19 April 2004 - Japan Leads the Way With Energy Saving Sugarcane Fuel
Story from the Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment (IEMA) international news pages here.
Municipal government
cars in Miyako, Okinawa Prefecture, will from next week start running on
fuel made mostly from sugarcane, Environment Ministry officials said.
Tests will be carried out on the cars running on a fuel made from sugarcane
and only small quantities of regular automobile gasoline to determine
whether they can compare in terms of economics and reliability with regular
cars.
Scientists hope the clean fuel will be good enough to power all of Japan's
cars by 2012 and the best news is that the sugarcane elixir is cheap, made
largely out of material that has until now largely been thrown away.
Scientists have extracted what's called bioethanol by fermenting the
by-products of sugar.
Sugar-based bioethanol is made in large quantities in Asia and South
America, but it is cheaper to make it in Okinawa than to import it.
It can be produced locally for a few dozen yen per litre.
Miyako annually produces about 3,400 tons of the sugarcane by-product used
in the fermenting process. Some of this is used as livestock feed or
fertilizer, but most is dumped. (Mainichi and wire reports, April 3, 2004).
