Rapeseed

Last year we read Peter Hessler's River Town, a book about the author's life teaching English in a Yangzi River town as a two-year Peace Corps volunteer. Throughout the book, Hessler refers to the rapeseed growing on farms along the Yangzi, and after a while the repetition of the word "rapeseed" got a little annoying. Upon visiting the Three Gorges, however, we figured out why he liked it so much.

Basically, it's gorgeous. Rapeseed is adorned by a yellow flower when in bloom, and most beautiful in the morning, dappled by the sunrise in an ongoing field. In Chinese, the name for rapeseed is 油菜子 which, literally translated, means "oil vegetable seed." So, upon hearing the name and seeing the amount of rapeseed planted around the Three Gorges, we began wondering about the utility of rapeseed as a biofuel.

It turns out we're not the first people to think about this. Rapeseed produces slightly more biofeul than soy, though some research shows that it produces 50% more greenhouses gases than fossil fuels. It also produces less sulfur, a fact that should be in the minds of those Chinese oil companies that are buying sulfur-laden petroleum in order to deal with government-mandated price controls. And at this point, according to this page on Wikipedia, rapeseed comprises 30% of some biodiesel blends in Europe. So I wonder how long it will be before rapeseed-based biofuels begin to edge fossil fuels out of the Chinese market, because there's certainly a ton of rapeseed planted in China's heartland right now.