Well, not really shortening–palm oil.

Palm oil, which in its hydrogenated form is a favorite target of the health food industry, has taken on a new career as the alternative energy source which will save mankind.

The University of Massachusetts biologist Jeffrey Dukes, in 2003, offered his calculation that the human race is now burning, in one year, the amount of fossil fuels that Mother Nature took 400 years to create.

If he is remotely accurate, even the least mathematically-inclined among us can read the numbers on the wall. And those who have, have also begun looking for the 21st century equivalent of our fossilized friends.

Enter the development of biodiesel fuels. Biodiesel is the alternative energy resulting from such things as the recycling of used cooking oils, or the oil produced by farms of genetically engineered algae.

Biodiesel advocates love to point out that, unlike fossil fuel combustion, burning of plant-based biodiesel fuels does not add the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; it simply re-releases what the plant absorbed while growing.

And some think they have found an adequate, inexhaustible alternative energy source in biodiesel produced from the palm oil seed.

So palm oil planters, who, up until 1985 had primarily been growing palms for the food, cosmetic, and lubricant industries, have leapt to the challenge. In 2005, the chairman of Malaysia’s Land Development Authority announced the construction of a biodiesel plant–the ninth such planned for Southeast Asia and Singapore–and all of them will be palm oil processors.

American and German interests are backing two of the facilities, a sign that economic potential of palm oil as an alternative energy is not going unnoticed.

Will the pictures of the vast, rig-studded oil fields of the Middle East one day be supplanted by pictures of vast, palm-studded, alternative energy producing oil fields of Malaysia?

Not likely. Land producing alternative energy is land unavailable for food crops. And as long as humans have lived, they have needed to eat.

That reality is one which the need for alternative energy will never change.