A Rain Forest Advocate Taps the Energy of the Sugar Palm
Scientist Willie Smits believes that the Arenga
sugar palm may be the key to protecting tropical forest in Indonesia
while providing opportunity for villagers through a unique process of
biofuel production.
Photograph courtesy Eric Rasmussen
Published June 22, 2011
This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.
One
of Indonesia's most ardent rain forest protection activists is in what
may seem an unlikely position: Spearheading a project to produce biofuel
from trees.
But tropical forest scientist
Willie Smits, after 30 years studying fragile ecosystems in these
Southeast Asian islands, wants to draw world attention to a powerhouse
of a tree—the Arenga sugar palm. Smits says it can be tapped for energy and safeguard the environment while enhancing local food security.
Smits says that the deep-rooted feather palm Arenga pinnata could
serve as the core of a waste-free system that produces a premium
organic sugar as well as the fuel alcohol, ethanol, providing food
products and jobs to villagers while it helps preserve the existing
native rain forest. And scientists who have studied the unique
harvesting and production process developed by Smits and his company, Tapergie, agree the system would protect the atmosphere rather than add to the Earth's growing carbon dioxide burden.
"The
palm juice chiefly consists of water and sugar—made from rain,
sunshine, carbon dioxide and nothing else," says Smits. "You are
basically only harvesting sunshine."
The project, being funded in part by a 73,160 euro grant (U.S. $105,000) from National Geographic's Great Energy Challenge
initiative, has potential to disrupt a cycle of poverty and
environmental devastation that has gripped one of the most vulnerable
and remote areas of the planet, while providing a new source of
sustainable fuel.
The Fuel Threat to Forests
Tapergie's sugar palm production facility that opened last year in Tomohon (map),
in the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia, and the microscale
facilities called Village Hubs that Smits aims to launch on nearby
islands, are a far cry from the oil palm biofuel operations that have
devastated the rain forest.
Demand for oil made
from the pulp and seeds of oil palm trees in Southeast Asia soared when
European countries sought to displace petroleum fuels with biofuel in
the past decade. It was a move that governments hoped would reduce
carbon emissions, but the impact was the reverse. Tracts of rain forest
were cleared, and peat land was drained and burned on a massive scale to
make way for oil palm monoculture. Because of the carbon emissions
caused by rainforest destruction, Indonesia leapt to the top tier of
world greenhouse gas emitters, just behind giant energy consumers China
and the United States.
Smits, who had been
knighted in his native Netherlands, was among the forest advocates who
sounded the warning around the world about the impact of large-scale
biofuel production from oil palm in his adopted home of Indonesia.
Smits
already had gained recognition as one of the world's most prominent
protectors of Asia's great apes and their habitat, as founder of the
Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. He laid out the biofuel problem,
and the rain forest restoration efforts he had spearheaded, in talks around the world, including in the popular online series sponsored by the nonprofit TED.
But
Smits felt he could take those restoration efforts much further, and
the secret was a tree with a value that was first impressed upon him 31
years ago, when he was courting a native Indonesian woman of a mountain
tribe of Sulawesi who would become his wife. (She was later elected a
female tribal leader for her good deeds.)
By
custom, before the marriage, he was required to pay his dowry in the
form of six sugar palms. It seemed a meager offering, until Smits
realized each tree's potential yield.
The fruit
can be harvested and sold as a delicacy. A starch, sago, can be
extracted from the stems. The wood is stronger than oak. Most important
of all, the tree has a distinctive sap, which can be tapped the way a
sugar maple is tapped for maple syrup, but year-round and in vast
quantities. The high-carbohydrate juice can be used to make a palm sugar
that is a healthier substitute for white cane sugar. Smits estimated
that there are at least 60 different products that can come from the
Arenga sugar palm, making it a wholly appropriate marriage gift.
"This was enough to support a young family," he said. "That got me interested in studying the sugar palm in more detail."
"The Most Amazing Tree"
He
found that the Arenga sugar palm had numerous qualities that made it a
virtual sentry of the forest. Its deep roots mean it can be grown on
steep, almost vertical, slopes—offering protection against erosion. It
needs little water and is drought- and fire-resistant, important on
volcanic islands. It is resistant to pests and needs no fertilizer; its
presence in a forest actually enhances the soil.
Because
of these qualities, Smits found that the Arenga sugar palm could be a
key species in his efforts to restore Indonesian rain forests that had
been brutally logged and burned for decades.
"It's
the anti-particle of oil palm . . . the most amazing tree I've ever run
into," says energy expert
Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist of
Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, and member of National
Geographic's Great Energy Challenge advisory board. Lovins recommended
Smits' project as the first grantee in the society's three-year energy
initiative when he learned of his idea for furthering his rainforest
restoration and protection efforts by tapping the sugar palm for fuel.
Smits
knew the sugary juice tapped from sugar palms typically was fermented
to produce a traditional alcoholic beverage. That meant it also could be
used to produce the alcohol fuel, ethanol.
And
Smits said that he discovered that because of the tree's special leaf
structure, its year-round production and extremely efficient
photosynthesis, the yield of ethanol from the sugar palm was far greater
than the biofuel output from other feedstocks in use around the world.
Smits says that his process can produce 19 tons (6,300 gallons/24,000
liters) of ethanol per hectare annually. That's a staggering
output-to-land area ratio compared to corn, the favored ethanol crop of
the United States, at 3.3 tons (1,100 gallons/4,200 liters) per hectare,
by most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture yield figures.
It also far outshines Brazil's sugarcane; output was assumed to be 4.5
tons (1,500 gallons/5,700 liters) per hectare in the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency's recent lifecycle analysis of renewable fuels. [A hectare is 2.5 acres.]
But
there's a catch. Producers can't sow row upon row of sugar palms the
way they blanket the countryside with cornfields in Iowa, sugarcane in
São Paulo or oil palm plantations in Sumatra. For one thing, the sugar
palm flourishes best in a diverse forest environment, not in a
monoculture.
And, importantly, each sugar palm
requires constant attention. For optimum production, it must be tapped
twice a day by tappers trained to slice a thin layer from the end of the
stalk on which male flowers are growing. If done properly, the tapping
extends the life of the tree—by "stealing" some of the tree's energy
that was intended as storage for its seeds. (The ripening of fruit is
thus delayed.) But the juice in which the energy is stored must be
preserved quickly on site or nearby, or else it spoils due to
uncontrolled fermentation. Smits says that the tapping process cannot be
mechanized.
"It is five-to-20 times more labor
intensive than harvesting oil from the oil palm," says Lovins. "You
don't hear about it from those in who are locked into the industrial
monoculture mentality. They think the economics are bad. But Willie
thinks the economics are terrific."
That's
because the sugar palm Village Hubs, as Smits envisions them, would
provide something as important to this region as fuel—economic
opportunity.
A Stake in Forest Protection
Tapergie's
facility that opened three years ago in Tomohon—the world's first
Arenga palm sugar factory—now has 6,285 palm tappers as members of the
cooperative, making the twice-daily journey into the village forests to
collect juice to be brought back to the factory. Thanks to sales of the
special palm sugar they produce, they earn an income that is twice the
region's prevailing minimum.
Sustainable energy
is also a part of the design of the factory. It operates on geothermal
heat (waste energy captured from the state energy company). In this way,
clean energy replaces devastating practices that prevailed for making
traditional palm sugar, in which hundreds of thousands of trees were cut
to fuel the fire that boiled the sap. In addition, the biofuel produced
on-site from the sugar palm is used to replace gasoline in motorcycles,
small vehicles, small machines and generators, and is also used as
cooking fuel in special burners. Once scaled up, biofuel could be
transported for further refining for use in conventional vehicle engines
elsewhere, Smits says.)
The Village Hub idea
that Smits now aims to test would bring small, turnkey versions of the
Tomohon factory—and its employment and energy benefits—to remote areas
on the 3,000 or so islands east of Sulawesi. These are areas where
people typically live without electricity, fuel, communication,
education, health services, or potable water.
Smits
says his portable mini-factories, running on local biomass and solar
heating, could help villages meet all of these needs, because they would
include equipment for telecommunications as well as for making fuel. He
sees the sites becoming economic centers that provide more than
jobs—they would produce drinking water, electricity, cooking fuel,
compost and cattle feed, while enabling telephone and satellite-based
broadband Internet access.
Because the
wellspring of all these benefits would be the Arenga sugar palm, the
villagers would have a shared investment in protecting and cultivating
the trees and the needed diverse surrounding forest, as Smits sees it.
So the system, in which communities would own 49 percent of the
operations, would be designed to establish a virtuous cycle of
protection.
"It's what we call 'sustainability,' " says Smits.
There
have been past efforts in Singapore and Borneo to cultivate sugar palms
for their fibers or sugar. But Smits believes Tapergie's effort can be
successful where others have failed, because of its determination to
maintain a mixed village forest, and to do it with community ownership.
The
sugar palm has vast potential, he says, but it can only be unlocked in a
holistic system, with production working hand-in-hand with protection.
Lovins says the two are tightly interwoven in the system Smits has
designed; "It gives people a stake and the clout needed to protect the
land and forest themselves," he says.
Smits will
be reporting to National Geographic on the success of his first Village
Hub deployment over the course of the next year.
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