Ribbon cut on Mozambique’s first cooking fuel plant

The opening of its first sustainable cooking fuel facility in Mozambique, Africa occurred this month.

Owned by Cleanstar Mozambique (CM), a company formed by Novozymes and Cleanstar Ventures in 2010, the facility will produce 2 million litres per year of ethanol-based cooking fuel from surplus cassava supplied by local farmers that follow CM’s sustainable farming techniques.

Opened by the Federal minister of Agriculture, José Pacheco, the cooking fuel will go on sale with CM’s cookstoves and provide a cleaner and safer solution to using charcoal.

‘This marks an important milestone in the mission to eliminate dirty cooking fuels from Africa’s leading regions’, says CM chairman Greg Murray. ‘This facility produces clean cooking fuel in a way that generates a reliable new income stream for local farmers, while ensuring that a continuous and affordable fuel supply reaches urban households.

‘Our private-sector led approach in Mozambique provides an encouraging example for other resource-constrained African countries that are struggling to respond to rising food and energy prices, growing cities and shrinking forests.’