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    Fuel Tech, Inc., today announced a demonstration order for its 'Targeted In-Furnace Injection' program, part of a set of technologies aimed at controlling slagging, fouling, corrosion, opacity and acid plume problems in utility scale boilers. The order was placed by an electric generating facility located in Italy, and will be conducted on two biomass units burning a combination of wood chips and olive husks. BusinessWire - March 9, 2007.

    At a biofuels conference ahead of the EU's Summit on energy and climate change, Total's chief of agricultural affairs says building environmentally friendly 'flexible-fuel' cars only cost an additional €200 (US$263) a vehicle and that, overall, ethanol is cheaper than gasoline. MarketWatch - March 8, 2007.

    During a session of Kazakhstan's republican party congress, President Nursultan Nazarbayev announced plans to construct two large ethanol plants with the aim to produce biofuels for exports to Europe. Company 'KazAgro' and the 'akimats' (administrative units) of grain-growing regions will be charged to develop biodiesel, bioethanol and bioproducts. KazInform - March 6, 2007.

    Saab will introduce its BioPower flex-fuel options to its entire 9-3 range, including Sport Sedan, SportCombi and Convertible bodystyles, at the Geneva auto show. GreenCarCongress - March 2, 2007.

    British oil giant BP plans to invest around US$50 million in Indonesia's biofuel industry, using jatropha oil as feedstock. BP will build biofuel plants with an annual capacity of 350,000 tons for which it will need to set up jatropha curcas plantations covering 100,000 hectares of land, to guarantee supply of feedstock, an official said. Antara [*cache] - March 2, 2007.

    The government of Taiwan has decided to increase the acreage dedicated to biofuel crops -- soybean, rape, sunflower, and sweet potato -- from 1,721 hectares in 2006 to 4,550 hectares this year, the Council of Agriculture said. China Post - March 2, 2007.

    Kinder Morgan Energy Partners has announced plans to invest up to €76/US$100 million to expand its terminal facilities to help serve the growing biodiesel market. KMP has entered into long-term agreements with Green Earth Fuels, LLC to build up to 1.3 million barrels of tankage that will handle approximately 8 million barrels of biodiesel production at KMP's terminals on the Houston Ship Channel, the Port of New Orleans and in New York Harbor. PRNewswire - March 1, 2007.

    A project to build a 130 million euro ($172 million) plant to produce 200,000 cubic metres of bioethanol annually was announced by three German groups on Tuesday. The plant will consume about 600,000 tonnes of wheat annually and when operational in the first half of 2009 should provide about a third of Germany's estimated bioethanol requirements. Reuters - Feb. 27, 2007.

    Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs has announced that government vehicles in Taipei City will begin using E3 fuel, composed of 97% gasoline and 3% ethanol, on a trial basis in 2007. Automotive World - Feb. 27, 2007.

    Spanish company Ferry Group is to invest €42/US$55.2 million in a project for the production of biomass fuel pellets in Bulgaria. The 3-year project consists of establishing plantations of paulownia trees near the city of Tran. Paulownia is a fast-growing tree used for the commercial production of fuel pellets. Dnevnik - Feb. 20, 2007.

    Hungary's BHD Hõerõmû Zrt. is to build a 35 billion Forint (€138/US$182 million) commercial biomass-fired power plant with a maximum output of 49.9 MW in Szerencs (northeast Hungary). Portfolio.hu - Feb. 20, 2007.

    Tonight at 9pm, BBC Two will be showing a program on geo-engineering techniques to 'save' the planet from global warming. Five of the world's top scientists propose five radical scientific inventions which could stop climate change dead in its tracks. The ideas include: a giant sunshade in space to filter out the sun's rays and help cool us down; forests of artificial trees that would breath in carbon dioxide and stop the green house effect and a fleet futuristic yachts that will shoot salt water into the clouds thickening them and cooling the planet. BBC News - Feb. 19, 2007.

    Archer Daniels Midland, the largest U.S. ethanol producer, is planning to open a biodiesel plant in Indonesia with Wilmar International Ltd. this year and a wholly owned biodiesel plant in Brazil before July, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The Brazil plant is expected to be the nation's largest, the paper said. Worldwide, the company projects a fourfold rise in biodiesel production over the next five years. ADM was not immediately available to comment. Reuters - Feb. 16, 2007.

    Finnish engineering firm Pöyry Oyj has been awarded contracts by San Carlos Bioenergy Inc. to provide services for the first bioethanol plant in the Philippines. The aggregate contract value is EUR 10 million. The plant is to be build in the Province of San Carlos on the north-eastern tip of Negros Island. The plant is expected to deliver 120,000 liters/day of bioethanol and 4 MW of excess power to the grid. Kauppalehti Online - Feb. 15, 2007.

    In order to reduce fuel costs, a Mukono-based flower farm which exports to Europe, is building its own biodiesel plant, based on using Jatropha curcas seeds. It estimates the fuel will cut production costs by up to 20%. New Vision (Kampala, Uganda) - Feb. 12, 2007.

    The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has decided to use 10% biodiesel in its fleet of public buses. The world's largest city is served by the Toei Bus System, which is used by some 570,000 people daily. Digital World Tokyo - Feb. 12, 2007.

    Fearing lack of electricity supply in South Africa and a price tag on CO2, WSP Group SA is investing in a biomass power plant that will replace coal in the Letaba Citrus juicing plant which is located in Tzaneen. Mining Weekly - Feb. 8, 2007.

    In what it calls an important addition to its global R&D capabilities, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is to build a new bioenergy research center in Hamburg, Germany. World Grain - Feb. 5, 2007.

    EthaBlog's Henrique Oliveira interviews leading Brazilian biofuels consultant Marcelo Coelho who offers insights into the (foreign) investment dynamics in the sector, the history of Brazilian ethanol and the relationship between oil price trends and biofuels. EthaBlog - Feb. 2, 2007.

    The government of Taiwan has announced its renewable energy target: 12% of all energy should come from renewables by 2020. The plan is expected to revitalise Taiwan's agricultural sector and to boost its nascent biomass industry. China Post - Feb. 2, 2007.

    Production at Cantarell, the world's second biggest oil field, declined by 500,000 barrels or 25% last year. This virtual collapse is unfolding much faster than projections from Mexico's state-run oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos. Wall Street Journal - Jan. 30, 2007.

    Dubai-based and AIM listed Teejori Ltd. has entered into an agreement to invest €6 million to acquire a 16.7% interest in Bekon, which developed two proprietary technologies enabling dry-fermentation of biomass. Both technologies allow it to design, establish and operate biogas plants in a highly efficient way. Dry-Fermentation offers significant advantages to the existing widely used wet fermentation process of converting biomass to biogas. Ame Info - Jan. 22, 2007.

    Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited is to build a biofuel production plant in the tribal belt of Banswara, Rajasthan, India. The petroleum company has acquired 20,000 hectares of low value land in the district, which it plans to commit to growing jatropha and other biofuel crops. The company's chairman said HPCL was also looking for similar wasteland in the state of Chhattisgarh. Zee News - Jan. 15, 2007.

    The Zimbabwean national police begins planting jatropha for a pilot project that must result in a daily production of 1000 liters of biodiesel. The Herald (Harare), Via AllAfrica - Jan. 12, 2007.

    In order to meet its Kyoto obligations and to cut dependence on oil, Japan has started importing biofuels from Brazil and elsewhere. And even though the country has limited local bioenergy potential, its Agriculture Ministry will begin a search for natural resources, including farm products and their residues, that can be used to make biofuels in Japan. To this end, studies will be conducted at 900 locations nationwide over a three-year period. The Japan Times - Jan. 12, 2007.

    Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint has launched an arrogant attack on "quasi-hysterical Europeans" and their attitudes to global warming, calling the Stern Review 'dubious'. The remarks illustrate the yawning gap between opinions on climate change among Europeans and Americans, but they also strengthen the view that announcements by US car makers and legislators about the development of green vehicles are nothing more than window dressing. Today, the EU announced its comprehensive energy policy for the 21st century, with climate change at the center of it. BBC News - Jan. 10, 2007.

    The new Canadian government is investing $840,000 into BioMatera Inc. a biotech company that develops industrial biopolymers (such as PHA) that have wide-scale applications in the plastics, farmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Plant-based biopolymers such as PHA are biodegradable and renewable. Government of Canada - Jan. 9, 2007.


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Saturday, March 10, 2007

New perspective on Amazonian population theories and the deforestation debate

Deforestation and biodiversity loss in the tropics are issues of major importance in the biofuels debate. Both Brazil and South East Asian nations are expanding biofuel plantations, but they have vowed this expansion will not threaten rainforests. In fact, deforestation rates in Brazil have decreased by more than 20% over the past three years, even though agricultural and biofuels outputs have increased.

Despite this encouraging news, an old scholarly debate keeps fuelling arguments about the historic nature of 'pristine' rainforests like that of the Amazon basin. These discussions in turn are used actively by both conservationists, farmers and loggers alike to legitimize their visions on issues such as the urgency with which biodiversity must be defended or the need for the absolute protection of forests.

Artificial or pristine landscape?
In the community of environmental archaeologists and paleo-ecologists, there are two distinct theories on pre-Columbian Amazonian populations. One commonly held vision says that the Amazon rainforest as it exists today is not 'pristine' at all, but basically an 'artificial landscape', created in ancient times by millions of people, who farmed, slashed-and-burned, logged and used the forests extensively and for centuries. According to the other camp, there is scant evidence for this hypothesis, and instead one can assume that the Amazon was sparsely populated, and only by small, primitive groups, whose impacts on the ecosystem have always been marginal.

Obviously, those with an interest in exploiting the forest today, point to the first theory and shamelessly argue that, since the Amazon has always been man-made and was massively disturbed in the past, there is no reason to stop humans from using it in the present.

Eurekalert now reports that the 'artificial landscape' view has become fashionable among many archaeologists and anthropologists, but that it is being challenged in a recent paper from Dr. Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology. The findings of Bush's research may rekindle this debate which has had major implications for land use and policy-setting in the rainforest.

"We don't contradict that there were major settlements in key areas flanking the Amazon Channel -- there could have been millions of people living there," says Mark Bush, a British-born paleo-ecologist who travels to extremely remote rain forest locations to collect core samples from ancient lakes. He then analyzes those samples for pollen and charcoal and thus is able to conclude with a high degree of accuracy the extent of human settlement in that region.

"What we do say is that when you start to look away from known settlements, you may see very long-term local use," he says. "These people didn't stray very far from home, or from local bodies of water for several thousands of years. We looked at clusters of lakes and landscapes where people lived, and asked, did they leave their homesite to farm around other nearby lakes? No they didn't. These findings argue for a very localized use of Amazonian forest resources outside the main, known, archaeological areas."

Bush says the evidence comes from a geographically diverse area: three districts, each with 3 (in two cases) or four lakes. "In each we have one lake occupied and used, and the others little used or not used at all," he says. "So this is a total of 10 lakes that provide three separate instances -- one in Brazil, one in Ecuador and one in Peru, where there is evidence of long, continuous occupation of more than 5,000 years that did not spread to the adjacent, 8 to 10 kilometer distant lakes."

The findings are published in a paper titled "Holocene fire and occupation in Amazonia: records from two lake districts" that appears in a recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, the February edition of which is themed around "Biodiversity hotspots through time: using the past to manage the future". A wide variety of very interesting articles can be found in the issue, including one by Bruno Glaser titled "Prehistorically modified soils of central Amazonia: a model for sustainable agriculture in the twenty-first century", [*abstract] which deals with the ancient carbon-sequestration and soil enhancement technique known as 'terra preta', to which we referred earlier.

Bush says his paper, and another forthcoming in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, may have important policy implications:
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That's because the hypothesis of human-manufactured landscapes has been made popular by Charles Mann's book - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - and could influence conservation policy in the Americas. That millions of people once populated the Americas, and that in Amazonia, at least, the rainforest is the product of long term human use, has been used as farmers and loggers as justification for clearcutting rainforests. Their argument, that the ecosystem already experienced vast landscape disturbance and proved resilient, relies on the ubiquitous influence of Pre-Columbian people, the suggestion that Bush's work rejects.

"These data are directly relevant to the resilience of Amazonian conservation, as they do not support the contention that all of Amazonia is a 'built landscape' and therefore a product of past human land use," Bush says. "Most archaeologists are buying into the argument that you had big populations that transformed the landscape en masse. Another group of archaeologists say that transformation was very much limited to river corridors, and if you went away from the river corridors there wasn't that much impact. That's what our findings tend to support."

Passionate debate
Bush doesn't expect that his new findings will settle the debate, however.

"There's just too much passion on this issue. People who are inclined to believe what we're talking about will say this is very strong evidence, and say 'let's have more.' The archaeologists will say this study only examines two districts."

Bush himself calls the paper, co-authored with Claudia Listopad, William D. Gosling, and Christopher Williams of Florida Tech, Paulo E. de Oliveira of Universidade do Guarulhos in Brazil, Miles R. Silman and Carolyn Krisel of Wake Forest and Mauro B. de Toledo of Florida Tech and Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil, an important first step in making the case, through core sampling and pollen and charcoal analysis of sediment from seven lake bottoms, three in one district, four in the other, that much of Amazonia has not been transformed by human actions, and ideally should be kept that way, to preserve species biodiversity.

"The way to see this is as a sneak peak," he says. "It's a new way to look at landscapes and it's a new tool. The study needs to be replicated in more places before people will be persuaded, but it's certainly a warning shot across the bow."

"While the majority of archaeologists argue the rivers were the major conduit for populations," he adds, "there is an increasing vocalization that there was much more widespread habitat transformation; that you still had a bulk of people along the river but their influence extended deep into the forest. It's still nebulous, and difficult to get people to map stuff, or put hard numbers on it, but there is a sentiment that the Amazonia has been disturbed and that the view of the Amazonian rainforest as a built landscape is gaining momentum. There are extremes at either ends, and the majority of people are in middle but there's a tendency of drifting toward the high end."

For example, he says 1950s population estimates were 1 million, in the 70s that estimate drifted up to 4 million; and in the 1990s drifted up to 10 million.

"We've now got a polarized community," he says.

At one end, he says, is Anna Roosevelt of the Field Museum in Chicago (she argues for large populations dispersed throughout Amazonia); at the other is Betty Meggers at Smithsonian (she argues these were very primitive people with low population).

Mark's studies are the first to apply core sampling methodology to determine through coal and pollen levels, how much human activity was going on.

More information:
Mark Bush's "Neotropical Paleoecology Research Group" at the Florida University of Technology.

Mark B. Bush, "Holocene fire and occupation in Amazonia: records from two lake districts" [*abstract], Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Theme Issue ‘Biodiversity hotspots through time: using the past to manage the future’ compiled by Katherine J. Willis, Lindsey Gillson and Sandra Knapp, Volume 362, Number 1478 / February 28, 2007, Pages: 209 - 218.

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt's academic page.

Betty Jane Meggers' academic page at the Minnesota State University.

Intro to Charles C. Mann's, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, at Wikipedia.


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Japan helps build Vietnam's first ethanol plant - cassava feedstock

The Vietnamese Petroleum Services and Tourism Company (Petrosetco) and Japan's Itochu Co-operation will set up a joint venture to build a bio-ethanol plant, the first of its kind in Vietnam. The two partners signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the issue in Ho Chi Minh City on March 9.

The €76.2/US$100 million project will turn out 100 million litres (26.4 million gallons) of ethanol each year, from cassava chips, which will be sold in Vietnam to mix in petrol used in industrial production and transport activities.

The mixing of ethanol in petrol will help the country reduce its petrol imports as well as cut environmental pollution, said Tran Cong Tao, Petrosetco's chief of executive.

It is estimated that if a 10 percent ethanol ratio is introduced in the country's largest city, Ho Chi Minh City, some 100 to 150 million liters will be needed per year. This amount can be covered by the single plant.

The Itochu group has 30 years of experience handling ethanol projects and is willing share its knowledge with the Vietnamese partner to contribute to the first bio-ethanol project in Vietnam, according to Itochu's deputy executive director Toshio Shigemi.

Deputy Minister of Industry Do Huu Hao and Vice Chairman of the municipal People's Committee Nguyen Trung Tin spoke highly of the co-operation between Petrosetco and Itochu to create a new kind of energy for Vietnam. The two officials also pledged to assist the project and expressed hope that the plant will soon be operational:
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Construction of the plant, which will be located in the Hiep Phuoc industrial zone, is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2009.

Cassava is being used accross South East Asia as a suitable feedstock for ethanol production. The starch-rich root crop is currently utilized in China and Thailand on an industrial scale.

Thailand recently launched a program involving smallholders who will be growing cassava for ethanol, in a push to alleviate poverty by diversifying their crop portfolio and open new markets (earlier post).

Likewise, in China, cassava is seen as an important crop to use for the production of biofuels instead of the grain crops many producers currently rely on. The fact that the plant requires low water and fertilizer inputs, and because it thrives on relatively poor soils, it is considered to be suitable for programs involving poor smallholders (earlier post).


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