If a group that toured Beslea Farms at Shelburne last Friday is right, there's a

great future in bio-diesel production, and you're likely to see more of local fields of yellow flowering canola as growers of that cash crop scramble to meet a growing demand for the oil they produce.

Gregory Penner PhD, the president and chief executive officer of a company he calls NeoVentures Biotechnology Inc. in Guelph, said bio-diesel fuel is just as efficient but much safer than that derived from petroleum.

"If there's a spill of bio-diesel produced from canola oil, you can just wash it away. It poses no risk to the environment," he said. Not so with the petroleum variety, however, in which case a spill would contaminate the soil on which it had splashed.

Curiously, scientists say that vegetable oils are derived from the same source as petroleum. "Children are told that oil came from the dinosaurs," reads one website on the topic. It goes on to say that some of the oil might have come from that source, but ultimately it has come from ancient vegetation.

In other recent news reports, the James Richardson group of companies in Winnipeg is proposing a multi-million-dollar canola crushing plant to be built in either one of the Canadian prairie provinces or in North Dakota.

Mr. Richardson is practically an historic figure in the grain business. The company occupies what was, until recently at least, the most imposing building in downtown Winnipeg at the windswept corner of Portage and Main.

The company is not likely to err in its judgment of the canola market. The investment decision has come at a time when the European market has an almost insatiable appetite for canola oil.

It's not that the population has taken to deep-frying everything in canola oil. It is that much of the oil is likely destined to be converted to bio-diesel fuel.

For canola farmers, a market for bio-diesel fuel probably offers a solution for problems associated with adverse weather conditions, including less-than-ideal temperatures.

Last year, growers had problems disposing of their crops because the seeds - although oily - were largely of a poor grade. The only crushing plant in Ontario is in Windsor, and it was refusing to take shipments of the poorer-grade seeds.

At the same time, experts at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) were advising extreme caution in feeding the seeds to livestock because of the oil content.

Mr. Penner and John Brooks told the Shelburne gathering last week that the seeds that couldn't be marketed last year could have been used for the production of bio-diesel, so there would have been a market.

But what if the automotive industry doesn't want bio-diesel?

Mr. Brooks, without revealing much detail, said he's associated with a group that intends to build a combination canola crushing/ electrical generation facility near Waterloo at an estimated cost of a bit less than a million dollars. (He said $950,000, which sounded like a pittance in terms of today's costs for such things.)

The facility would use the bio-diesel to fuel engines similar to those used in jet aircraft to power the generators for electricity, thereby adding another item to Ontario's stock of complementary systems to meet a growing demand of a mushrooming population in and around the Golden Horseshoe and Greater Toronto Area.

This raises the topic of measures being taken to fulfill the provincial government's promise of cleaner energy and cleaner water.

Tapping the wind and the sun for energy has been one measure that will ultimately reduce the province's reliance on coal-fired electrical generators.

Along with that, new nuclear plants are to be built, and stream-fed hydroelectric generators are in the works.

If Mr. Penner and Mr. Brooks are right that bio-diesel is not only cleaner burning but less non-contaminating in the event of spills, it might be a step in the right direction toward avoiding pollution of both the atmosphere and groundwater.

Dufferin's move toward gasification of garbage, and possible use of the gases to fuel electrical generators, would appear to be another such measure - as is the future plant at Dundalk.

But one boat is being missed, so to speak. Old landfill sites are producing methane gas constantly. I have to wonder why that is not being tapped.