Kansai Electric to produce fuel from mangroves

An innovative project led by Kansai Electric Power Co. is under way in Thailand to revive an ecosystem and produce environment-friendly bioethanol fuel from nipa palms, a kind of mangrove. Kansai Electric planted 250,000 mangroves on 83 hectares of land back in 2000 as an experiment and some 80% of these have survived and grown as tall as 10 meters, against a maximum possible height of 15 meters, said Hiroyuki Koyama, chief researcher at the company’s Power Engineering R&D Center. The project ended in fiscal 2007. In 2010, Kansai Electric began studies to develop an afforestation technology for nipa palms and to produce bioethanol using nipa palm as feedstock. Kansai Electric plans to launch commercial production of bioethanol in fiscal 2013 at the earliest. The company estimates that planting nipa palms on 200,000 hectares of denuded land could produce 500,000 kiloliters of bioethanol per year, enough to reduce CO2 emissions by 800,000 tons, if used as an alternative to gasoline. (January 24, 2011)