China Environmental Law

The rise of China’s wind industry continues to receive hyperventilating coverage (how many of these projects are actually getting built? See The Green Leap Forward’s Wind Chill Factors for a sobering statistic on this point- “only 55% of wind farm projects awarded since 2004 have been built”), but China’s biofuel industry is in the dumps.

Forbes reports that

The Chinese government needs to draw up new policies to ensure that its biofuel targets can be achieved efficiently and economically, said a researcher with the country’s regulator, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

Wang Zhongying, the assistant director of the renewable energy section of the NDRC’s Energy Research Institute, said at a conference in Beijing that the industry has so far been stumbling along without any proper product standards or market entry requirements.

The government has said that 15 pct of total vehicle gasoline and diesel demand should be met by biofuel by 2020, and it has already set up 10 ‘experimental’ biofuel promotion regions in which gasoline is mixed with ethanol, but the target might be too ambitious, Wang said.

There is clearly ambivalence about this industry in China. For instance, “[t]he government banned the use of food crops in the production of biofuel in 2006″ and in 2007 it moved the “[m]anufacture of biological liquid fuel (fuel ethanol, bio-diesel)” to the “restricted” category for foreign investment and required that the Chinese party hold the controlling share in any joint ventures.  Concerns remain about “impact the large-scale cultivation of biofuel crops would have on food and water supplies, the environment, and the quantity and quality of land in China.”

Assistant Director Wang

called upon the government to do its best to use what technology already exists to take greater advantage of current ‘first generation’ biofuel resources such as ethanol, biodiesel and vegetable oil.

It would take fifteen years or so before the technology is mature to exploit ’second-generation’ biofuel resources, which include forest waste, cellulose and non-food crop residues, he said.

Large-scale state-led projects in the rural southwest are now being planned, using sorghum, cassava and oilseed as feedstocks, but the bulk of China’s biofuel output is currently derived from cooking oil waste and crop residues.

I know that some foreign firms interested in investing in the “upstream” segment of the biodiesel market by establishing jatropha plantations on marginal land, have been scarred off by the complexities of rural land ownership in China and concern for the ability to enforce contractual commitments to sustain long-term crops like jatropha.

The final nail in the biofuel coffin was delivered in the Forbes article by none other than, Abdullatif Al-Houti, the managing director of international marketing with the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation who pointed out that

‘If you cut the planet in half like an orange and plant (biofuel) crops everywhere, you still wouldn’t have enough for global energy needs, and you’re still going to need oil.’

Actually I’m still puzzling over the meaning of the visual.  Are we only planting crops on one half of the orange or both halves (but why then cut it in half)? Are we only planting on the concave surfaces (again why cut it in half?) or on the newly exposed flat surface as well?  I’m confused. Whatever he meant, I don’t think it was designed to make us feel good about biofuels, but then what would you expect from the marketing director of a petroleum company?