Palm Oil:alternative energy- but what is the cost ?
Palm Oil: To some, it is liquid gold, to others, the harbinger of death – but to most , palm oil is a complete mystery.
Yet, production of this oil – an ingredient in many of the foods we eat and products we use and also a major source of alternative biofuel – comes at a devastating environmental cost. Millions of hectares of South-East Asian rainforest are being destroyed to make way for new palm plantations, decimating some of the world’s most threatened species, including the orang-utan.
Malaysia and Indonesia produce 90% of the world’s palm oil on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra – the only two locations where orangutans still live in the wild.
But with predictions that palm oil will be the world’s most internationally traded edible oil within five years, orang-utan welfare campaigners fear the further destruction of tropical lowland forests could push the orang-utan to the brink of extinction. In the two decades since palm oil plantations began to expand, orangutan numbers have fallen from 200,000 to about 30,000.
The clear-felling in Indonesian Kalimantan and Malaysian Borneo has led to thousands of orang-utans being hunted, killed, orphaned, injured or sold into captivity.
Once, palm oil was seen as an ideal biofuel, a cheap alternative to petroleum that would fight global warming.
But second thoughts are wracking the power industry. Can the fruit of the palm tree help save the planet — or contribute to its destruction?
Environmentalists have long warned that many plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, where 85 percent of commercial palm oil is grown, were planted on cleared rain forest, threatening the home of endangered animals like the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger.
Now, amid global efforts to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, power companies have joined conservationists in calculating the carbon count of producing palm oil fuel — and found the balance increasingly negative. A few companies have put plans on hold to switch to palm oil.
The palm oil debate is just one example of cold realism dampening enthusiasm for vegetable oils as substitutes for the fossil fuels that are widely blamed for the gradual warming of the Earth and potentially disastrous changes in climate.
In the United States, where farmers have diverted corn and sugar crops to ethanol production, food prices have soared. Environmentalists say the high energy cost of making ethanol, coupled with the degraded land and polluted water from heavily fertilized fields, have put a large question mark on its value as a biofuel.
Palm oil is an ingredient in cooking oil, cosmetics, soaps, bread, chocolate — in fact, in about one in every 10 products on the supermarket shelf. It also is used as an industrial lubricant.
It is attractive for bioenergy because it is relatively abundant, cheap at about US$557 (€419) per ton in mid-March, and more easily integrated into existing power stations than most other alternative fuels.
Unlike carbon-rich fossil fuels, production is considered carbon neutral, meaning the carbon emitted from burning palm oil is the same as that absorbed during growth.
But the surrounding environmental cost is becoming increasingly apparent.
The four-year study in Southeast Asia by a team from Wetlands, Delft Hydraulics and the Alterra Research Center of Wageningen University said 600 million tons of carbon dioxide seep every year into the air from drained peat swamps. Another 1.4 billion tons go up in smoke from rain forest fires deliberately set to clear new land for plantations, shrouding much of Singapore and Malaysia in an impenetrable haze for weeks at a time.
Together, those 2 billion tons of CO2 amount to 8 percent of the globe’s fossil fuel emissions, the report said.
Friends of the Earth called the report “astonishing,” and said it shows that harvesting palm oil for fuel is counterproductive. “It undermines the whole project,” said a climate specialist for the environment group, Anne van Schaik.
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