Brazil throws weight behind Amazon soy ban

Ana Nicolaci da Costa, Reuters 17 Jun 08;

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's new environment minister reached an agreement with the grain processing industry to ban purchases of soy from deforested Amazon until July 2009, winning praise from environmentalists.

"This same initiative will be extended to two other sectors -- the timber sector and the beef sector," Environment Minister Carlos Minc said while praising the grain industry and non-governmental organizations for a "pioneering" initiative.

Environmentalists called Minc's initiative essential to the protection of the world's largest rainforest. Deforestation in the region quickened in the past months as world grain prices continue to set record highs.

The moratorium is a commitment by the local Vegetable Oils Industry Association (Abiove), which includes big crushers such as Cargill Inc, Bunge Ltd, ADM Co and Louis Dreyfus, and the Grain Exporters Association (Anec) to extend the expiring, one-year ban that began in July 2006.

Rising prices are reviving the local soy sector out of its worst crisis in decades. In 2004 through 2006, the rise in the real against the dollar and production costs like fuel and fertilizers pushed many producers to the brink of insolvency.

Brazil is the world's second largest soy producer after the United States. Abiove and Anec control about 94 percent of Brazil's soy trade.

"The decision today is very important as it shows a leading sector in Brazilian agribusiness can guarantee food production without the need to cut down one more hectare of Amazon," Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Amazon campaign director, said in a note.

Deforestation of the Amazon is on course to rise after three years of declines, with figures for April released earlier this month showing a startling 434 square miles of trees lost in the month.

Minc replaced Amazon defender Marina Silva as environment minister last month, raising concern among environmentalists that the government is siding with farming and industrial interests that want to develop the forest.

In a show of commitment to Amazon protection, the government unveiled initiatives in past weeks including the creation of three protected reserves and an operation to impound cattle grazing on illegally cleared pastures.

But Greenpeace said a one year extension may not be long enough to build the tools necessary to ensure that soy production does not result in further deforestation.

(Additional Reporting by Inae Riveras in Sao Paulo; Editing by Reese Ewing and Bill Trott)

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Australia urged to protect its honey worker bees

James Grubel, Yahoo News 17 Jun 08;

Australia's honey bees, crucial to worldwide food production, need more protection from foreign invaders that could potentially wipe out their population, a parliamentary report said on Tuesday.

Australia is a major supplier of queen and hive bees to North America, Japan and the Middle East, cashing in on its standing as the only country not to suffer from a deadly bee mite known as the varroa destructor.

But the varroa mite has been found in bees in neighboring Papua New Guinea and New Zealand, raising new fears it could soon breach Australian borders.

"Scientists who have studied the progress of this pest believe that it is only a matter of time before it arrives in Australia and devastates the honey bee population," the report said, urging the government to tighten border and quarantine controls.

"It might be an exaggeration to state 'no bees, no food', but the food security and economic welfare of the entire community depend to a considerable degree on the humble honey bee."

The mite has hit hives around the world with devastating effects on pollination industries, and has been linked to the mystery Colony Collapse Disorder across North America.

Australian Parliament's primary industries committee found bees add up to A$6 billion ($5.7 billion) a year to the value of agriculture and horticulture, and were crucial for 35 key crops as well as stock feeds such as clover.

"Once you've got varroa, it would lead to the collapse of the bee industry. It would simply wipe out bee colonies," bee keeper Lindsay Bourke told Reuters.

"A third of everything we eat has to be pollinated or relies on pollination. You won't eat a decent steak without bees."

Australia currently exports disease-free bees, particularly to the United States where they are used to help pollinate the California almond industry.

Exporter Paula Dewar, who sends about 8,000 queen bees a year to Canada, the United States and Japan for up to $22 a bee, said Australian apiarists were worried about imported bee disease.

"We are known for our good breeding stock, varieties and healthy bees," Dewar said.

Australia currently has a "sentinel" bee program where hives are set up at key ports so authorities can spot any new disease.

The report urged the government to also set up new bait hives around the ports to attract bees arriving by ship and to stop them from joining domestic hives.

($1=A$1.06)

(Editing by Miral Fahmy)

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Cultivation in the drylands undermined by international policies

A way of life is feeling the heat
Masego Madzwamuse, BBC Green Room 17 Jun 08;

International development policies are undermining the long term survival of some of the globe's poorest communities, argues Masego Madzwamuse. In this week's Green Room, she says the skills and knowledge needed to survive in the world's harsh drylands are being sacrificed in the name of progress.

The world's poorest of the poor live in the toughest areas of the planet - the drylands.

These areas all have key factors in common: water is scarce, and rainfall is unpredictable - or it rains only during a very short period every year.

Drylands cover more than 40% of the Earth's surface and are home to more than two billion people.

These areas are also home to a disproportionate number of people without secure access to food.

Why are 43% of the world's cultivated lands found in dry areas? And why have decades of development not led to significant improvements?

Rather than improving, it would appear that the situation is getting worse, with more frequent droughts, such as those in Ethiopia and Northern Kenya.

Another important issue that strikes me about drylands is that these areas have been completely neglected despite being the world's home of the poor.

While one international agreement - the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) - has been dedicated solely to the drylands of this world, little attention has been paid by the media, development or conservation organisations, or the international donor community.

The only time attention is paid is when droughts (a regular climatic phenomenon in such lands) are allowed to proceed to famine, which in this day and age can only be the result of political failure.

Humanitarian and food relief follow the TV headlines, creating more dependencies rather than developing viable and sustainable economies.

Dry heat

It is expected that these areas will be hardest hit by climate change in the future.

The influential Stern Review noted that a 3C (5.4F) increase in global temperature was likely to result in an extra 150-550m people becoming exposed to the risk of hunger.

The review also said that climate change was likely to result in up to four billion people suffering water shortages.

The world's drylands are likely to bear the brunt of this gloomy prognosis.

In my opinion, the world will only successfully fight poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) if we pay more attention to these unique ecosystems and learn from the mistakes of the past.

This means moving away from a colonially biased view of drylands.

It is unfortunately still common to equate drylands with deserts and wastelands, as these areas might not look at first sight very productive, especially during a period of drought.

So, what are the ingredients for success in developing the poorest regions of this world?

First of all, development interventions need to be adapted to the realities of drylands.

Crop production, whether rain-fed or irrigated, will always be a limited opportunity. Yet the major effort in "development" is a green revolution for the desert.

Has half a century of development not taught us the reality for cultivation in the drylands?

Livestock is much more suitable to arid environments and more likely to support rural livelihoods in arid regions.

For instance, Turkana pastoralists of Kenya know that livestock is their mainstay, even though they have some of the fastest maturing varieties of sorghum in the world.

Secondly, we should work with the knowledge and institutional systems of the people who have lived there for centuries.

We need to understand why they have complex common property systems for land and resource management that may span and cover very large territories, and guarantee that a variety of stakeholders can use these scarce resources and survive.

It is important to also understand why they place more emphasis on livestock than crops. Livestock is a better converter of biomass in such harsh lands.

We must not sweep aside this knowledge and experience. Instead, we should build on those systems and support them with so-called "modern and scientific knowledge" to improve productivity and create market opportunities.

Yet we ignore their complex risk management and resilience enhancement strategies.

One classical example has been the numerous efforts to use inappropriate policies to settle nomadic people and restrict their movements.

Nomadic livestock herding has been a key sustainable survival strategy in the more arid areas. Once grass and water become scarce, these communities move with their animals to the next area.

Thus, they are able to use resources sustainably without leaving themselves exposed to the effects of droughts.

While livestock farming in drylands contributes significantly to national economies, most subsidies go to unsustainable ranching projects rather than the small livestock holders.

National treasures

Pastoralism is one of the few land use systems that can be compatible with wildlife conservation.

Yet where are many of the world's national parks? More than 70% of Kenya's are in drylands, which includes a number of important dry season grazing areas for pastoralists.

Dryland peoples depend on the surrounding environment, and they should be able to benefit from conservation through community conserved areas and tourism, rather than having their best lands taken away from them in the name of conservation.

Thirdly, nature's contribution to the survival of the poor needs to be recognised as an important asset.

It is nature that provides food, fodder for livestock, construction material for shelter, medicinal plants, emergency food and climate regulation (shade is highly valued in 40C).

Opportunities for sustainable development exist.

Sudan is the world's largest producer of gum arabic, a principal ingredient of colas and chewing gum, which stems from a 2,000-year agroforestry tradition.

And the arid lands of the Horn of Africa produce the highest quality frankincense and myrrh in the world.

In one district in Botswana that has an average annual rainfall of just 200mm, dryland ecosystem services contributed $190,000 (£95,000) to the national income. Almost 50% of this came from wild plants such as the medicinal devil's claw.

Instead of building on this natural capital, development and government interventions tend to replace and disregard them.

Even worse, they are not reflected in the national GDP figures. As a consequence, most policy frameworks provide incentives for their exploitation rather than their sustainable use.

We cannot continue to let the world's poor dryland dwellers down.

Panaceas, history tells us, don't work. Instead, we need to invest in the innovative and sustainable use of natural assets.

Masego Madzwamuse is the IUCN's regional programme development officer and focal person for southern African drylands

The Green Room is a series of opinion pieces on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website

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Australia food bowl areas "beyond repair in months"

Reuters 17 Jun 08;

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Parts of Australia's key Murray-Darling river food bowl may be beyond recovery unless a prolonged dry spell and political wrangling over water use ends by October, a leaked scientific report warned on Wednesday.

"There has been 10 years at least that people have said you have got to restore the environmental flows to the system if you wish to keep the natural assets. We have failed to do that," University of Adelaide ecologist David Paton told local radio.

The Murray-Darling river basin, an area the size of France and Germany, produces 41 percent of Australia's agriculture and provides $21 billion worth of agricultural exports to Asia and the Middle East, including rice, corn, grapes and dairy.

But the government wants to secure water supplies and repair ailing rivers with an A$13 billion ($12.2 billion), 10-year water plan topped by a A$3 billion deal to buy river water back from irrigators.

The centre-left Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd deferred consideration of a scientific report into the crisis facing the basin's lower reaches until a ministerial meeting with state counterparts in November.

But Paton and other ecologists warned much of the river system could be virtually dead by then, with vegetation on the lower Murray lost and fish species driven to extinction.

The lower Murray, where vast wetlands and lakes meet the sea, is an important region for horticulture, vegetable and pasture cropping, as well as dairy farming.

"You don't often hear a scientist using language of this strength," Australian Conservation Foundation spokeswoman Arlene Buchan said. "They're being crystal clear about the need for water, the short period of time, the urgency of the problem."

Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth, has been suffering more than seven years of drought, with water inflows into the nation's rivers at record lows and farmers facing tough restrictions on irrigation.

Climate scientists have warned the continent is suffering accelerated climate change, with temperatures expected to rise by about 1 degree Celsius by 2030 and rainfall forecast to decrease by up to 20 percent by 2070 in the most populous southeast.

Australia this week cut its wheat output forecast by nearly 9 percent after the return of dry weather during a crucial planting period dashed hopes for a record crop from the world's second-biggest exporter.

($1=A$1.06)

(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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Corn price hits new high as US rain continues

Peter Stiff and agencies, Times Online 17 Jun 08;

Corn prices rose to an all-time high today as flooding in the US, the world’s biggest exporter of the grain, hit crops, fuelling concerns over the rising cost of food.

The surge in corn prices, which broke the $8-a-bushel barrier for the first time, came as heavy rains in the Midwest damaged crops and delayed planting, heightening fears that there will be insufficient corn to meet global demand for food, feed and biofuels.

The July 2009 delivery price of a bushel of corn surged to $8.07, the highest price for a corn contract and a new record for the eighth trading day in a row. The July 2008 corn contract rose to a record $7.57, with the price of soybeans also going higher.

Analysts said that, if rain in the region continues, further problems for corn crops would be impossible to avoid and that traders would continue to buy, pushing up the price.

Short supply and strong demand has caused prices to jump by a quarter since the start of the month, increasing financial pressure on livestock breeders, exporters and ethanol and biodiesel makers. In the past year, the price of corn has risen 85 per cent, on record demand for biofuels and livestock feed as people in a more affluent Asia eat more meat.

Last week, the US Department of Agriculture warned that corn stockpiles may fall 53 per cent to a 13-year low before next year’s harvest, largely because of bad weather hitting crops.

Flooding in the Midwest has been described as the worst since 1993, with the US National Weather Service predicting millions of dollars worth of damage.

More thunderstorms are expected this week, adding to farmers’ woes, whose fields were soaked by 12 inches of rain last week; some have suffered five times the normal amount of moisture since the end of May.

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Floods damage fishery, threaten poultry production

Business Times 18 Jun 08;

(BEIJING) Rains and floods in China's southern provinces have damaged the region's fishery and may threaten its poultry production, Shanghai JC Intelligence Co said.

Rain swamped some fish farms in provinces including Guangdong and may cause the spread of diseases among poultry, Helen Huang and Daisy Rang, analysts at the Shanghai-based research firm, said in interviews yesterday.

About 15 southern provinces have been inundated by the fourth major rainstorm in three weeks, the National Meteorological Centre said yesterday. The adverse weather across roughly half of China's 31 provinces may stoke food prices, cut fish and poultry stocks and reduce demand for corn and soyabean meal, which are used in animal feed.

'The storms have significantly impacted fish farming, and effects on coastal Guangdong and Guangxi provinces have been disastrous,' Ms Huang said. 'The effects on fish supplies may not be felt initially, but will reverberate in the long run.' The analysts declined to provide estimates of the damages citing lack of data.

Water levels in southern China's rivers and lakes are rising rapidly, increasing the risks of major floods, the weather office said. 'If there isn't adequate prevention, this will increase the risk of poultry disease,' Ms Rang said. The storms have also disrupted shipping and supplies, she said.

By last Saturday, rains and floods have caused 10.6 billion yuan (S$2.1 billion) in damages and affected 860,500 hectares of crops, the China National Grain and Oils Information Centre said in a report yesterday\. \-- Bloomberg

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ecoWise set to join renewable energy wave in Singapore

Jamie Lee, Business Times 18 Jun 08;

ECOWISE Holdings said it expects to acquire or set up joint ventures with regional crop producers and owners over the next one year to generate biomass fuel, as the waste recycler diversifies into the renewable energy business.

EcoWise, which specialises in recycling copper slug collected from homegrown shipyards such as Keppel Corp and Sembcorp Marine, hopes to ramp up its renewable energy production, which makes up 10 per cent of its current business, executive director Teoh Teik Kee said during a corporate briefing yesterday.

It already operates a co-generation (cogen) plant, which is fuelled by biomass such as wood and horticultural waste. Landscape contractors in Singapore pay ecoWise to collect the waste produced.

The cogen plant, started in 2005, generates 15,000 kg of steam and one megawatt of electricity per hour from five tonnes of biomass. The steam and waste heat has also been used to sell ISO tank heating services. ISO tanks are containers that store chemicals requiring slow heating. Future tie-ups with crop producers and owners will extend to building a biomass plant near the plantations at a later time, said Mr Teoh.

Working with crop producers such as rice millers in Thailand, would help to 'lock in the supply', he said, adding that the projects must also guarantee off-take by the buyers and provide an annual internal rate of return of 8 to 10 per cent at the start.

The company gave no investment figure, but Mr Teoh estimated that it could cost at least $20 million to produce 10 megawatt of electricity using processed food waste at a biomass plant. The investment will be funded by internal resources and bank loans, he added. The company has a healthy cash flow of about $10.3 million, according to its half-year financial statement.

'We've been scouting around,' he said. 'The competition will not come from building a power plant but more from whether we are able to secure the supply of raw material to burn.' He added that smaller local players could pose a threat in pushing up prices of the biomass. The firm hopes that the renewable energy business will contribute to half of its revenue in about three years' time.

Analysts whom BT spoke to said the management's strong track record is likely to push ecoWise's diversification plans through, but noted that such plans are unlikely to contribute significantly to earnings in the short-term.

The firm, which has a market value of $71 million, saw its net profit more than double to $6.6 million for its half-year ended April, thanks to an exceptional gain of about $5.1 million from its sale of a 50 per cent stake in its newly-formed unit to Holcim Singapore. Shares of ecoWise fell half a cent to end at 19.5 cents yesterday.

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EU Lawmakers Agree Recycling Goals to Cut Landfill

Pete Harrison, PlanetArk 18 Jun 08;

STRASBOURG, France - European Union lawmakers approved new targets for recycling rubbish on Tuesday, aiming to curb greenhouse emissions from landfill sites, but green groups said the deal would not cut growing trash piles.

The agreement, which will have to be approved by member states before becoming law, is part of an EU effort to get on top of a growing problem typified by mountains of waste in Naples, Italy.

Rubbish is growing faster than the 27-nation bloc's GDP.

The European Parliament voted for the goal of recycling or re-using half of the main types of EU household waste by 2020 and 70 percent of all waste from building and demolition.

"Calorific waste is a valuable and energy-rich resource that must not be landfilled," said Jan-Erik Johansson of PlasticsEurope, which welcomed the agreement.

"Every item that is recycled or recovered saves harmful methane emissions from landfills."

Over 1.8 billion tonnes of waste are generated each year in Europe, equating to 3.5 tonnes per person, of which less than a third is recycled.

"There will be big pressure on the UK and Ireland, let alone in eastern Europe, to move towards these levels of recycling," said British MEP Caroline Jackson, who led the legislation through parliament. "I don't think it will be popular."

She said only about 2 percent of household waste was now recycled in Hungary, and only about 13 percent in parts of London, while in Holland and Denmark landfilling had been almost eliminated.


GARBAGE MAFIA

But environmentalists criticised the agreement for promoting incineration, for being unenforceable and for failing to set limits on the amount of waste produced.

"This promotes incineration, a waste-hungry technology which is counterproductive to any effort to tackle the waste mountains at their source," said Welsh MEP Jill Evans.

PlasticsEurope countered that even burning rubbish was better than letting it rot. "Given the scarcity of energy resources, we need to make use of every viable complement to fossil fuels," said Jan-Erik Johansson.

Caroline Jackson said parliament had failed to agree waste prevention targets as current volumes were largely kept secret by a murky industry.

"We are operating in the dark," she said. "Waste is a secret area, as demonstrated in Naples."

Crime experts say the Camorra, the Naples mafia, has been involved in the lucrative waste dumping business for decades -- one of the reasons the city's refuse system ground to a halt at the end of last year when all official dumps were declared full.

Political inadequacy and local opposition to new waste disposal sites has hampered years of attempts to clean up what has become a chronic problem in Italy's third-largest city.

"We all know what has been going on in Naples," said Jackson. "But I don't want to end up as a concrete block, so I won't go any further."

The agreement also laid down the order that member states should use for dealing with waste.

As a first priority, states will not create waste in the first place, secondly they will re-use things such as beer crates, thirdly they will recycle what they can, fourthly they will recover at least the energy contained in rubbish, and as a last resort, they can dump rubbish. (Reporting by Pete Harrison; editing by James Jukwey)

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Energy situation near tipping point, says Shell analyst

Warning comes even as oil prices ease slightly from near US$140 record high
Yang Huiwen, Straits Times 18 Jun 08;

SOARING oil prices have driven the world to an energy tipping point where cheap, plentiful supplies of crude and gas can no longer be taken for granted.

The warning came from Dr Khong Cho Oon, chief political analyst in the global business environment team of Shell International, a unit of the Anglo-Dutch oil giant.

Dr Khong, who was in Singapore for a seminar, said yesterday that the old system of affordable energy is no longer tenable.

'We're looking at very high oil prices right now precisely because we're at a transition point in the energy world,' he said.

'We're moving away from a structure that has been in place for many decades, and we're moving into something new. What we're moving into, that is yet to be clear.'

Dr Khong's comments come at a time of rocketing oil prices. They hit a record high of almost US$140 a barrel earlier this week, before retreating a little amid uncertainty over a pledge by Saudi Arabia to boost output.

Prices have risen more than fourfold since 2004 and have shot up over 120 per cent this year alone, partly on increased fears that production will struggle to keep up with demand over the next decade.

Dr Khong, who is based in The Hague, Netherlands, said the key question is whether the transition to a new world energy order is going to be smooth or rough.

The Shell executive is a member of a team that developed two scenarios describing how the world's energy landscape may pan out over the next 50 years.

In a 'scramble' world, concerns over the security of oil supplies dominate decision making, spurring reactive government policies that are based purely on national interests.

In contrast, a 'blueprint' world begins with the mindset of anticipating change, with decisions based on common interest and sustainability. Examples of this approach are the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali climate talks.

While elements of both scenarios are now present, one will eventually dominate the world, much like the wave of globalisation in the 1990s, said Dr Khong.

It is difficult to tell which way the world is heading, but he favours a scenario with more proactive engagement.

This will require 'a critical mass of countries to move along a particular direction', with the key nations being the United States and China, as well as other major players such as the European Union, Japan, India, Brazil and Indonesia.

This can be driven by people's concerns at the grassroots level, which will eventually lead to action at the state and government level.

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World Crude Production Has Peaked - Pickens

Jasmin Melvin and Missy Ryan, PlanetArk 18 Jun 08;

WASHINGTON - World crude oil production has topped out at 85 million barrels per day even as demand keeps climbing, helping to drive a stunning surge in prices, billionaire oil investor T. Boone Pickens said on Tuesday.

"I do believe you have peaked out at 85 million barrels a day globally," Pickens, who heads BP Capital hedge fund with more than US$4 billion under management, said during testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The United States alone has been using "21 million barrels of the 85 million and producing about 7 of the 21, so if I could take just a minute on this point, the demand is about 86.4 million barrels a day, and when the demand is greater than the supply, the price has to go up until it kills demand," Pickens told lawmakers.

US crude futures CLc1> have risen by a third since the start of the year and more than six-fold since 2002 as surging demand from China and other developing nations outpaces new production.

Oil slipped on Tuesday, a day after touching a record high near US$140 a barrel, but remained above US$133 a barrel.

Pickens, who announced a US$2 billion investment in wind energy earlier this year, told lawmakers during a hearing on renewable electricity that he expected "the price of oil will go up further." Without alternatives, the cost of foreign oil will drain the United States of more resources, he said.

"In 10 years, we will have exported close to US$10 trillion out of the country if we continue on the same basis we're going now. It is the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind," he said.

Pickens downplayed the role that speculative trading and institutional investors -- forces some see behind the high oil prices -- have had in the price trend.

Asked about the role of institutional investors, Pickens told reporters he does not "agree that that has anything to do with oil prices ... It's a global market. It doesn't have anything to do with traders on Wall Street or any place else."

He said increased oversight of oil markets by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) represents "a waste of time."

On Monday, the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, released new CFTC information he said made the case for greater federal regulation in crude oil markets.

Bingaman and others have introduced a spate of proposals to boost CFTC authority over trading of certain oil contracts.

(Reporting by Jasmin Melvin and Missy Ryan; Editing by David Gregorio)

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Japanese scientists create diesel-producing algae

Leo Lewis, Times Online 14 Jun 08;

Under the gleam of blinding lamps, engulfed by banks of angrily frothing flasks, Makoto Watanabe is plotting a slimy, lurid-green revolution. He has spent his life in search of a species of algae that efficiently “sweats” crude oil, and has finally found it.

Now, exploiting the previously unrecognised power of pondlife, Professor Watanabe dreams of transforming Japan from a voracious energy importer into an oil-exporting nation to rival any member of Opec.

The professor has given himself a decade to effect this seemingly implausible conversion: Japan’s export-led economics have always been shaped by their near 100 per cent dependence on foreign energy. In the present world economic climate, those economics are looking especially fragile.

“I believe I can change Japan within five years,” the Professor told The Times from his laboratory in Tsukuba University. “A couple of years after that, we start changing the world.”

The algae, he believes, will spearhead enormous changes to the way that energy is produced and to the explosive geopolitics that have developed around the global thirst for fossil fuels. They could also overturn the current debate on corn and sugar-based biofuels. It is madness, he says, for humanity to pursue sources of energy that compete with its own stomachs when there is a far purer source that does not sitting in a test tube in his laboratory.

Professor Watanabe’s vision arises from the extraordinary properties of the Botryococcus braunii algae: give the microscopic green strands enough light – and plenty of carbon dioxide – and they excrete oil. The tiny globules of oil that form on the surface of the algae can be easily harvested and then refined using the same “cracking” technologies with which the oil industry now converts crude into everything from jet fuel to plastics.

The Japanese Government has supplied him with hefty grants to work on ways of industrialising the algae cultures. The professor admits that there is much work to be done to bring the financial and environmental costs of creating algae oilfields down to reasonable levels: to meet Japan’s current oil needs would require an algae-filled paddyfield the size of Yorkshire.

But – in laboratory conditions at least – the powers of Botryococcus braunii are astonishing. A field of corn, when converted into biofuel ethanol, may produce about 0.2 tonnes of oil equivalent per hectare. Rapeseed may generate around 1.2 tonnes. Micro algae can theoretically produce between 50 and 140 tonnes using the same plot of land.

The discovery of Botryococcus braunii and its precious excretions has taken years. The oil-producing properties of Botryococcus algae have been known for decades, but the volume and quality varies between species.

There remain, however, substantial obstacles before cars and aircraft are all running on algae. Although field tests have proved that there is little technical difficulty in breeding or harvesting the algae, the sums do not add up. A prospective algae-breeding oil concern would either have to invest billions of dollars in expensive breeder tanks – at a cost of around three times what the oil would sell for on the international market over the lifetime of the tanks – or find an enormous expanse of well-irrigated land in a country where labour can be bought very cheaply. It is for this reason that Professor Watanabe believes the world’s first algae farms will be constructed in countries such as Indonesia or Vietnam.

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Best of our wild blogs: 17 Jun 08

A Climate Hero: The Early Years
about the long struggle to raise the issue from the Worldwatch Institute

African Fish-eagle catching fish
from Bird Ecology Study Group blog

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