This issue goes to print under seemingly dramatic geopolitical circumstances. Russia’s or rather Putin’s war of attrition in Ukraine has escalated in so far as military service orders for Russian citizens have been issued leading to an exodus of Russian males fleeing the country.
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Further, bogus elections have just been held in the occupied regions of Ukraine in a lead to declare them as Russian Federation territory, as was previously, and illegally, done with Crimea.
The EU has responded with another round of economic sanctions against Russia, and the United States with more aid to Ukraine.
However, no less dramatic and a cause of grave concern are the now four leakages on the NordStream I and II gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea that transport gas to Germany from Russia.
While Gazprom had already stopped gas deliveries via the pipelines for “extended unscheduled maintenance” on the Russian end, the sudden appearance of leakages off the Danish Island of Bornholm has been dubbed by Swedish and Danish authorities as deliberate acts by persons or entities yet unknown and for reasons yet unknown.
The what, how, who, and why will all come out in the wash in due course once the remaining gas in the pipelines has bubbled up to the surface.
How many billions Nm3 of methane will ultimately leak into the atmosphere, its greenhouse gas (GHG) effect, and whose national GHG tab is something for academics, and GHG reporting agencies, to get stuck into.
Clear is that the incident is yet another brazen in-your-face reminder of why energy independence and security of supply, including reducing or mitigating energy infrastructure chokepoints matter, at national, regional, and local levels.
The Achilles’ heel of large-scale centralized power generation is simply the fact that they are large-scale and centralized.
This makes them vulnerable as targets to cause maximum disruptive effect, which in this age of the Internet of Things does not necessarily entail physically leveling the plant to the ground with an airstrike – a theme the fourth “Die Hard” Hollywood action movie explored.
A recent trip to the State of Maharashtra, the second-most populous and third-largest state in India, provided some candid insights into local nay even household efforts toward increasing energy independence and security of supply.
Organized by the World Bioenergy Association (WBA) as part of its 2022 General Assembly, the official trip to Aurangabad and Pune included visits to biomass- and biogas-fired clean cookstove producers while some extra-curricular ad-hoc visits included household- and corporate canteen biogas digesters.
Both are based on the circular economy idea of utilizing locally generated residues to produce cooking fuel to be used locally – a household, a rural village, or a corporate canteen.
Moreover, the country relies almost exclusively on imports of oil and gas to fuel its ever-growing transportation sector – something that Prime Minister Modi is keen to address communicating national efforts to increase the domestic production and use of renewable transportation fuels, not least via the annual World Biofuel Day.
All four national oil marketing companies (OMCs) have advanced biofuel projects using technology developed by compatriot Praj Industries ongoing of which Indian Oil Company Ltd (IOCL) is now commissioning. Indeed, Praj Industries itself is perhaps a good reflection of just how far the ethanol fuel and beverage industry has come and where it may be headed in the near future.
Finally, on the fuel and food thought, statistics released by the European Renewable Ethanol Association (ePURE) indicate its members required just 1.1 million hectares (ha) for crops for fuel ethanol production in 2021.
This is about 1 percent of the total available arable land in the EU-27 and UK, and more than three times less than the current acreage of set-aside- and fallow land.
At the same time, a casual conversation with an ENGO in India held that local household-scale (i.e. a few litres per day) biodiesel production using available oilseeds in rural India (and elsewhere) could unlock significant gains in overall agricultural productivity.
How? By reducing the acreage of involuntary fallow fields. Switching from an ox-powered tiller to a small biodiesel unit can shorten the time spent working a field post-harvest preparing it for resowing the next crop by up to fivefold. This has significant implications as the time between harvest and resowing is short, and many farmers simply run out of time thus the field lies fallow over the season.
By extension, it is an intriguing thought, that locally produced and consumed biofuels, along with the associated food/feed co-products, could be the enabler of increased food production on existing arable land areas – a thought that most definitely deserves a lot more attention and determining data.
