Pakistan faces a 6 gigawatt energy supply gap, meaning the electrical grid falls short of demand by 40 percent on a regular basis. That’s the equivalent of 3 Hoover Dams of energy production.
Power shortages can lead to increased death tolls during heat waves, darkness in large portions of a major city like Karachi and factory closings, ending thousands of jobs.
EnMass, a green biomass start-up based in Durham has announced that they will begin their first large-scale 50 megawatt biomass project in Pakistan next spring, with plans for another 200 MW in 2018. Their projects could power the equivalent of 975,000 homes in Pakistan, or 365,000 in the U.S.
Andrew Joiner said the company creates reliable energy from agricultural biomass, which can then be generated off the national or local grid. They work with bulk producers, industrial users, manufacturers, commercial users or an organized community to provide energy.
Mark Little, executive director of the Kenan Institute and director of NCGrowth, said biomass can refer to anything from burning wood to gasification, the process that EnMass will use. His work in economic development includes energy initiatives through NCGrowth, an initiative of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-CH to help businesses create jobs and communities create sustainable and equitable opportunities.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, gasification converts organic materials at high temperatures, with a controlled amount of oxygen or steam, into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. Plants consume carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of the growth process as they make biomass, which offsets the carbon dioxide released from producing hydrogen through biomass gasification. This results in low net greenhouse gas emissions.
“Gasification presents lots of advantages over burning material,” Little said. “But any time you change the form of biomass, you do lose some energy. While burning the gas produced through gasification will ultimately be better for the environment … it does cost more.”
By using agricultural biomass, such as cotton stalks, in this process, farmers in Pakistan could benefit both from removal of waste and earn income with the energy.
“There’s enough biomass generated in Pakistan to cover at least half the entire country’s shortfall,” founder and CEO Andrew Joiner said. “They are missing about six GW of power, and you could generate economically about three GW of power from biomass in Pakistan.”
Joiner said that EnMass chose Pakistan as their first location because a co-founder is from Pakistan, and he had technical experience and connections there.
Joiner and the other founders of EnMass, Hasan Anwer and Ryan Dilts, met while in graduate school at Duke University. Anwer was at Duke on a Fulbright scholarship, and his application was to address the power crisis in Pakistan.
Joiner said Pakistan grows around 10 percent of the world’s cotton in a concentrated area, and the headquarters of that area is a heavily industrialized area that processes cotton into textiles that are used in the US. He said some of the clients who would be receiving energy from the biomass plant weave, dye or process cotton into khakis, T-shirts, sheets or towels that are sold in the US or Europe.
“There is a new policy in Pakistan where you have to get rid of waste due to invasive species that are hurting other crops,” said Joiner. “By working with us, not only do they get their biomass removed, but they get paid for the biomass waste. It’s an extra revenue stream.”
Since EnMass’ beginning in 2015, Joiner, Anwer, and Dilts have been slowly moving along the development timeline by raising money, finding partners, and ensuring a robust and sustainable supply chain of biomass.
“Just to kind of provide a glimpse of how much: this is collecting 500,000 tons of agricultural waste, cotton stalks and corn stalks, used corn cobs, processing all of that into a smaller, uniform fuel and then moving 100,000 tons of that fuel to individual projects in different areas,” he said. “It’s a logistical nightmare, but we made sure that we had the partners with requisite expertise aboard, in addition to building up our team and establishing operations.”
The founding team says they continue to look for new areas for international expansion.
