Agifish: Fill 'Er Up With Catfish Unleaded Please
by Karin Kloosterman, Tel Aviv 
on 07.21.06
If you ever wondered what to do with your leftover catfish guts, a Vietnamese innovator has come up with a dandy solution: catfish biodiesel. According to Reuters, a Vietnamese company called Agifish plans to turn catfish fat into fuel to run diesel engines. "The fuel is as good as diesel oil," said Agifish director Nguyen Dinh Huan who added that the company has been using the fuel, made from fat leftovers, to run pumps at its fish ponds in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang in southern Vietnam. We are not sure if this idea would be popular on Animal Farm (fish fat running a fish farm!), and it's not quite vegan, but the company claims that a kilogram of catfish fat could produce 1.13 litres of biofuel. Agifish plans on building a 10,000-tonne-per-year factory in 2007 to mass-produce the fuel for domestic markets. If it's using what would otherwise be considered waste, why not? ::New Scientist via ::Reuters.
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The problem with this is that native Vietnamese catfish are being hunted to extinction
(viz Fisherman in the north’s Da River valley have prospered trapping the elusive tiger catfish, a valued delicacy. But, Do Doan Hoang and Thanh
Long warn, they may be about to kill off their golden goose.
The Chien, or Bagarius yarelli to scientists and ‘tiger catfish’ to hunters ...is in danger of being bled out of rivers from excessive hunting...
/vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=02SUN160706
)
Any commercial development that involves fish farming will affect the quality of the river, cause a stampede to round up every catfish available to sell to the developer, and allow parasites to prosper as the population of fish is built up to abnormally dense levels.
Sadly, I don't see this helping anyone out - except making the developer rich in the short-term...
For years there has been a plea from US catfish farmers to cut off Vietnamese catfish exports to the US, under charges of price dumping that makes it impossible for US farmers to make any money. There are also charges that the Vietnamese cats are raised with all sorts of nasty additives. Wanna bet that the Vietnamese fish farms are importing corn from the US cornbelt to feed those cats? And with the corn farmers under US subsidy? What a crazy world.
This is quite distressing.
Car exhaust from bio-diesel made from deep fryers smell like French fries, now our cars will smell like mackerel.
In the name of preserving nature, this is a horrible idea. In a location where the fish (or animal) being used is domesticated, turning waste products into biodiesel is productive BUT when the production of biodiesel means the destruction of wildlife, it is counter-productive!
Its great that they are developing more things to make fuel out of however we need a use sparingly guideline applied to some of these. If he was to take the fat from many animals as to not cause a run and set off an inhumane amount of hunting this would be great.
that is the biggest catfish ever