Thread by @sarnchos

According to an ethanol production capacity of 8,400 tonnes of cassava to produce 1 million litres of ethanol, Nigeria can achieve self sufficiency in ethanol fuel for automobile use (at 35 million litres per day) if we can only quintuple our current cassava production.

We currently produce 34 million tonnes of cassava annually. Most of this cassava is produced for subsistence.

We only process 75k tonnes into ethanol annually for 9 million litres.

We import the remaining 388 million litres of ethanol annually for various industrial uses.

If Nigeria decided to switch to strictly ethanol for automobile fuel we would need to cultivate at least 90 million tonnes of cassava strictly for biofuel (ethanol fuel) production.

This averages to about 5 million hectares to be cultivated with mechanisation and enhancements

Therefore a quintupling of our current production of cassava will revolutionise our agriculture, create massive jobs both in the downstream farming and upstream processing sectors in a crop where we are world leaders in production.

I repeat, we have no competition globally

in cassava production.

If we step up this crop, we will easily become a net exporter of ethanol.