Biofuels - for the hearth, not the car for now

It is good to see that Mr Vinod Khosla, VC No1 (and former Sun Micro Chief?) is 'fired up' by bio-fuels, going by this article of 26th in the ET (Economic Times - www.economictimes.indiatimes.com) and his guest-edited ET edition of Monday, 29th August '05. I have also noted his optimism for storming the Rajasthan Desert and other arid wastelands with Jatropha.

I am sure that with his grip on learning curves and over further trips to India, Mr Khosla will note that:

1 Regardless of arguments on Pongamia pinnata or Karanj Vs Jatropha or the harm done by Jatropha, a mono-culture is an environmental hazard with disastrous consequences. Look at the havoc wreaked by enthusiastic eucalyptus-dominated aforestation drives.

2 When our existing forest cover is depleting at a frightening rate, arresting that will always get more priority over developing energy forests.

3 The plantation development business is in total disrepute and hence it will take an uphill task beginning with intense political lobbying, ranging to confidence-building measures to develop a nation-wide spread of energy plantations.

4 Assuming success in the above three areas, there are results going back to the 70s, notably the Gasohol experiment of Indian Oil Corpn which was abandoned on finding out that even to replace about 30% of petrol with ethanol/methanol would need seven (?) hectares of land per car each year. Assuming that cars today are more fuel-efficient, their population has spiralled.

5 Several other experiments on vegetable fuels have been carried out and a gamut of regionally-appripriate solutions will be needed. This will mean a problem in standardising quality of each type of fuel, much needed if auto manufacturers are expected to honour their warranty obligations. Auto manufacturers like Telco in India have experimented with Jojoba among other bio-fuels, as back as the 80s. Their experience too needs factoring.

6 Further, Auto manufacturers will need to be made stakeholders as much as petroleum companies by utilising their R&D and distribution in a synergistic way. This will be yet another issue.

7 Even after clearing those further hurdles, the disseminated resource in the plantations or forests will mean a lot of infrastructure and energy invested in harvesting, local processing, transport to refineries, central processing, homogenising & standardising, quality checks and finally, distribution. These costs and investments may reverse some or all the economy as compared to petroleum.

8 Instead, would it not be more advantageous to simply focus on the rural food sector?

9 If so, the disseminated nature of this forest/plantation resource can spawn local village cooperatives where each villager gets credit for cooking bio-fuel in exchange for his supply of some input. This stake will assure sustenance of the trees.

We also have successes in biogas and biomass gassification that need to be consolidated.

Waste vegetable oil recovery processes are also simple, economical and need more discipline than resources to exploit.

10 Thereby, sufficient trees and their growth rate can be sustained to make every village self-sufficient in cooking oil and TOTALLY REPLACE KEROSENE as presently used in progressive stoves and lamps.

11 Further, wood stoves can be replaced with bio-fuel (veg oil or bio-gas) fired stoves and ovens. technologies are available and various State Nodal Agencies under the MNES have done good work in this area too.

12 Likewise, kerosene in oil lamps can be replaced by vegetable oil, as ponghum is already used. Several thousand women and children (Millions, globally, as per an ITDG report.) are either blinded or choked to death by kerosene vapours from lamps in cold regions each year. Solar photovoltaics driving CFL and LED lamps are the cleanest alternative.

Such a GHAS TEL HATAO campaign focused on the food sector instead of aping the West on the transport sector will free up rural kerosene + LPG demand and the vast amounts of pollution as well as the associated subsidy funds.

I shall appreciate Mr Khosla's consideration of this.

Regards

Udit Chaudhuri