Bio-fuels are not new. They have been around for more than thirty years starting with Brazil's ethanol programme and France's bio-diesel from rapeseed initiative in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, recent developments have accelerated the development of alternative fuels and their application on a global basis, and Southeast Asia is no exception to this trend.

This chapter seeks to offer a broad understanding of bio-fuels in terms of their types, production processes, current usage, and their advantages and problems in relation to crude fossil fuels. The chapter will explore how oil and bio-fuel industries have improved production processes to pave the way for a new generation of bio-fuels, such as synthetic fuels. It will argue that the focus in developing bio-fuels needs to be on the sustainability of alternative energy resources, and that this is possible only if the growth in cultivation of bio-mass for fuel does not cause damage to eco-systems and competition with food production is prevented as far as possible. It will also stress the importance of employing the right tools to evaluate the efficacy of bio-fuels, and will stress the utility of the well-to-wheel analysis in this regard.

SETTING THE SCENE

The twentieth century was the golden age of mobility. The transport of both people and freight shifted rapidly from being manual to mechanical — automobiles, trains, ships, buses and planes have come to dominate the way the people and materials move. The rapidity of transport development over the twentieth century will however not be replicated over the next twenty to thirty years. While there will not be any step-changes in the evolution of transport fuels, we will see a rise in the use of new fuels in the future, such as naphtha/methanol and hydrogen. Gaseous fuels will also be increasingly used but they will remain niche fuels. Liquid fuels will remain the dominant fuels over the next two to three decades, and the character of transport engines will not undergo any fundamental transformations.