Bioremediation And Biofuels: The Asian Angle

China bought into the grain-for-ethanol scheme in 2002, but then started to back away from it 2006 for pretty much the same reasons we in the west have soured on ethanol: Rising grain prices and the basic immorality of taking good, arable land and using it to grow fuel and not food. (Not to mention the rapid depletion of groundwater that accompanies corn ethanol production.)

Lately, they’ve been giving biofuels another try — except this time they’re not using grain, but crops such as cassava, which Chinese farmers have grown for centuries, to turn wastelands into both carbon sinks (cassava being very good at trapping CO2, as well as putting out carbohydrates in amounts suitable for energy feedstocks) and feedstocks for biofuel production.

Sounds like the Chinese are doing what’s known as “bioremediation”: Using various plant crops — it doesn’t have to be cassava; the Chinese are mainly using cassava because that’s a crop their farmers know how to grow; it could be switchgrass or sunflowers or even fast-growing types of trees — they are working on cleaning their brownfields (the plants harvested will pull toxins from the soil and sequester carbon) AND turning the plants into fuel. (Cassava is particularly good at removing heavy-metal toxins from wastewater, by the way.)

This isn’t the only foray by China into bioremediation: Chinese and Japanese scientists are studying a type of seaweed that thrives in polluted waters, with a view to using it as compost if possible if it can be safely composted after it absorbs the waste in the water in which it grows.