June 11 (LPAC)--The Swedish Scania truck company has been at the center of the worldwide ethanol mania since the launching of their ethanol buses 15 years ago.
Scania is the only producer of a heavy engine that can burn it, a diesel that runs on 95% ethanol (E95). An old factory which produces ethanol from the Swedish pulp industry in the north has taken the lead in producing the ethanol and the necessary 5% ignition-improving additive. Called Svensk EtanolKemi AB-SEKAB, it is now going big into Africa and is running 40% of all Brazilian ethanol into Europe.
This Swedish-Brazilian connection goes back almost a century, as Scania has a truck factory in Sao Paolo, as do most other Wallenberg multinationals. Scania, which was formerly a Wallenberg family-owned operation, was sold on March 3 to Volkswagen, which also controls the German truck manufacturer MAN--something that fuels the interest of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made her infamous statement blaming the food crisis on the eating habits of the Chinese at an ethanol production site in Brandenburg.
Ford and GM, with their Swedish daughter companies, Volvo and SAAB, are also big in the international ethanol-promotion organization Bioethanol for Sustainable Transport (BEST). They have made Sweden a center for their development of biofuel cars. Also supporting BEST is Britain's Tudor Capital-controlled grain company, Wessex Grain, which sponsors regional cooperation with the Somerset County site where Wessex has an ethanol production facility.
Other nodes of this cooperation include Brazil, U.K. and Brandenburg--also Rotterdam, Basque Country (sic), Madrid, La Spezia (Italy), and Nanyang (China).
The Stockholm LaRouche movement intervened at the June 4 BEST conference, which was pushing local communities to invest in more biofuel buses and trucks--at an extra cost per vehicle of EU11,000-22,000 to buy, and EU7,000 in added yearly operating cost.
The Swedish SEKAB is trying to take the lead in the control of the ethanol distribution in especially Northern Europe. SEKAB is owned by three power utilities of the cities around the factory, a regional insurance company and the equally politically controlled Social Democratic gas station chain OK, which last December was sucked into a huge renewed funding of SEKAB to pay for both research into making ethanol from wood and aggressive land purchases in Africa.
SEKAB made a deal on April 22, 2008, with the Brazilian construction company Constran, to build an ethanol factory in Ghana that would process and buy all sugar cane from a local producer controlling 27,000 hectares. SEKAB also plans to acquire 400,000 hectares (ha) of land in Tanzania and Mozambique for ethanol crop plantations. They now have 20,000 ha in production in Tanzania and 50,000 ha more under development, with the aim of getting 400,000 ha within 30 years.
Tanzania is the longtime prime receiver of Swedish government aid, which now finances the National Biofuels Task Force of the government of Tanzania. It is also the country where the notorious operator Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Capital U.K., owns a vast game preserve. There is also a heavy German connection there, since Tanzania used to be the German colony Tanganyika. The old colonial control of the biofuels campaign--and not the local taxpayers owning SEKAB and paying for the biofuel buses--is clearly visible in the campaign material of the lobbying organization BEST. There, the leading authority trying to claim that biofuels do not drive up food prices is Frank Rosillo Calle of the British university with the unwashed name Imperial College.
