Pakistan’s 27 million acres of saline land provide an ideal medium to cultivate algae for biofuel production, according to Ehsan Ali of Mie University of Japan.
Various organisations are already aiming to produce biofuel from jatropha and castor oil cultivated in Pakistan, but the use of algae as a feedstock would have numerous benefits for the country, Ali said in a recent seminar.
In addition to the greater potential yield of oil from algae, its ability to grow in saline soil would mean that there would be no potential competition with food crops. Indeed, since algae draws salt from the soil, the amount of land suitable for food cultivation could even be increased if saline groundwater from elsewhere were used to feed the algae.
Pakistan’s development is, at present, overly dependent on fossil fuels, he argued, which is unsustainable as oil production begins to diminish. The country urgently needs to establish its own biofuel research academy to investigate opportunities for biofuels production in Pakistan.
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