Dear Editor.
In the previous letter I wrote on this bagasse matter in SN on January 6, I indicated that if Prof Narine from the IAST can take me to an estate where there is a substantial reserve of bagasse to warrant the expenditure of $50 million to buy, import, make a foundation for and install the machine necessary to do this job of making briquettes, not to mention such hum-drum expenditures as manning the machines to produce the briquettes, loading and offloading the briquettes to/from the press, then loading them on to trucks to be transported to some estate which needs them, I would like to accompany him to see it, since finding surplus bagasse today would be like finding a Tyrannosaurus Rex in one of the estates’ bagasse logies. It is why I say that this is unworkable. Not as a technology – I never said so – but as a practical solution as outlined recently by the CEO Raj Singh to the problems which currently face the industry.
I am a manager and I can only deal in facts, not conjecture. By Prof Narine’s own admission he does not know the estates and their problems, and I can tell him that generally bagasse is very limited in the industry today due to the intermittent grinding which he himself has alluded to and which is confirmed by Mr Ken Norman in his letter.
Since I don’t need a pen-pal I have nothing further to say on this matter. I never said that the technology is unworkable; I said that the plan is unworkable, since I am not aware of any estate which produces enough surplus bagasse to make this a viable proposition, and Mr Norman’s submission (a man who has worked in the industry as a factory shift manager) agrees with what I wrote. And so to be experimenting to establish whether Guyana’s bagasse is different from that of India or Australia in order to see if it can make briquettes is actually a waste of time and taxpayers’ money, since the technology to do this has existed since the ’70s. I saw it then at a Sugar Association of the Caribbean (SAC) meeting in Jamaica; in fact they were making chipboard from it. However, the fact remains there is no surplus bagasse to do it.
I think that Mr Norman sums it up well: “I wish to ask that caution be exercised in the commercialisation of this project; if not it could be another addition to the white elephants to this beleaguered company”; and “The problem lies not in the extensive use of firewood in the factories, but the erratic and unreliable cane supply that leads to extensive out of cane, and in the process less bagasse being generated and stored.” I wish to add that I have never met or corresponded with Mr Norman.
Be aware that I am not a big fan of the functioning of the IAST. Demerara Waves on March 6, 2014 explains that after spending a tidy bit of our taxpayers’ money researching the use of converting waste oil to biodiesel fuel: “He (Dr Narine) noted that the waste material that would normally end up in the drains now goes through a process of filtration, then it is heated and chemically processed into fuel that meets and exceeds American and German standard requirements for biodiesel. This recycling process allows the institute to save up to $35M in diesel annually. However, this commodity is not being produced on a commercial scale, due to the limited amount of the waste that is produced in Guyana.” Clearly no lesson was learned from this previous exercise, and perhaps Prof Narine should first find out if the bagasse is available before IAST creates what Mr Norman calls another “white elephant.”
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
