By combining advanced process knowledge from Denmark, cheap manufacturing capabilities from India and a unique, humanitarian business case in a Kenyan refugee camp, MASH Biotech has found a viable solution for powering the African continent.

The energy challenges of the future will disproportionately affect growing populations in the developing world, where lack of infrastructure and capital has historically stifled the development of utility power as it is known in the Western world. Luckily, it is also in the developing world we find the  regions with the most biomass to energy potential – central Africa being the clear example. In MASH Biotech, we have set out to exploit this massive resource and at  the same time help improve the livelihoods of impoverished populations in Africa and other developing regions.

In MASH Biotech, we realised the potential of addressing both energy-related and humanitarian problems on a grand scale while visiting the remote refugee camp Kakuma in Kenya. Here, more than 150,000 refugees live at the mercy of diesel gensets, requiring massive support via humanitarian aid and adding little value besides electricity to the local population. In MASH, we saw that the gensets could be avoided entirely if our solutions were tailored to produce electricity from the local, widespread, invasive plant species, Prosopis. This would create thousands of local jobs and also result in the production of a valuable by-product “biochar” – a soil amendment material, which could, in time, enable the farming of otherwise arid lands around
the camp.

In short, such a solution could contribute substantially to the overall UNHCR goal of creating self-sustaining settlements, instead of camps requiring massive support from the global community. After realising the humanitarian and commercial potential of using our technology in Kakuma, we set out to develop and perfect a unique, decentralised gasifier in collaboration with our partners in India.

Today, the solution is ready for the market in the form of our MB-G100C gasifier. The MB-G100C can provide both baseload and peak load power at unprecedented low cost – enabling payback times of less than three years. Furthermore, it can be set to output a large quantity of biochar for use in enabling /increasing yields from local farmland. MASH Biotech is working with the Kenyan Red Cross in realising the potential of the solution in the country. However, the potential goes far beyond Kenya. In surveying the biomass availability in countries such as Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa and Mozambique, we are beginning to realise that the MASH  solution really has the potential to form the backbone of Africa’s future power grid.