Pacific islands look to coconuts to cut oil costs
by Michelle Nichols

Reuters News Service    Translate This Article
10 May 2006

On 10 May 2006 Reuters News Service reported: A report by the 20-member South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) has found that if Pacific island countries were to replace 50 per cent of diesel imports with coconut oil, then the region's average import bill would be cut by 10 per cent. Global Good News service views this news as a sign of rising positivity in the field of environment, documenting the growth of life-supporting, evolutionary trends.

Coconut oil—extracted from copra, or coconut meat—can be used to make biodiesel to directly substitute diesel, or be blended with diesel. SOPAC reported that engines need only to be adapted for diesel blends of more than 10 per cent coconut oil, Reuters reported.

In the Solomon Islands, which relies on aid for 70 per cent of its budget and has a population of 500,000, fuel for electricity and transport makes up one-third of imports, Finance Minister Peter Boyers told Reuters in an interview.

Boyers said the Solomons must explore 'creative solutions' to ease external pressures on a struggling economy. One such solution is a plan by the Australian Biodiesel Group to produce biodiesel using coconut oil, a plan that was approved last month by the Solomons Foreign Investment Review Board, Reuters reported.

'We're hoping that industry can come in and consume the copra production ... they would produce all that into biofuel, which would be an import subsidisation against fuel,' Boyers said.

'But most importantly it will stabilise the rural man's income by having a base line price per kilo (for copra). That's very important because that affects 80 percent of the population, which is involved in our rural informal sector,' Reuters reported.

Every day Global Good News documents the rise of a better quality of life dawning in the world and highlights the need for introducing Natural Law based—Total Knowledge based—programmes to bring the support of Nature to every individual, raise the quality of life of every society, and create a lasting state of world peace.

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