Indians know better than to eat the plum-sized fruit of the wild jatropha bush. It's poisonous enough to kill.
But with oil prices surging, the lowly jatropha is experiencing a renaissance of sorts -- as a potential source for fuel for trucks and power stations. The government has identified 39.2 million hectares of land where jatropha can be grown, hoping it will replace 20 percent 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 R.K. Malhotra, who oversees the Indian Oil Corp's research center that is running tests on the oil.
PHOTO: AP
India isn't alone. All across Asia, governments are searching for crops that can help them offset a dependence on imported oil that can only skyrocket as their economies soar. 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 for 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 millions of hectares of rain forest on the island of Borneo into palm oil plantations.
Georgia Tech professor Arthur Ragauskas, who co-authored a study of biofuels that was published in Science magazine, sees other potential pitfalls.
"One criticism of biofuels is that if you want to go from 2 percent to 20 percent, you would have to direct so much of that agriculture from food to fuel that there would be real competition between the two," he said in a telephone interview.
"Even 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 said.
For now, alternative fuels are less than 1 percent 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 is trying to commercialize and put up legislation on biofuels," said Conrado Heruela, a renewable energy specialist with the UN Food and Agriculture Agency.
"Right now, the target is not that big but it will be very significant in the long term," he said.
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 percent 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 percent to 25 percent by 2030. Much of this will come from nuclear plants, but it is also examining wind power and other methods including jatropha.
About half of India drives on gasoline with 5 percent ethanol, and the government aims to increase that to 20 percent in the next decade.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
MORE POPULAR: Taiwan Pass sales increased by 59 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the Tourism Administration said The Tourism Administration yesterday said that it has streamlined the Taiwan Pass, with two versions available for purchase beginning today. The tourism agency has made the pass available to international tourists since 2024, allowing them to access the high-speed rail, Taiwan Railway Corp services, four MRT systems and four Taiwan Tourist Shuttles. Previously, five types of Taiwan Pass were available, but some tourists have said that the offerings were too complicated. The agency said only two types of Taiwan Pass would be available, starting from a three-day pass with the high-speed rail and a three-day pass with Taiwan Railway Corp. The former costs NT$2,800
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
RSS