The Hindu Business Line : US in energetic pursuit of alternative fuels

The recent call of scientists and climatologists highlights the need for curtailing, if not eliminating the greenhouse effects, caused mainly by fossil fuels. Predictions of portentous climate changes, with all the consequences of more floods, wild fires and rains in different regions, also include a warning that life on the planet will worsen by degrees, henceforth. One solution for this problem could be bio-fuels.

Bio-fuels have been much in the news in the US north-west, especially as the Oregon State Legislature is considering a wide-ranging Bill to boost production and usage of alternative fuels. The Bill includes an incentive in the form of a benefit package with tax cuts to farmers and industry handling the blending process.Burgeoning interest among consumers and the seriousness of the Federal Government may energise this comparatively small industry.

If the Oregon Bill gets passed into law, there would follow

an automatic insistence, right away, on retailers to sell a 2 per cent bio-diesel blend for every diesel filling, and ultimately increase it to 10 per cent when ethanol manufacture catches up,

a taboo on petrol having the toxic additive meant to achieve high octane level, and

an all-round encouragement to bio-fuel refining units by permitting operations on exclusively zoned-out agricultural land.

There is high expectation that ethanol production will before long rise substantially, as more land is brought under canola, a fast-growing plant whose oil-rich seeds are ideal for bio-diesel production. Some other resources, not uncommon but hitherto lightly exploited, are the piles of urban waste, farmyard manure, and agricultural waste. Of these, the first mentioned, though involving an intense segregation exercise to recover recyclable material, can provide a large volume of fuel for feeding specially-designed boilers that can produce steam for power generation.

As for use of farmyard manure, there is already a well-organised industry in many parts of the US. Agricultural farms and ranches have become dependable supply sources. According to experts, a dairy farm with a herd of 400 cows can yield enough manure to generate biogas to run a power station of a small village. Agricultural waste can also be mixed with the farmyard manure.

The biogas produced from all these materials has a fairly high calorific value. Biogas is, in fact, the outcome of a biological transformation that takes place in a complex natural process commencing in the accumulated manure within a digester. As an anaerobic digestion occurs at a constantly maintained temperature of 95degree F, micro-organisms set off a series of reactions that finally release biogas. The gas is indeed a fitting answer to the pleas for `green power'.

Bio-fuel, when developed on a large scale, will, no doubt, go a long way towards satisfying the appetite of automobiles and for establishing more and more self-contained electricity generation plants in small neighbourhoods and remote villages. Cleaner air quality and low pollution levels would perhaps be the most welcome aspect of bio-fuels. An opportunity that India must also tap.

(The author is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon, US.)

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