready to extract raw materials from, should such a nationalized endeavor ever be undergone by SA.

https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/61085/south-africa-ethanol-boon-or-bust

======(from article)

The fertile fields that appear to stretch unbroken across Free State Province, South Africa's heartland and breadbasket, may well prove the epicentre of an economic revolution as significant as the discovery of gold and diamonds more than 100 years earlier.

The plan is deceptively simple: turn food into fuel.

Bioethanol is an alcohol refined from almost any starch crop humans eat - maize, sugar cane, beetroot, wheat - and is championed by supporters as both an environmental and economic panacea to the world's dependence on fast-disappearing fossil fuels.

Ethanol emits much less carbon dioxide (CO2) gas than regular gasoline, is cheaper to buy and, unlike oil or coal, is a renewable source of energy: simply plant more of it if you run out.

The reigning kings of the global biofuel industry are the United States and Brazil, where millions of tons of sugar - a staple crop in the South American country - are processed into an astonishing 16 billion litres of ethanol annually.

Brazilians are literally driving on sugar. Most of Brazil's service stations offer ethanol at a substantially lower price than traditional gasoline, and the country has replaced about 40 percent of its gasoline consumption by switching to ethanol, a sweet dividend with oil prices hovering around US$70 a barrel.

"Africans have the potential to become the Arabs of the biofuel industry," said Johan Hoffman, chief executive of Ethanol Africa, the company that plans to build eight biofuel factories across South Africa.

"There is a potential to use vast areas of this massive continent for biofuel production, and all that is needed is water and an electricity supply," Hoffman said. "Africa has the potential to provide energy for the world - who is going to supply the growing economies of China and India? We already know there is a finite amount of oil left in the earth, and it is being used in enormous quantities and will soon be gone."

While bioethanol might be the tonic that quenches the world's thirst for energy, it also holds the promise of bettering the lives of thousands of poor, rural Africans by providing farm and factory jobs, and ensuring a steady market for maize, sugar and other commodities.

"The [South African] government wants to create jobs in rural areas and redistribute land from white to black farmers, and bioethanol production could be the solution to both problems," Hoffman said. "Bioethanol will create jobs, not just for the farming industry, but for whole communities, and uplift the poor."

====(end)

However many people were sceptics of this scheme, and many were not convinced that Ethanol could be produced cost effectively to even pay for itself, and thus make Ethanol Biofuel competetive against traditional oil.

====(again from articlr)

"It is well documented - it takes energy to make energy, and the amount of energy it takes to grow and harvest these crops barely produces a surplus return," he said. "While bioethanol production makes some sense with high oil prices, I don't think our government has wrapped its mind around all the consequences, and studies that should be done, haven't been done."

Scientific debate rages around the process and results of transforming food into fuel, with many saying the numbers simply don't add up.

Ethanol distilled from sugar gives a decent energy return, but add up all the energy it takes to grow a field of maize, and the amount you get back is barely more than you put in, critics say. Besides that, biofuel is much less efficient than regular fuel, so even if it is cheaper to buy, it will not move your vehicle nearly as far.

How much maize is needed to move a car, a truck, or a fleet of buses? A hectare of land - 1 sq.km or about the size of two football fields - yields an average of 4 tonnes of maize. Each tonne of maize can be distilled into 420 litres of bioethanol, plus some ancillary products. The two football fields would thus produce about 1,680 litres of ethanol.

According to a report in the Washington Post newspaper, the entire American maize crop would provide enough ethanol fuel to replace only about 12 percent of the country's gasoline requirements.

====(end)

Point being that Ethanol while a decent alternative to regular oil and petrol, was much less efficient, and at that moment in time in 2006, many were not really sure as to how much actual fricking fuel was being produced in terms of liters per hectars.

There were a lot of concern from prospective investors about whether there was actually enough surplus Maize/mielies as men like Hannes Haasbroek claimed would be, so that the production of Ethanol would not interfere with the supply of annual maize which consisted of the staple food supply for rural south africans in the regions of Limpopo, Mapumalanga and the Free state. South Africans ate all of the food domestically, and could not afford to relinquish that food security to produce fuel that wasn't even as effective as dino-liquid.

Safrican economists were FULLY aware that a country would lose tenfold GDP product, and economic tax bases, if it was ever put in the position to be forced to import food to sustain its shortfall, which the economic collapse of Shri Lanka in 2019 displayed.

====(from article)

"The grain required to fill a 25-gallon (about 114 litres) SUV [sports utility vehicle] gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year," said Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in a statement. "The grain it takes to fill the tank every two weeks over a year will feed 26 people ... The 55 million tons (about 50 million tonnes) of US corn going into ethanol this year represent nearly one-sixth of the country's grain harvest, but will supply only 3 percent of its automotive fuel."

While some bristle at the idea of the poor and hungry competing with luxury all-terrain vehicles for the world's supply of grain, Ethanol Africa says it will use only yellow maize in its factories, and not the white maize favoured by consumers.

Environmentalists, who have resisted blindly embracing bioethanol as a viable answer to energy supplies, have raised other concerns. Biowatch South Africa, an NGO concerned with food security and promoting organic farming methods, reels at the bioethanol industry's dependence on genetically modified (GM) crops in South Africa

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You guys get the idea.

But our raging capitalists went forth and built factories all across the Free State, after all the past 2 decades showcased that Maize/Mielie farmers were amongst the most productive on Erath and have had general surplus for as long as the country had been a democracy, and thus more than enough for Ethanol refineries after the food cut had been taken by tractors the outlooks were positive, prospectors and investors were salivating

https://www.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/G02285.pdf

Strangely enough RSA was already exporting Ethanol, but mostly in the form of byproducts from refinaries or factories, and not for the intention of creating biofuel for vehicles, especially not domestically. The Ethanol produced locally was usually used or generated by local Oil magnates like SASOL

The specifics however is greek to me. What is important, was that this was used as an argument by the new Ethanol Africa factories as supporting their arguments that RSA already had a framework of generating Ethanol, now it just wanted to created 1000 times that amount, and with Maize.

However private companies still needed the backing of the government, in the form of tax breaks, subsidies or allocation/disallocation of levies for biofuel to allow such a fledgling industry to be able to get off its feet, and at that time the ANC was very tepid, and was swinging either way.

Finally however by the end of 2006, the ANC finally gave their go-ahead to enable and support Ethanol production, provided that Maize surplus remained as high as they had been for the past decade, Ethanol companies went full r-slur and proceeded to mega overinvest even with this very lukewarm reception the government had given to Ethanol production.

SHIT HITS THE FAN: EL NINO STRIKES SOUTHERN AFRICA:

So wtf is an El Nino??

It's a naturally occurring climate pattern associated with warming of the ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which can significantly influence weather patterns, ocean conditions, and marine fisheries worldwide.

They can and do occur across the whole world. In Southern Africa they tend to cause abnormally dry and extremely hot heatwave

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/05/what-is-el-nino

El Niño is a climate phenomenon that occurs when a vast pool of water in the tropical Ocean becomes abnormally warm. An El Niño is officially declared if the temperature of the eastern tropical Pacific rises 0.5C above the long-term average. The extreme El Niño year of 1997-98 saw a rise of more than 3C.

El Niño is one extreme in a natural cycle, with the opposite extreme called La Niña. The effect of climate change on the cycle is not yet understood, though some scientists think El Niño will become more common.

https://www.citizen.co.za/north-coast-courier/news-headlines/local-news/2015/08/13/understanding-el-nino

"Every two to 10 years the pressure gradient force that raises the easterly trade winds in the Pacific region, weakens, causing the trade winds to relax, sea temperatures to change and ultimately plunging south eastern Africa, Indonesia and parts of Australia and parts of South America into drought.

El Niño (the dry phase of ENSO) normally lasts between 12 and 18 months and is the reason KZN is being held hostage by the current drought.

Under normal conditions, the high pressure cell over the eastern Pacific Ocean (west coast of South America) and the low pressure cell over the western Pacific (Indonesia and east coast of Australia) create great differences in air pressure, creating the easterly trade winds in the Pacific region (wind always blows from a region of high pressure to low pressure)."

You guys can see where this is going

As the incredibly bad luck would have it, RSA would experience a one in 10-15 year event, where we suffered abnormal drought, and in 2007 RSA was under the chokehold of the worst of droughts since democratization.

https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/highlights/2007/05/southern_africa_corn_may07

"The severe drought is one of the worst droughts to hit South Africa's main corn belt since 1992. In addition, South Africa this year will have to import over one million tons of yellow maize when South Africa is typically considered an export granary for the region"

For the 1st time in 20 fricking years, RSA had to IMPORT maize instead of exporting it, as you guys can imagine there sure as shit was not surplus of maize for any hairbrained scheme involving turning the nation's fricking food into some unknown car fuel.

"The El Niño induced drought also drastically reduced grain production for countries that border South Africa's corn belt, such as Lesotho and Swaziland. For example, crop production in both these countries is currently estimated by USDA to be 40 percent less than last year and Swaziland is facing the sixth consecutive year of poor harvests. "

The big issue was that basically all of the neighbouring countries which also farmed maize didn't have surplus as well, all that shit had to go home to feed the local market.

Anyways you guys get the idea, basically it looks like Ethanol might be killed in its cradle and the EThanol-factories are boned

https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/highlights/2007/05/southern_africa_corn_may07

"Ethanol Africa has started construction of South Africa's first corn ethanol distillery at Bothaville, the center of South Africa's corn belt (see Figure 6). The Bothaville distillery plant (Figure 7. will be the first of eight similar plants to be built in South Africa, with one proposed plant at Sasolburg to utilize grain sorghum instead of corn. The other six corn distilleries will be located at Middelburg, Lichtenburg, Bultfontein, Ventersdorp, Frankfort, and Bloemhof (see Figure 6). Construction of the Bothaville plant is expected to be completed by the second quarter of 2008, and a large portion of South Africa's emerging farmers on resettled farms will be given contracts to grow and supply yellow corn for the proposed distillery plants."

Yep they screwed

Also see this picture of the unbuilt factory storeroom, THIS FRICKING STOREROOM had remained so since fucnking 2007 lmoa

ETHANOL INDUSTRY BONED:

https://www.farmersweekly.co.za/archive/setback-for-bothaville-ethanol-plant

To make matters worse for out promising capitalists, the ANC gov had already started balking from supporting the Ethanol enterprise and backtracking from their support in 2006. There wasn't any gov subsidies in sight, not with the mass poverty of RSA to gamble on unknown (at the time) biofuel.

So when the El Nino struck in 2007, it was basically the end, many dudes went baNkrupt, and made themselves a laughing stock, because just like Coinbros and shitcoins, a lot of suckers would make themselves annoying in gossip groups by bragging about how they were going to make shitheaps of money cuz Ethanol was a massive industry in places like Brazil.

So when the entire enterprise got in its cradle, these annoying guys would never live it down.