24/9/06 JAKARTA (AFP) - Indonesia's first fully plant-fuelled car has successfully completed a 3,200-kilometre (2,000-mile) road trip. Now its backers are hoping the triumph may herald a new era of sustainable energy in the archipelago nation.

Tanto Bangun, editor of Indonesian    National Geographic, one of the major sponsors of the trip, says he was not sure the Mitsubishi Strada would survive the arduous journey from West Timor's Atambua to the capital Jakarta.

But the car, fuelled with oil from the jatropha plant, smoothly negotiated the freezing volcanic peaks of Flores and Sumbawa islands, as well as the sweltering Javanese countryside.

The trip was the brainchild of Bangun and Robert Manurung, head of the biotechnology research centre at the Bandung Institute of Technology.

Bangun said: "When I met Robert Manurung, he was talking about how he is concerned about the lack of research on alternative energy (in Indonesia)... Innovation is not really appreciated because many industries that are related to fossil fuels don't like this development."

"So I challenged him: Can we make a journey on pure jatropha oil?"

Manurung, who has spent several years looking at refining oil from the bushy jatropha plant and developing a converter to allow the oil to withstand extremes of temperature, has high hopes for the innovative vehicle.

"Maybe this is the world's first pure biodiesel-run car. Definitely, it's Indonesia's first," he says.

Amid soaring oil costs, Indonesia is trying to reduce the cost of providing subsidized fuel to the population, which has risen to an estimated 62.4 trillion rupiah (6.86 billion dollars) this year, despite several cuts to subsidies by the cash-strapped government.

Although rich in fossil fuels, Indonesia realizes it does not have an endless supply, says Al Hilal Hamdi, who was appointed to head a government team examining biofuel development this year.

"The government would like to have more energy security because we have limited fossil fuels. We have only 23 to 25 years of oil, 60 years of gas, and 150 years of coal," says Hamdi.

"Biofuel will secure our energy sources," he adds.

Jakarta plans to make at least five million hectares (12 million acres) of former forest land available for palm oil, jatropha, sugarcane and cassava plantations in a bid to create jobs for up to three million people, Hamdi says.

"The government is looking for a breakthrough for creating more jobs since we have over 10 million people unemployed," says Hamdi.

Already diesel trucks and buses across Indonesia can buy biodiesel, a mixture of palm oil -- another biofuel -- and fossil fuel, at 120 gas stations run by state oil company Pertamina, he notes.

The government hopes that biofuels will supply 10 percent of Indonesia's transport and electricity fuel needs by 2010.

In Sumatra's Lampung province, the state electricity supplier PLN is using biofuel as part of a pilot project towards converting electricity stations on all of Indonesia's islands outside Java to 100 percent biodiesel by 2010.

Environmentalists applaud Jakarta's plans for alternative energy sources, but warn that palm oil is not necessarily a green answer to Indonesia's fuel crisis.

"If the government really wants to press for biofuel, please use idle land -- don't convert natural forest," urges Elfian Effendi from Greenomics.

Palm oil, which requires fertile land, eats up valuable food-producing land, but jatropha, notes Manurung, can grow on dry wasteland.

Jatropha is ideal for the drought-prone regions of eastern Indonesia which struggle to grow other food crops, and establishing a jatropha plantation costs just a tenth of setting up a palm oil plantation, he says.

"Palm oil is a bourgeois plant. But jatropha is the proletariat plant, because anyone can own it," quips the scientist.

With the price of palm oil rising as demand picks up, several European biofuel buyers have said they want to buy jatropha rather than palm oil.

Manurung has been talking to farmers in Papua, Kalimantan and Nusa Tenggara and hopes to facilitate a deal between them and European buyers to cultivate a million hectares of jatropha.

A Dutch company has already requested half a million tons of pure jatropha oil for 2007, says Manurung.

While demand for biofuels is likely to soar, vegetable oils are not about to replace petrol as Indonesia's -- or the world's -- major fuel source, warns David Chang, a researcher from UOBKay Hian Securities.

Palm oil production from Malaysia and Indonesia, which together supply 90 percent of global palm oil, provides the equivalent of only about three percent of the current demand for fossil fuels.

And Indonesia, which currently supplies 50 percent of global crude palm oil, will struggle to supply even the food industry over the coming years, he said.

As palm oil plantations take four years to reach maturity, it will take several years before Indonesia can significantly expand its production.

"I think what we're talking about is biodiesel forming a small percentage of fuel supplies," says Chang.

Manurung concedes that it might take time for jatropha to become Indonesia's fuel of choice, but he hopes that the government will realise it has a cheaper option to fossil fuels and palm oil -- and has the potential to enrich Indonesia's poor farmers in the east.

"We hoped, by making this expedition, that at least the government realises it has another alternative to palm oil," he says.