BEIJING - Corn
growers in northwestern China were curious about
entrepreneur Sun Jianghong's obsession with their
crops, especially his keen interest in throwaway
corn stalks. "Why do you bother to ask us about
this all the time?" they asked after explaining
how they smashed the stalks for fodder or burned
them.
Sun wants to open a factory that
will produce ethanol fuel from corn stalks. A
study revealed that four tons of stalks could be
transformed into one ton of ethanol fuel and
generate major
profits. However, Sun
discovered that collecting stalks was not as easy
as he first thought, despite the corn waste being
of no use to many farmers.
Sun's
experience reflects the early stages of China's
biofuel industry. The potential is great but there
are tremendous challenges.
Although the
idea of biofuel is relatively new in China, a
similar practice of fermenting grain was used here
more than 4,000 years ago. "Using grain to ferment
alcohol is almost the same as the modern biofuel
industry, which uses corn to produce fuel ethanol.
The latter just has higher purity," said Zhu Ming,
president of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural
Engineering.
Ethanol is the most widely
used biofuel and is usually made from corn
(maize). There is also bio-diesel, which is
produced from the sugar content of crops and is
often made from soybean in the United States and
Brazil.
The biofuel industry in the US was
developed in the 1980s as a byproduct to process
surplus grain. It was also supported and promoted
by environmental groups as a clean, renewable
energy source. However it was not until early
2000, when international oil prices continued to
rise, that biofuels became accepted as a possible
alternative to fossil fuels such as petroleum and
coal. And new research shows that ethanol and
bio-diesel are more productive than previously
imagined.
According a new study published
in the US journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, both corn-grain ethanol and
soybean bio-diesel produce more energy than is
needed to grow the crops and convert them into
biofuels. This finding refutes other studies
claiming that these biofuels require more energy
to produce than they provide. Soybean bio-diesel
returned 93% more energy than is used to produce
it, while corn-grain ethanol currently provides
25% more energy.
China's economic growth
and dramatic increase in energy use have
necessitated the development of biofuels, said Qiu
Hongwei, director for industrial biotechnology at
the China National Center for Biotechnology
Development. Qiu was speaking at the 2006 World
Biofuels Symposium held late last week in Beijing.
The
biofuel symposium was jointly organized by
Tsinghua University, the Minnesota Department of
Agriculture, China National Cereals, Oil and
Foodstuffs Corp and the US firm BBI International.
As a major agricultural country, China generates a
massive amount of materials that could be
transformed into biofuels.
Zhu estimated
that China's farming plants could be used to
produce biofuel equal to 150 million tons of
petroleum and the farming-residue stalks and straw
could offer 590 million tons of biofuel each year.
Liu Qun, an official at the Industrial
Department of the National Development and Reform
Commission (NDRC), China's top economic-planning
body, said developing biofuels could increase
farmers' incomes and improve their living
conditions. "In the coming five years, the
government will invest huge amounts of money in
supporting the research and development of
biofuels," Liu said.
China's biofuel
development has been slow. Motorists in all cities
in northeastern China's Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin provinces, central
China's Henan province, and
eastern China's Anhui province have now
been mandated to use gasoline blended with 10%
fuel ethanol produced from corn at a lower price
than regular gasoline. However, this green energy
accounts for just 2% of China's total gasoline
consumption.
Ethanol fuel in China is
produced mainly by four plants in Henan, Anhui,
Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces.
Although
ethanol fuel is sold at a lower price than
gasoline - about 5,000 yuan (US$630) per ton,
compared with 5,200 yuan for gasoline - production
enjoyed government subsidies of up to 1,300 yuan
per ton and the exemption of value-added and
consumption taxes.
In the boldest scenario
forecast by experts, China's biofuel could replace
about 10 million tons of fossil fuel by 2010.
China's bio-diesel, which is only
sporadically manufactured by smaller producers
without government subsidies, has also recorded
higher production costs.
"China has too
large a population and not enough land, so it
could not massively develop grain-based biofuel,
as in the United States and Canada," said Liu of
the NDRC. "When making policies related to the
biofuel industry, we only support either plant
stalks or crops grown in the marginal land, such
as cassava and sweet sorghum," Liu told the China
Daily.
To produce ethanol, the seemingly
cheap stalks and straw could incur higher costs
than corn or soy, explained Zhang Jian'an, an
associate professor of chemistry at Tsinghua
University.
A complicated procedure is
needed to peel off the fibrin, hydrolyze sugar
contents and purify the oil. The enzyme needed for
decomposing stalk fibrin could be more expensive
than fibrin itself. With the idea to use
valueless stalks to produce expensive biofuels,
the average price of stalks has increased
fivefold, from less than 50 yuan per ton to nearly
250 yuan since last year; yet it could still be
very difficult to collect enough stalks even for a
middle-sized biofuel factory to operate fully.
"Chinese farmers work on very small scales
and most of them do not have private trucks. In
addition, the stalk supply is concentrated in the
harvest season and could be difficult to store for
a whole year," Zhu said.
Similar problems
confront sweet sorghum, the fruit and stalks from
which can be used for producing ethanol fuel.
Using transgenic plants, which have higher
sugar contents and varying harvest seasons, as
well as developing more enzymes able to dissolve
fibrin of stalks more efficiently, could be a
long-term solution, said Zhu.
The ongoing
New Countryside Movement, according to Zhu, could
help improve the organization of small farmers,
increasing the efficiency of stalk provisions.
But he said the attention should not only
be focused on "valueless" stalks, as the
production costs of stalk-derived biofuels could
not be easily reduced. A diversified planting
structure could help increase the supplies of
biofuel material, such as sugar beet in southern
China, Zhu said, while not reducing grain
production.
Kurt Markham, marketing
director of the Minnesota Department of
Agriculture, said that although food safety is
important, it does not mean most land should only
be dedicated to low-output staples.
If
grains such as corn or soybean could be processed
in an integrated way, which enabled farmers both
to utilize their protein contents for food and
fodder and to process their sugar contents for
biofuels, then "China's food safety will not be
threatened due to the development of biofuels",
Markham said.
