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Professor Yuan Longping, an established Chinese rice expert, dubbed as the "father of hybrid rice", has been mulling a new project to make fuel alcohol with rice.
Yuan, a member of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the top advisory body, made the proposal to the ongoing session of the CPPCC National Committee in Beijing.
The huge surpluses of early-ripening indican rice in southern China, or a kind of a high-yielding, long-grained rice with rich amylose, is an ideal raw material for making ethyl alcohol for industrial use, he acknowledged.
As matter of fact, Prof. Yuan said he was going all out to promote the project so as to tackle the problem with the surplus rice. By employing a high technology he himself developed, the yields of a hybrid early ripening indican rice soared to around 10 tons per hectare. So, local farmers said they were happy to have such high yields but difficult to sell the less-tasty rice out. As more strains of yummy rice are within the easy reaches of consumers, the sale of such early ripening rice poses a problem.
"It's not ideal to eat, but it could be used to produce ethyl alcohol," said Prof. Yuan, who brightened up by the ways of processing surplus grain into ethyl alcohol in the northeastern granary provinces of Jilin and Liaoning .
In his proposal to the first session of the 10th CPPCC National Committee, Prof. Yuan suggested building a special distillery with an annual output of 300,000 tons of fuel ethyl alcohol in Changde city, central-south China's Hunan Province.
"The distillery would cost a little more than 100 million yuan (US$12 million), but the benefits are great, as 300,000 tons of fuel ethyl alcohol equals to approximately one million tons of petroleum. This could save China a lot of foreign currency when it still depended heavily on oil imports. And it also meant higher income for farmers," he added.
And Prof. Yuan is delighted for another reason. "Then, I could go on with my researches on further increase of yields for the early-ripening indican rice," said Yuan, a winner of the preeminent State Science and Technology Award in 2001.
(Xinhua News Agency March 12, 2003)
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