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| Cycling to save fuel makes cents only if it is not an expensive e-bike, which cost more than a small used car. |
They drilled into me that spending was OK if the return on investment showed a gain, but waste of any kind was never on. Which is why I’m cursed to this day with a compulsion to wash and re-use plastic bags, and get angry every time I have to fill a fuel tank.
Most people feel this fuel tank rage, knowing the billions raised in taxing our fuel will just be wasted in the black holes of our state-owned “enterprises”. But here’s another reason to fume — all internal combustion engines waste almost 80% of all the energy you pay so much for.
I’ve done everything one can — and more — to stop wasting money on fuel. In summer, I cycled the 20 km to work. In winter, I paid to ride the slow municipal bus. Later, I car pooled.
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| The world's fastest hybrid Atos in action. |
When I came to KZN, I went electric, importing the first all-electric motorbike to Maritzburg and later converting a Hyundai Atos into the world’s fastest (and only) all-wheel-drive electric-petrol.
Only one thing remains to do — to grow our own fuel. Brazil is the leader in this, fermenting sugar cane into methanol and refining this into biodiesel. KZN’s sugar cane farmers can also grow bioethanol but to compete with imported fuel under current laws, oil prices have to be higher than $82 per barrel and sugar prices below $290 per ton. This is according to a 2016 assessment by Marcel Kohler, senior lecturer at University of KwaZulu-Natal College of Law and Management Studies School of Accounting, Economics and Finance.
Two years later crude oil was just inching closer to $70 per barrel of crude and sugar over $335 per ton at the time of print. So scratch sugar mills refining biofuels locally.
If the farmers, however, look at hemp instead of sugar cane, these figures go out of the window.
As arid Australia is showing, hemp fibre can be harvested 70–90 days after planting when the stem is five to 10 mm thick, allowing at least two crops a year at conservative yields of 10 tons per hectare, especially in SA’s winter as the plant requires short days and long nights.
Former “bean counter at a bank” and now voluntary chair of the KZN branch of Cannabis Development Council of SA Krithi Thaver said SA is literally bent over a barrel of crude and totally at the mercy of Trump’s tweets when it comes to paying for oil.
He said the charts show the price of crude oil is like a tide that sends SA’s inflation up or down.
Divorcing ourselves from this dependency on the crude we import from mostly Saudi Arabia, Angola and Nigeria will empower the economy in all the ways that giving the Zuptas R10 million from each R50 million locomotive that Transnet ordered from China does not.
Thaver warns that growing our own fuel does not mean it will cost less.
“Growing oil for bio-fuel and bio-degradable plastics may not be cheaper than to import it from bigger players, but the money will stay circulating in the local economy, not go to waste overseas,” he said.
The irony is that SA’s various levels of governments are not blind to the fact that growing biofuel can provide real radical economic transformation in our poorest areas.
A typical government statement reads:“Renewable fuels, such as biofuels, provide an opportunity to expand and diversify South Africa’s energy supply thereby reducing her foreign exchange expenditure and dependence on crude oil imports while at the same time reducing the size of the economy’s carbon footprint.”
But with the same government looking to milk every rand we spent on fuel to the raise R118,7 billion in levies this year, progress will remain slow.
