Green Fuel halts production without Zimbabwean trading licence

Zimbabwean ethanol producer Green Fuel was forced to stop production at the beginning of last week because it has reached its storage capacity and was unable to offload the product until it received a trading licence from the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority.

However, Green Fuel spokesperson Lilian Muungani said today that they had put the plant back online on Thursday morning.

‘Green Fuel hadn’t been trading before the shutdown and so it was a new trading licence that was being used for the first time,’ she explained to Biofuels International.

Although the project was funded entirely by local Zimbabweans and private investors, Muungani says the government had been supportive of the facility.

‘We have had good government support in the form of tax and duty rebates against goods imported for the project,’ she says.

The company produces about 120,000 litres of ethanol each day and has two million litres currently in storage, its maximum capacity, at its plant in Chisumbanje.

Although the company applied for the licence in August, it took until last week for it to be approved.