Monday, August 17, 2009

Native American Tribe Shows the Way Ahead in Doing Business with Biofuels

The New York Times has this very interesting piece about the Southern Ute Indian community and their foray into biofuels as well as into extracting the vast natural gas reserves under their reservations: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/business/energy-environment/17algae.html This is a project of the kind that takes after my heart. The SOuthern Ute are not greenies living in la-la land like some who have been arguing with me on some of the blogs that I post on, as well as in one of the posts here. They are a tribe who are looking at making money for the long term for their people and they are interested in doing this in an environment-friendly manner. They are among the wealthiest Native American tribes and this shows that they have the acumen to run a successful business. This project should succeed - it has all the right ingredients that should work as they are fine-tuned to business perfection.

There is a lesson in this for South Asia. The region produces enormous amounts of sewage which only pollutes its ever dwindling fresh-water reserves. There is severe vehicular and powerplant based pollution in the region and the CO2 component in this could go towards feeding algal cultures which would then be refined into fuel. Need I leave out the fact that this would help the nations of the region retain their money instead of sending it overseas to buy fossil fuels? There is some positive interest these days in Solar Power with both India and Pakistan working to bring about a policy to introduce more and mroe solar powered equipment in the future. Hopefully, both of them and the other nations of South Asia will come up with policies that take resources like sewage into account and process them into useable products.

Solix Biofuels, the company that has the business arrangement with the SOuthern Utes has a very interesting website at: http://www.solixbiofuels.com/

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