Asia races to find crops to replace imported oil

Multinational plans
Other countries are using the interest in biofuels to boost their farming sector.

Malaysia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, has issued 10 licenses for plants to produce biodiesel for export, mostly to the European Union, which has mandated that all fuels should contain 5.75 percent biofuels by 2010.

Decatur, Ill.-based Archer Daniels Midland last year announced plans to build a $29 million biodiesel facility in Singapore.

BP is spending $9.4 million to study jatropha in India and in March announced it will produce 29 million gallons of ethanol a year by 2007 in Australia, which aims to substitute 2 percent of oil use by 2010 with ethanol.

British-based D1 Oils is investing up to $20 million mostly in jatropha in India, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Jatropha environmentally friendly?
The Indian government says it has successfully run dozens of trucks and buses on jatropha-based biodiesel and 18.5 million acres of jatropha saplings are growing along the country’s railroad tracks. It intends to start mixing 5 percent or 2.6 million tons of jatropha into diesel by 2007, which would require planting 6 million acres of jatropha.

Seeds from the jatropha fruit are crushed to produce a yellowish oil that is refined and then mixed with diesel. Yields remain open to debate, with the Indian government saying they could be up to 4 tons of biodiesel per acre of jatropha — or just a fifth of that — depending on how successfully farmers cultivate it.

It appears to have advantages in Asia over competitors like palm oil, since it can be grown almost anywhere, meaning it won’t compete with food crops and so far has not appeared to threaten rain forest and other environmentally sensitive areas.

Chris Chatterton, chief executive officer of D1 Oils Southeast Asia, sees jatropha as “a major competitor with palm oil.” And a nonedible source is an advantage over rape seed or sunflower oil, he says, because “You are not taking land that would otherwise be used for food ... It is a bit bourgeois to take edible biodiesel so Europeans can drive around in their Mercedes.”

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