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After giving rubber for many years, the rubber tree can also produce energy. And offer a fuel with a very low carbon footprint. In the current tense energy context, the vein is buoyant.
A year and a half ago, wood pellets delivered to the port of Rotterdam sold for 170 euros per ton. Today it costs 550 euros to European importers. This means that the market is more than buoyant in a context where gas prices have soared. Especially when the price of the wood used has not increased. This is precisely the case with rubber on the African continent, unlike other European woods, which are in high demand.
The rubber tree, renowned for its rubber, also has a second life. After 35 or 40 years, a plantation is no longer productive enough and therefore condemned to felling. In some farms, the waste is destined to be decomposed on site, and act as inputs. But in Côte d’Ivoire, the continent’s leading rubber producer, or in Cameroon, industrialists have launched projects to transform residues into fuel. Either in the form of chips, to supply biomass power plants in Europe, or in the form of wood pellets.
► To read also: Ivory Coast: rubber and its paradoxes
Rubber pellets made in Cameroon
The Compagnie Générale des Granulés (CGG) has thus entered the market and has been exporting pellets from plantations belonging to the Hevecam company for the past year. Objective for 2023: transform 50,000 tonnes of rubber trees that have reached the end of their life. Half of the current production is purchased locally for drying or heating activities. The other part is exported.
This new outlet for rubber could perhaps end up driving up the price of rubber, explains an expert in the sector, but also have a positive effect on other species. ” The current energy crisis could encourage the recovery of scrap from other sawmills in Central Africa », explains Benoît Jobbé-Duval, director of the International Technical Association for Tropical Timber (ATIBT). The Congo Basin countries are indeed working to process more logs locally, with the aim of no longer exporting raw wood. This would imply at the end of the chain a large volume of waste to be recovered in the sawmills and recycled.
Rubber plywood, another challenge
Rubberwood fuel has the advantage of being a good student in terms of decarbonization. Since, being made from wood waste, it offers a neutral or negligible carbon footprint. A good point at a time when climate concerns are taking up more and more space.
The future of African rubber may one day also be plywood, on the model of what is done in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand. But this transformation requires heavier industrial equipment than the transformation into fuel. And a sufficient volume of mature wood to guarantee supply to factories over the long term.