Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Jun 2 2005 (IPS) — A pellet of dried grass. Not much to look at, but the tiny ball symbolises a technology that experts say can help meet our surging demand for energy while curbing poverty and global warming especially in developing countries where vast rural populations with no access to electricity and rapidly-expanding mega cities vie for material resources.

Pelletised grass is just one form of bioenergy, which includes, biogas, bioethanol and biodiesel from crops such as sugar cane and beet, maize and biomass energy from fuelwood, fuelwood, charcoal, agricultural wastes and by-products, forestry residues, and livestock manure.

”Right now, with oil at (around) 50 dollars a barrel, bioenergy can easily compete with oil as an energy source,” said Roger Samson, executive director of the research and consulting group Resource Efficient Agricultural Production Canada (REAP-Canada).

”The biggest new energy source in the world is a biofuel made of compacted grass pellets,” Samson, an energy specialist, told IPS in an interview in advance of World Environment Day, which falls on Sunday, June 5.

Economies based on fossil fuels will make a transition to bioenergy-based economies over the next few decades. That switch could benefit not only the rural poor but also the whole planet, since biofuels can help mitigate climate change, says a recent report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Grasses grown on marginal lands in tropical areas have the potential to produce 100 barrels of oil energy equivalent per hectare per year based on studies in Brazil, said Samson. This could be done without fertilisers, he added.

The grasses are dried and turned into hard pellets that can be burned in stoves, furnaces and boilers. The process is renewable, energy efficient, and emits less greenhouse gases and air pollutants than wood, coal, or oil.

There is tremendous variation in the energy efficiency, pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions of each form of bioenergy, however. It takes roughly one barrel of oil energy to produce 14 barrels of oil energy equivalent from pelletised grass, said Samson.

Maize-based ethanol requires an investment of four barrels to produce five to seven barrels of oil energy equivalent.

Bioenergy offers a range of benefits for the two billion people still living without electricity or other modern energy services in mostly rural areas of developing countries, according to the FAO. These include the opportunity to diversify agricultural and forestry activities, improve food security, and contribute to sustainable development.

”The production and use of biofuels need to be properly managed in order to provide energy services to the rural poor while improving food security and contributing to sustainable development,” FAO expert Gustavo Best said in a statement.

In some parts of China, according to international researchers, farmers take their crop residues – leftover straw and plant stalks – 3-5 kilometres to a small pelletising mill. They then use the pellets to cook with or to heat their homes, and sell the rest.

Brazil has 100 million hectares of marginal farmland and could easily export large volumes of grass pellets to Europe for less than it would cost Europe to grow and make its own. Yields in Brazil are higher for such grasses but marginal lands in Eastern Europe could also be a significant producer, they add.

The nascent carbon credit market will make bioenergy even more feasible. Under the Kyoto Protocol to limit global warming, countries unable to meet their greenhouse gas reduction targets can purchase so-called carbon credits. Money from those credits can go to producers of bioenergy, raising the prices of the feedstock that farmers provide.

New sources of energy also are needed as world oil supplies begin to decline. About 35 percent of the world’s energy comes from oil. In 2004, consumption of oil jumped 3.4 percent to 82.4 million barrels per day. This represents the fastest rate of increase in 16 years, driven primarily by China’s growing energy needs, according to the Washington-based research and advocacy group Worldwatch Institute.

The think tank notes, in a report released in April, that many petroleum experts believe that global oil production will peak in the next few years and begin a permanent decline.

World consumption of virtually everything from grain and meat to steel and oil peaked in 2004 as the growing economies of Asia, and particularly China, place an enormous strain on world resources, according to Worldwatch.

”China’s decisions will have a major bearing on the future health of humanity and the planet,” Christopher Flavin, Worldwatch’s president, said in a statement.

There are more middle- to high-income consumers – those earning more than 7,000 dollars per year – in Asia and the Pacific than in Western Europe and North America combined. Yet this still represents only 26 percent of the region’s rapidly growing population, according to a recent review by the Sustainable Consumption Asia (SC.Asia) project of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

”All this adds up to a future scenario where more and more people, by meeting their basic needs and demands through increased consumption, increase the consumption pressure to levels corresponding to the ones found in Europe or North America today,” said Wei Zhao, UNEP’s SC.Asia project manager.

While world population has soared from about 1.4 billion in 1900 to over six billion today, total consumption of natural resources has skyrocketed by a factor of 16. And nowhere are consumption levels rising faster than in Asia.

”Average household consumption increased 68 percent from 1980 to 1998, oil and paper consumption more than tripled since the early 1960s, and the road traffic in several Southeast Asian countries more than doubled from 1990 to 1999,” she said.

Future rapid growth in consumption levels across Asia could devastate the region’s environment, experts say, hence what they term an urgent need to find ways to minimise those impacts. At the same time, however, development demands that the region’s poor gain access to products and services to achieve an improved quality of life.

Flavin said China’s recent recognition that environmental sustainability is key to successful economic development is cause for ”cautious optimism.” Among his reasons: China has committed to generating 10 percent of its electricity using renewable energy sources by 2010.

It will take more than switching to bioenergy to become sustainable. Energy efficiency, conservation and new technologies all are needed, he said.

China also happens to be the world’s top producer and user of compact fluorescent light bulbs and has 75 percent of the world market for solar water heating devices. And most U.S cars cannot be sold in China because they cannot meet stiff new efficiency standards, he added.