Japan is a developed country with a powerful economy and is the world’s second largest gasoline consumer after the United States. Till date country is entirely dependent on the crude oil imports. The main reason behind this is high prices for local farm produce, lack of support from country’s powerful oil distributors and failure by the government to provide policy incentives such as mandatory usage.
And now after the surge in oil prices the Govt. has started feeling the heat of this issue and has started the production of cheap rice-origin ethanol brew facility at a former high school field in Shinanomachi and a sweet, sour aroma, similar to that of unfiltered sake, wafts into the air. The facility can produce 0.5 liter of ethanol from 1 kilogram of rice.
The production has started under a Govt. funded project lead by Yasuo Igarashi, a professor of applied microbiology at the University of Tokyo. The project aims at creating a local community of more than 10000 who would voluntary in donating farm waste such as rice hulls to make inexpensive biofuels.
Officials said that there is a great possibility of developing cost effective and renewable biofuels using the agriculture waste and abandoned farmland and make the future cars to run on them. For this purpose the team has imported a “flex-fuel vehicle“, a red Ford Focus from Britain that can run on any on any mixture of gasoline and green fuels.
With this kind of initiative the Country will surely be able to meet up the carbon emissions reduction targets to meet under the Kyoto protocols and may be a day will come that Japanese motorists will pump their cars full of sake(the fermented rice wine that is Japan’s national drink) to speed on tracks.
Via: reuters
