China's low-key jump onto biofuel
bandwagon By Sunny Lee
BEIJING - While the biofuel craze is
sweeping across the world like a wildfire, China
appears to remain uncannily quiet, at least
lately, just observing the new global obsession.
Beijing has been inconsistent in its love
affair with biofuel. Last year, it held a big
international conference on biofuel at Beijing's
Tsinghua University, displaying great enthusiasm
for it. Chinese scientists and government
officials visited Brazil, a global leader in the
use of biofuel, and came back with a clear
determination that this would be China's energy
future. But then, toward the end of
last
year, Beijing announced that it would reconsider
bio-ethanol because of concerns about national
food security.
Since then, the biofuel
news coming out of China has mostly carried a tint
of negativism. In March, the state-controlled
China Daily ran a piece saying that biofuel causes
more harm than good. In April, it quoted a
Stanford University research study, saying that
bio-ethanol may cause more smog and deaths. That
was followed by another piece this month that
quoted a United Nations report saying that the
benefits of biofuel may bypass the rural poor.
Is the Middle Kingdom, often highlighted
these days for its insatiable appetite for oil in
Africa, unenthused about jumping on this
new-energy bandwagon?
The truth is that
China is keenly interested in the new energy
source, but it is a contentious issue and the
country has been fiercely debating the matter.
"Arguments have never ceased in the Chinese
science community on biofuel," said a senior
Chinese academic.
China is not a newcomer
to the global drive for biofuel. It has long been
producing bio-ethanol from corn (maize), a
national staple crop. However, as the scale of
bio-ethanol production for industrial use dried up
the corn supply for human consumption, "people
began to worry about food security", said the
scholar, who asked not to be named.
According to the scholar, that was
"China's lesson with bio-ethanol". It turned out
to be quite controversial. The collective
emotional resistance to the idea of using food as
fuel ran deep. After all, this is a country where
close to 70% of the population are farmers and
many of them are poor.
"China is a country
where if the agricultural sector collapses, then
the whole country collapses," said a foreign
expert who works at the same Beijing research
institute as the scholar cited above.
China experienced what many historians
call the greatest famine in human history in the
1950s and 1960s. And while going through the Cold
War, it felt more strongly the importance of food
self-sufficiency, elevating it to the level of
national security. To this day Beijing orders
provincial governments to reserve a certain amount
of arable land for agricultural cultivation.
But that is by no means an indication that
China is no longer researching and developing
biofuel. "It's safe to assume that anything
researched in other countries is also being
experimented [with] somewhere in China now,
including cutting-edge biofuel technology," said
the foreign expert.
Indeed, Yang
Xiongnian, a senior official with the Ministry of
Agriculture, said China is "researching all kinds
of biomass energy options, and others including
sorghum ethanol and coal-based diesel oil".
Bioenergy has become a worldwide hot topic
because of the limited fossil energy resources and
their impact on the environment. Bioenergy is
basically categorized into biogas, biomass (in the
form of a solid, such as straw briquettes), and
biofuel (in the form of liquid, such as bio-diesel
and bio-ethanol).
China is the world's
second-largest corn producer. In 2005, it churned
out a record ethanol output of 920,000 tons from
corn. In 2006, it exported 500,000 tons of
ethanol, mainly to the United States. But
domestically, China has been proposing to address
increased fuel demand with the help of biofuel.
In its official 11th Five-Year Plan
Guidelines, covering 2006-10, China plans to set
aside US$101 billion to meet 15% of its
transportation energy needs through the use of
biofuel by 2020, corresponding to 12 million tons.
The country also plans to plant 13 million
hectares of jatropha trees by 2010, from which 6
million tons of bio-diesel can be extracted.
All this indicates that although China
officially says the issue of national food
security should take precedence over the green
agenda, the shift toward biofuel production has
been quietly under way all along.
For
instance, since 2000 the government has been
subsidizing the production of bio-ethanol at four
plants in Henan, Anhui, Jilin and Heilongjiang
provinces, with a combined annual capacity of 1
million tons, or about 0.5% of the projected corn
and wheat outputs in 2007.
China is also
looking at sources other than corn to produce
biofuel. It plans to set up a plant - the fifth
biofuel production plant in the country - in
Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region that will use
cassava, a tropical plant, by the end of this
year. The processing plant would have a production
capacity of 200,000 tons a year and would be
managed by the state-owned grain trader, China
National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp.
The National Offshore Oil Corp will also
construct 100 bio-diesel plants across the country
with different materials as feedstock.
Particularly noticeable is that some
Chinese companies, with the help of the
government, are establishing biofuel-production
facilities abroad. One such company has invested
in Nigeria some $90 million for the production of
150,000 tonnes of cassava-based bio-ethanol.
Beijing will provide 85% of the project cost while
15% will come from the Nigerian government.
But all this has been carried out rather
quietly because of the national sentiment on
biofuel. After all, for China, keeping up with the
breakthrough green alternative is important, but
equally important is raising the living standards
of the country's many rural poor.
The
issue is particularly relevant as the wealth gap
between urban and rural areas is widening. In
China, where "building a harmonious society" has
become a popular national slogan as Beijing grows
increasingly nervous about growing rural unrest,
there is already a concern that the benefits of
biofuel may bypass the rural poor to benefit only
the urban rich who can afford expensive hybrid
cars that run on the substance.
Thus it is
imperative for China's biofuel development to make
rural areas relevant by investing in them. With
that in mind, the Ministry of Agriculture in 2000
began to introduce various "low-end" bioenergy
technologies to rural areas and implemented new
policies such as "ecological homeland" and the
"plan to enrich people". One such option that has
been aggressively promoted has been the use of
biogas, which powers stoves, electricity, tractors
and indoor lighting in rural areas.
Since
2003, biogas-plant construction in rural areas has
been included in programs financed by Chinese
government bonds. During 2003-06, 1 billion yuan
(about $130 million) was invested in household
biogas production in rural areas. During the
three-year period, the central government invested
3 billion yuan in biogas production and
demonstration programs, benefiting more than 3.1
million rural households.
According to the
Ministry of Agriculture, 15 million households in
rural China were using biogas by the end of 2004.
The ministry aims to increase this number to 27
million by 2010, which would account for more than
10% of all rural households.
Sunny
Lee is a journalist based in Beijing, where he
has lived for five years. A native of South Korea,
Lee is a graduate of Harvard University and
Beijing Foreign Studies University.
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