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Taiwan to focus on ethanol crop cultivation
TAIPEI - The government's energy crops policy will focus on planting crops for the production of ethanol gasoline, also known as gashol, after efforts to grow crops for the production of bio-diesel over the past two years have proved inefficient, a senior Agriculture and Food Agency (AFA) official said yesterday.| * "Future energy crop cultivation will focus on plants like sweet potatoes, which are the major resource for the production of bio-ethanol." |
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AFA Deputy Director Yu Sheng Feng
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AFA Deputy Director Yu Sheng feng said that as part of the government's efforts to promote the use of biomass energy, the agency began planting energy crops, including soybeans and sunflowers, on 1,721 hectares of fallow land in the southern counties of Yunlin, Chiayi and Tainan in 2006.
This year, the cultivation was further expanded to 24 counties and townships, including Taoyuan and Taipei counties, covering a total of 3,334 hectares of fallow ground.
However, harvests were far less than expected due to damage caused by natural disasters and pests, Yu said, adding that they could only meet the demand from several model governmental bio-energy promotion programs such as the "green government vehicle" program implemented in September.
In this regard, Yu said, future energy crop cultivation will focus on plants like sweet potatoes, which are the major resource for the production of bio-ethanol.
Energy crop cultivation is one of the government's strategies in the face of an international energy crisis, resulting from skyrocketing crude oil prices, according to the AFA.
Meanwhile, former Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh, who is a 1986 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, suggested that the government speed up efforts to cut Taiwan's emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the factors in global warming.
At a national park/greenland conference held by the Construction and Planning Agency in Taipei earlier in the day, Lee said the country has moved at a snail's pace in the reduction of CO2 emissions.
He said Taiwan can be regarded as an "over-developed" country from the viewpoint of its CO2 emissions. If the nation cannot act to cut the emissions significantly, economic activity in the country will be "meaningless," because the next generation will be faced with a polluted environment unsuitable for living, Lee said.
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