The Hindu : Bio-fuels, a greener alternative to diesel

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jan 22, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Karnataka

Bio-fuels, a greener alternative to diesel

By Alladi Jayasri

BANGALORE Jan. 21. It turns out that Rudolf Diesel, who invented the diesel engine, had as early as in 1899, experimented with the by-products of coal distillation and coke plants, such as tar and creosote oils. And he came to the conclusion that it was possible to burn vegetable and animal oils without difficulty.

In 1912, he wrote "...the first trials were made in 1900 with earth-nut oil; it is certain that motor power can still be produced from the heat of the sun which is always available for agricultural purposes, even where all our natural stores of solid and liquid fuels are exhausted".

A hundred years on, diesel may still be the wonder fuel it was touted to be, but its effect on the air quality and the health of a city has assumed alarming proportions, and the search for clean, green fuels continues.

And then there was E.F. Schumacher, who wrote in the foreword to Forest Farming, Prosperity for India, "Travelling through India, I came to the conclusion that there was no salvation for India except through trees."

In 1952, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research declared, "It can be safely stated, therefore, that when running diesel engines on vegetable oils without any appreciable change in design, it is possible to get similar, or superior, efficiency to that obtained when using mineral oil."

Much diesel has been burned since then and, hearteningly, the search for bio-fuels has not been flagging. Scientists and technologists are now talking of a national policy on non-edible vegetable oils as bio-fuels.

SuTRA (Sustainable Transformation of Rural Areas), Indian Institute of Science, and the Samagra Vikas Trust have planned a seminar on the subject on February 1. The retired bureaucrat V. Balasubramanian, who is the convener of the seminar, has said that a committee chaired by K.V. Raju, Institute of Social and Economic Change, has drafted a national policy after a series of consultations. The draft is being circulated among various agencies and organisations for their inputs.

The Samagra Vikas Trust president, Y.B. Ramakrishna, says the trust has joined hands with SuTRA to popularise and promote the technology to extract bio-fuels from non-edible oils. SuTRA has been successfully running a demonstration of the holistic benefits of the technology at Ungura, a village in Kunigal, near Bangalore, for many years now.

It has been very successful in promoting the honge (pongamia) oil as a diesel substitute to run generators to produce electricity to pump water. It has also been shown that diesel-run automobiles can be run on these non-edible oils.

There is also ample opportunity for socio-economic development of the rural community that can be centred on honge cultivation and production of honge oil, the Samagra Vikas Trust's Vaman Acharya points out.

We are closer than we think to what Joshua Tickell, writing in From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank visualises: "As you roll down your window to let in some fresh air, you notice the sweet smell of French fries... you turn your diesel off, and wonder why nobody believed you when you told them that you were going to run your car on French fry oil."

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