Bioethanol Standards: Critical to Fuel Expansion

Expanding the use of bioethanol into clean cooking applications involves more than just pitching the benefits.

A liquid with uses that range from fuel to solvent to disinfectant to recreational beverage faces a dizzying array of rules, taxes, regulations and misconceptions that must be overcome before consumer uptake can scale adequately. Making that process flexible and easy, for countries in Africa in particular, has been a priority for clean cooking advocates.

Barriers to entry

In efforts to promote clean cooking in Africa, biofuel advocates faced significant hurdles just getting the fuel into countries, said Kristy Moore, technical and regulatory consultant with Growth Energy.

“We had an issue where our product was being stuck in customs in these various locations, and we were having a very difficult time explaining and conveying to them ‘Hey, this isn't alcohol for drinking, and it's also not an ethanol clean fuel for gasoline markets,’” she said.

Taxes for beverage alcohol are dramatically different than are taxes on bioethanol for use in transportation fuel, cooking fuel, or industrial applications.  

Standards overcome challenges

Pivot, Moore, POET, and others began to work with ASTM International, which creates technical standards on a variety of materials and products. From that effort came ASTM E3050, “Standard Specification of Denatured Ethanol for Use as Cooking and Appliance Fuel”.  With that standard in hand, they began advocating for its adoption; the standard provides greater flexibility for producers, traders, and distributors on a global level, but maintains the requirements necessary to provide a clean fuel to consumers.

“We explain what the product is; we identify the product as cooking fuel. So we match up an international standard with what the product is, and the product can go through customs without all of these impediments and all these questions,” Moore said.

Selling the standard

Key partners in efforts to reform policy and standards have been USAID and the Standards Alliance, a public/private partnership that seeks to overcome the technical barriers to trade, which include standards and regulatory challenges.

David Jankowski, former Program Manager for the American National Standards Institute, has worked through the Standards Alliance on efforts including clean cooking. 

It started with a two-day workshop in Uganda to introduce the ASTM standard, answer questions and determine if there were areas that needed to be addressed to comply with that country’s needs. Uganda quickly adopted ASTM standards for bioethanol cooking fuel. Shortly after, a similar effort in Zambia led to their adoption of the standards.

“What [the Standards Alliance is] trying to do is harmonize trade and the standards and regulations that underpin trade,” he said. “And so programs like this one help to support a more clear vision for what trade might look like, making sure that any standards that do underpin regulation in or on the African continent meet international best practices and international standards.”

Easing the way for proactive policy

Jankowski has observed a ‘bottom-up’ approach to standards and policy development in the US, a process that attempts to include all perspectives and stakeholders. In the interest of engaging with developing markets, the standards are typically created with an eye toward how the private sector is producing or using a product today, and those private players are intimately involved in the process.

Sometimes governments prefer a ‘top-down’ approach that allows for faster implementation; the risk in developing policy this way is that you can miss important aspects of how an industry operates. It is vital to engage stakeholders in a meaningful way that results in developing inclusive policy and effective regulation - transparency and careful consideration of feedback is critical for this process.

“Oftentimes you miss stakeholder opinions, you lose buy-in because people feel like they're not part of the process or they're just being lectured to,” he said. “Especially if it's developed with a blind spot to a certain area of that sector’s work. You could pretty easily miss something that's very critical to encouraging investment.”

That’s why good work on standards is so important. Moore says it has been critical for her and groups like Pivot to help countries encourage bioethanol use.

“They're educating these other countries that are unaware of this clean fuel,” she said. “And then we push the spec into those markets. ‘Oh look, we've already got all this built, all these resources for you. Here are the stoves, here's the fuel, here's how we can get it to you.’ And then we can push that into the markets and you've got a turnkey package.”

Moore said the groundwork has been laid for even more progress in the future; Pivot is actively leading the charge in key geographies to open up access for bioethanol in the household space.

“We've got the business case, the environmental case, and we've got a regulatory case. All of that is built together. I think we've got quite the arsenal,” she said.