Ethanol gasoline crops to replace biodiesel project

The government's policy on producing crops for energy will refocus on crops used for ethanol gasoline after efforts to grow crops for biodiesel over the past two years proved inefficient, a senior Agriculture and Food Agency (AFA) official said yesterday.

AFA Deputy Director Yu Sheng-feng (游勝鋒) said that as part of the efforts to promote the use of biomass energy, the agency planted biodiesel crops, including soybeans and sunflowers, on 1,721 hectares of fallow land in Yunlin, Chiayi and Tainan counties last year.

EXPANSION

This year the cultivation of such crops was expanded to 24 counties and townships nationwide, including Taoyuan and Taipei counties, on a total of 3,334 hectares of fallow.

However, harvests were far less than expected because of inclement weather and pests, Yu said, adding that the harvests were only sufficient to fuel a fleet of vehicles used in government biomass energy programs such as the "green government vehicle" program launched in September.

SWEET POTATOES

Because of this, Yu said, efforts will turn to plants such as sweet potatoes, which are one of the main crops used in the production of bio-ethanol.

Faced with an international energy crisis as crude oil prices skyrocket, the government is betting on biofuel crops to alleviate the problem within Taiwan, the AFA said.

NOBEL LAUREATE

Meanwhile, former Academia Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲), a 1986 Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, urged the government to speed up efforts to cut the nation's emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the factors in global warming.

At a conference on national parks and forests hosted by the Construction and Planning Agency in Taipei earlier yesterday, Lee said that the country is inching forward at a snail's pace in its efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.