Asia seeking sources for biofuels

FARIDABAD, India — Indians know better than to eat the plum-size 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 98 million acres 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," says R.K. Malhotra, who oversees the Indian Oil Corp.'s research center that is running tests on the oil.

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 acres of rain forest 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 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 told said.

"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."

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 U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency.

"Right now, the target is not that big but it will be very significant in the long term," he said.