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  The Straits Times 1 May 06
Push for biofuels
Associated Press

Faridabad (India) - INDIANS know better than to eat the plum-sized fruit of the wild jatropha bush. It is poisonous enough to kill. But with oil prices surging, the lowly jatropha has found favour as a potential source of fuel for trucks and power stations.

The government has identified 39.2ha of land where jatropha can be grown, hoping it will replace 20 per cent of diesel consumption in five years. 'We have found that we can produce biodiesel from it. If we can keep the price down, the future looks bright,' said Indian Oil Corp research boss R.K. Malhotra.

India is not alone. Across Asia, governments are searching for crops that can help them offset dependence on imported oil. Palm oil and sugar cane are the dominant crops in the region, but everything from coconuts to castor oil to cow dung is being tested to provide fossil-fuel alternatives such as ethanol and biodiesel.

Most experts also believe that, using current technologies, there isn't enough land to make a serious dent in oil consumption.

Some scientists say production will consume more conventional energy than it will save, and environmentalists came out this month against plans by Indonesia to convert huge areas of rainforest on the island of Borneo into palm-oil plantations.

Georgia Tech Professor Arthur Ragauskas, who co-authored a study of biofuels published in Science magazine, sees other potential pitfalls: 'One criticism of biofuels is that if you want to go from 2 per cent to 20 per cent, you would have to direct so much of that agriculture from food to fuel that there would be real competition between the two...worse, if we have a famine in part of the world, we would have to make a decision as a society between food or fuel,' he writes.

For now, alternative fuels comprise less than 1 per cent of current fuel usage in most of Asia, and experts say their large-scale use is years if not decades away.

Still, every country in Asia was trying to commercialise and put up legislation on bio-fuels, according to renewable-energy specialist Conrado Heruela. 'Right now, the target is not that big but it will be very significant in the long term,' he said.

Ethanol, distilled mostly from corn in the United States and from sugar in Brazil and Asia, is mixed with petrol. Biodiesel comes mostly from rapeseed in Europe, vegetable oil in the United States and palm oil, coconut oil and jatropha in Asia, and is mixed with diesel.

Ethanol produces 13 per cent less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, a study published recently in Science magazine found, while the US Department of Agriculture says biodiesel can reduce carbon emissions by 78 per cent.

Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej has a car that runs on palm oil and he has been touting the substitute fuel for more than 20 years. Hundreds of service stations in the capital, Bangkok, sell gasohol - petrol with 10 per cent ethanol - which is slightly cheaper than regular petrol. Thailand also grants the sugar industry tax breaks to produce ethanol and is following the US in a plan to replace the toxic fuel additive MTBE with ethanol.

Still, supply is not matching demand. On some Pacific islands, whose isolation makes oil imports more costly and vulnerable to market shifts, power companies are looking for other sources.

'The use of alternative fuels is very much the topic of the moment among the small utilities in the Pacific,' said Jean Chaniel, the general manager of Unelco Vanuatu, whose company runs some generators on 5 per cent coconut oil. The Fiji Electricity Authority plans to switch entirely to renewable energy by 2011.

India says it wants to increase its use of renewable energy from the current 5 per cent to 25 per cent by 2030. Much of this will come from nuclear plants, but it is also examining wind power and other methods including jatropha.

In China, the government is promoting ethanol and is financing nuclear, hydroelectric and solar power, aiming to increase renewable energy sources from 7 per cent to 15 per cent by 2020.

High oil prices and rising car ownership meant there was great market potential for renewable vehicle fuel, China's National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement.

Other countries are using the interest in biofuels to boost farming sectors. Malaysia, the world's largest producer of palm oil, has issued 10 licences for plants to produce biodiesel for export, mostly to the European Union, which has ruled that all fuels should contain 5.75 per cent biofuels by 2010.

Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland last year announced plans to build a US$29 million (S$46 million) biodiesel facility in Singapore, and British Petroleum says it will be producing 110 million litres of ethanol a year by 2007 in Australia.
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