Biofueling Up

In January, Dagmar Zwebe, a renewable energy specialist with the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV), visited a small pig farm in Vietnam's Thanh Hoa province. The SNV, in collaboration with Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), had just installed the 100,000th tank for converting animal waste into biogas, a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide.

To Zwebe's surprise, the farmer was not only using the gas as a cooking fuel, but he had rigged up a piping system to spread the leftover slurry as an odorless fertilizer on his fields. "It made a big impression on me of how entrepreneurial the Vietnamese people are," Zwebe says.

The biogas project, which earned a 2010 Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy from the London-based charitable group, is one of a growing number of efforts in Vietnam to develop new sources of renewable energy. Since biogas typically can't be used as a transport fuel, the country is also focusing on converting several different feedstocks—including sorghum, sesame, sugarcane and maize—into ethanol and biodiesel as a substitute for petroleum.

"I think there's enough biomass in Vietnam to produce all these different types of biofuel," says Nguyen Do Anh Tuan, director of MARD's Center for Agricultural Policy in Hanoi. Hopefully, that is correct, because the government has a plan in place to produce enough "green gasoline" to meet 5 percent of the country's domestic fuel demand by 2025.

According to Tuan, the bulk of the Vietnam's ethanol should come from cassava, a starchy tuberous root. Unlike other countries, where sugarcane is more abundant, "Vietnam is not so suitable for sugarcane production," Tuan says. To ramp up ethanol production, Petrosetco, a subsidiary of the state-run PetroVietnam, has built five new cassava-conversion factories across the country over the past two years.

Biodiesel is also expected to come from jatropha—a hardy, drought-resistant tropical plant that grows well on non-arable and marginal lands—and catfish oil, which is generated from the waste at the fish-processing plants that dot the southern tip of the country.

Yet even under the most optimistic scenarios, Vietnam probably won't meet its ambitious biodiesel targets, says Pradeep Tharakan, a climate-change specialist with the Asian Development Bank in Manila, Philippines. "People have simply not been able to produce jatropha at the levels needed to supply a national market even in small amounts, much less a global market," he says. What's more, "scaling up catfish biodiesel for use in the transport sector is not something that would be recommended from an environmental standpoint," he says.

Those obstacles aside, the entrepreneurial spirit of Vietnam's people could drive more invention in this country than some experts expect.