豪州における穀物からのバイオ燃料生産の動向とその意義 : 再生可能な石油代替燃料の生産による資源循環型農業への模索

Abstract

Recently, Australia has tried to promote Biofuel production in two ways. --one from sugarcane mainly in Queensland and the other from wheat in Western Australia. However, at the moment, oil companies and automobile industries are strongly against these policies in order to maintain their share of traditional petroleum fuels. Federal government has also been hesitating its rapid expansion following their opinions although state governments have all been promoting strongly. These situations reflect current political dual structure i.e. federal government is led by conservative coalition of National party and Liberal party while all state governments are led by Labor party. Due to the stagnation of international prices of sugar and wheat, farmers in Queensland and western Australia have suffered from serious farm management situations. Promotion of biofuel production based on grains began to be considered as the efficient measures to solve these situations. In addition to these, current high oil price and appreciated exchange rate of Australian dollar had contributed to the promotion of biofuel production. Under these situations, Australian government has set the target of "350 million litter of biofuel production by 2010". On the other hand, Australia has not ratified Kyoto Protocol yet. Originally the biofuel projects have 2 purposes. One is securing sufficient fuel supply and another is mitigating the global warming by curtailing CO2 emission through substituting petroleum with biofuels. The promotion of biofuel projects might be important for offsetting the negative image of nonparticipation in the international agreement for global environmental conservation. Anyway, biofuel projects have just been implemented in both projects for the bio-etanol and the bio diesel fuels. At the moment, Australia has been enjoying economic boom caused by former Sydney Olympic and coming Peking Olympic which has rapidly expanded mineral import from Australia. This biofuel project can be one of the effective measures to solve the recession or bubble explosion after these events are over.