10/4/2005 (China Post) - With oil prices rising worldwide, Taiwan isjumping on the global bandwagon of experimenting with biofuel as a sourceof energy as an alternative to the petroleum-based gasoline and diesel.

Taipei County's Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) launched a projectlast week to allowing public buses, regular trucks, and the county'sgarbage trucks to run on biodiesel, which is made of vegetable oil oranimal fat, on a trial basis.

Biodiesel, which along with plant-derived ethanol constitute the majorityof biofuel, can be used by itself or in a mixture with regular dieselfuel. The fuel which will run the buses and trucks in the Taipei Countyproject will be a mixture of 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent regulardiesel, effectively making obsolete one fifth of the total of regulardiesel.

"As many countries around the world such as the U.S. and those in Europehave already been experimenting with biofuel, we ran the project with thesupport of the Executive Yuan's Environmental Protection Administration(EPA)," said Taipei County EPB section chief Lin Sung-chin.

The project, which is being subsidized by the EPA, involves five local andfreeway bus operators, a shipping company and sanitation crews from fiveTaipei County townships for a total of forty vehicles, plus eight heavymachines working in a landfill.

The program will run for five months, until the end of February next year,accumulating over 400,000 kilometers of vehicle mileage and over 300 hoursof machine use while consuming over 90,000 liters of biodiesel. EPB willalso arrange for the vehicles to be checked for emissions.

Compared to petroleum-based fuel, biofuel has the advantage of fewer airpollutants being emitted by vehicles burning it.

According to statistics compiled by the U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency, biodiesel can cut down carbon monoxide emissions by elevenpercent, nitrogen oxide emissions by 21 percent, and atmospheric aerosolsby 10 percent when compared to regular diesel fuel.

"Since the U.S. and Europe have different environments than ours, we arerunning this program to see how biofuel affects us locally," said Lin.

Combined with the impact brought about by the Kyoto Accords, the drop inworldwide oil production makes the Taipei County project significant interms of finding an alternative source of fuel that is at the same timeenvironmentally friendly, according to EPB.

Lin said that Taiwan has just begun experimenting with biofuel within thelast two years, starting with Kaohsiung County and then followed by dozensof other counties and cities.

Taiwan is basically following in the footsteps of the world's biggestbiodiesel producer, Germany, which has passed a law requiring the mixtureof 5 percent of biodiesel into the country's total regular diesel output.

In terms of ethanol, Brazil has been leading the world in terms ofproduction of the alcohol which can be used in place of gasoline. Thecountry's sugar-cane fields feed a network of 320 ethanol plants, with 50more planned in the next five years, according to Newsweek. Most ofBrazil's 20 million drivers fill up with fuel that is cut with 25 percentethanol, according to the weekly.

The U.S. production of ethanol is almost as high as Brazil's, doublingsince 2001 and already replacing three percent of all transport fuel.