The very title of this analysis may sound like natural madness in a country that is day by day chaotically governed according to the chaos caused by the free market as we understand it.

This impression of madness caused me to participate in an extremely promising and potentially useful project for the Romanian economy: rooting of some hybrids of sugar sorghum varieties, although I am almost sure that readers will find this topic prosaic, insignificant, having nothing to do with Great Energyand PV (or even Wind) about which not a day passes without hearing how important are they for Romania’s Grand Energy Strategy and how do they decarbonize us and ensure our energy security?!

In more than 3 years, a group of companies, agricultural enthusiasts (we still have one! although some are considered “disappointed”), two agricultural research institutes and several farmers have brought several sugar sorghum hybrids into the country. , planted, grown and collected from representative batches, from all representative agricultural territories of Romania (Moldova, Dobruja, Muntenia, Banat, Transylvania). The results of the tests were simply impressive, confirming what was known: Romania has quality agricultural land (basic soils) that allowed for exceptional test yields.

The reader may rightly ask: yes, what about this?.

Let’s go NEXT

It is common knowledge that Romania (as well as the vast majority of industries) closed almost all sugar factories in the country for various reasons, which we will not analyze now (lack of raw materials, “heaps of old beasts” – the diagnosis of the well-known macroeconomist uncompetitiveness in the free market, etc.)

CONSEQUENCE? Currently, Romania annually imports approx. 500,000 t of sugar (produced mainly from sugar cane, processed in factories in France and Great Britain, from raw materials imported from the former dominions), and which, calculated at the retail price in Romania (min. 6 lei/kg of local white sugar or min. 10 lei/kg of brown sugar) lead to the value at least 1 billion euros/year, imports that largely contribute to the HUGE food trade deficit, Again, a well-known fact to which we are already accustomed – Romania is a net importer of food on the free market!?

In this context, let’s look at some of the results of the trials of crops harvested for sugar sorghum, highlighting that this crop is widely distributed in the world as well as in the EU…not only in Romania!

• Production/ha: 60 – 120 t/ha (very suitable for sandy, arid and water-deficient soils, i.e. exactly what is currently happening in Romania and it will still be emphasized in the future …we all see whole fields with dry crops of corn, due to lack of rainfall or irrigation)
• Sorghum plantation – has an absorption coefficient of approx 50 t CO2/ha, about 4 times higher than any forest or agricultural crops! and releases about the same amount of O2 into the atmosphere!
• In terms of nutrition:
  • From 1 ha of sugar sorghum plantationobtained by pressing approximately 40 t juice with BRICS-20% (concentration of sugar in water), then 8 t Natural syrup BRIX-80% and finally 7 tons of sugar equivalent (healthy!)
  • Sweet sorghum syrup has properties similar to bee honey and, very importantly, does not pose a risk of diabetes, unlike chemical sugar.
  • Sorghum flour is gluten-free, rich in fiber, antioxidants and phenols, making it ideal for bread, cakes, pastries and pasta.
  • ANAMOB – The National Association of the Flour Milling and Baking Industry in Romania, based on the analysis and the certificates provided, issued an official statement on the use of any available amount of sorghum products, I quote: “…to provide the population of Romania with healthy and cheap food. We consider the quality of food for the population to be an element of Romania’s food security.”
  • We do not mention here the many other benefits that this culture brings, a topic that can be discussed in detail separately

Finally, we estimated the agricultural area required to cultivate sugar sorghum (just to avoid importing chemical sugar !), as a result area approx. 71,400 hectares (minor compared to the 8.2 million ha already cultivated out of Romania’s 14 million ha agricultural potential)

THIS IS WHERE THE “PROBLEMS” OF AGRICULTURE START:

• with only 71,400 ha potentially suitable for growing sugar sorghum, the average yield of the raw material is approx. 5.7 million tons, both after processing (into sugar) and after the production of 500,000 tons of sugar, which will exclude imports, approx. will remain 2.88 million tons/year waste called bagasse (actually biomass) of which the industry “must escape”!.
• Combustion tests show that bagasse has a calorific power of about 5 MWh/t, which clearly exceeds forest biomass!, and this means a total primary energy (net!) approx. 14.4 million MWh/year!

HOW CAN WE HELP THE AGRICULTURAL SECTOR TO “GET RID” OF THE WASTE GENERATED IN LARGE VOLUMES?

• A simple look at ANRE’s report on thermal energy consumed by SACET systems in Romania by geographic region shows that in 2021 just over 7 million/MWh/year were consumed.

• WHAT WOULD BE A VERY SIMPLE SOLUTION?

In agricultural areas near large cities that have SACET, LULUCF is compared with the EU Directive (the reader can document what this means online), in the concept of “circular economy” and sugar sorghum is cultivated (crops changed) on certain surfaces. The crop is economically transported (over short distances) inside the large CVTs (all of which have huge storage facilities for coal, ash, or simply have surpluses) where future sugar mills will be built. And, if the sugar/flour/juice plants etc are still being built, there is also a suitably sized pulp (biomass) cogeneration plant being built to replace the old gas/coal plants.

Below you can see the concept at SEN level:

WHAT HAS BEEN ACHIEVED? (except excluding unhealthy sugar imports and replacing them with healthy ones)

• The simple cultivation of 71,400 ha/year of sugar sorghum results in the absorption from the atmosphere of approximately 3.6 million tons of CO2/year and the release of the same amount of oxygen, which is very useful near large cities
• production, through cogeneration approx. 900-1000 MW of green electricity (fully controlled!) and total decarbonization of 7 million MWh from SACET, which would otherwise be very difficult to achieve. We will not go into details, but the production of green electricity and thermal energy will still save approx. 5-6 million tons of CO2/year
• Just by reducing emissions at today’s price of 85 EUR/tCO2, savings of approximately EUR 700 million/year are achieved – /read full article and comment on Contributors.ro