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New Wonder Weed to Fuel Cars?
Hugh Pickens writes "Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation, may someday power your car. The plant, resilient to pests and resistant to drought, produces seeds with up to 40 per cent oil content that when crushed can be burned in a diesel car while the residue can be processed into biomass for power plants. Although jatropha has been used for decades by farmers in Africa as a living fence because its smell and taste repel grazing animals, the New York Times reports that jatropha may replace biofuels like ethanol that require large amounts of water, fertilizer, and energy, making their environmental benefits limited. Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts. Poor farmers living close to the equator are planting jatropha on millions of acres spurred on by big oil companies like British Petroleum that are investing in jatropha cultivation."
It is a very good biomass source, it grows just about everywhere.
You don't get high from smoking industrial hemp.
See:
http://fuelandfiber.com/Hemp4NRG/Hemp4NRGRV3.htm
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Plus, this takes important jobs away from corn farmers in the USA.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
This sounds like what they are doing in more arid regions with Jojoba , which is similar in that is grows in places other plants won't, requires little water and produces an oil that can power diesel engines.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
This is a noxious fast-growing weed, apparently kept in check in its native environment due to the fact that the soil and weather conditions there are terrible for growing anything. However, TFA mentions that various companies are looking at planting this thing all over the place, including areas that have good soil and growth-friendly climates.
So what happens when we start planting this thing everywhere? Could this turn into the next kudzu?
I think I've got this stuff growing on my back fence. (No, really!) (Disclosure: I live in Florida).
It seems like almost any plant oil could be used to make biodiesel, but this stuff does grow like a weed, even in sandy soil and drought conditions (both of which are present in my backyard). That's what would make it economically viable.
Although, the fact that it does grow like a weed, means it still pulls out a lot of nutrients from the soil, which would make it hard to grow anything else on the same land. OTOH, it grows where other things already don't grow, so that's definitely a plus from an environmental point of view.
Oh, and if BP or anyone else wants to pay me to grow more, let me know!
My blog
with BP every day. They are the only major oil company to seem to "get" that oil won't last forever. They have invested money into solar technologies (walk into Home Depot), lowered their own emissions requirements to meet standards that don't even exist yet, and now are shown to be investing heavily into alternative "bio" fuels. Exxon and the like seem content to just pulling oil from the ground and putting it into pumps.
Just a simple thought. They are still an "evil oil company" thus far as I can see... but at least they have vision for the future and aren't thinking oil will last forever as the Bush administration thinks it will.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
From your article: Grown for oilseed, Canadian grower's yields average 1 tonne/hectare, or about 400 lbs. per acre. Cannabis seed contains about 28% oil (112 lbs.), or about 15 gallons per acre.
To meet the gasoline consumption needs of the USA would require about 9 billion acres at the above rate. This is about 4 times the size of the USA, including Alaska, and thus is probably not a workable plan.
This is my sig.
Not in my U.S.A. Remember, you have no rights.
PatRIOTically,
George W. Bush
"nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts"
Anybody else cross their legs and cringe when reading this?
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Jatropha is a poisonous weed, yet it cures constipation? In the same way hemlock would cure constipation?
If only they could find a way to make fuel out of kudzu. Anyone driving through the south could just pull over and refuel.
Badass Resumes
"No fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts."
I suppose that would be the case with most things.
That part made me laugh, cry and cringe
..... When I saw the title, I thought the poster was talking about a really good grade of pot.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Too many billions in subsidies going into the maw of ethanol production.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hmm, some quick calculations showed that if we plant all of North America with this weed exclusively, then we will get almost enough oil to sustain the current consumption. Maybe if we add all of Europe too... Quick, bring the bulldozers so we can start plowing up all these pesky cities and farms that are cluttering up the place!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The new weed burning cars will be available is many, many, many different colors.
So many colors...
Wait... what?
I think I have a lot in common with that plant. I too give off nutrient-rich seed left after oil is pressed from my nuts.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
According to the article, the price of fuel derived from this will be in excess of $1/liter, or about $4/gallon. That's more that diesel is now. Something will have to change for this to be profitable.
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"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
You're going to have nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and depending on the fuel & control devices used, varying levels of particulates, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). You're going to get this whether you burn the horribly-connoted "coal" or the relatively-benignly-connoted "wood". Plant matter, like that specified in TFA, isn't all that different from "wood", and actually used to be lumped together in the "biomass" definition until the US Supreme Court vacated the appropriate legislation set forth by the EPA.
Point being... all of this is the generation of additional waste stream for fuel, instead of utilizing an existing waste stream for fuel. I applaud the thought and intent, but why not use the garbage we already generate for fuel? RDF (refuse-derived fuel) boilers already exist for electrical generation...
..."beyond petroleum". But then again, this is the same BP that just lost HUGE in the court of public opinion when everyone in Chicago started complaining about the fact that they wanted to dump more pollutants into Lake Michigan. Hell, even Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam called attention to it at Lollapalooza.
Frankly, I'm not impressed with BP. This big bad oil company is doing nothing more than chasing the $$$. You'd better believe that if oil prices dropped, they wouldn't hesitate to cancel these programs... Being environmentally conscious is money-making--for the time-being...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
If BP changes it's corporate directive, or the Jatropha plant isn't the great biomass solution it's touted to be, then we have millions of acres planted with "ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed" which is "resilient to pests and resistant to drought". Oh, great. While we're at it, let's introduce rabbits like they did into Australia, and kudzu like in the Southern US. Don't get me started on Zebra mussles or sea lampreys in the Great Lakes. Ok, so there's not much in the way of swampland in central Africa, but the point is that Really Bad Things happen wherever mankind does something that drastically alters the native environment. I wonder if global warming and increased CO2 will help the plant grow faster and more obnoxious?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Allow me to be crack-pot.
This is old news, like 20 years old. Mainstream old, it's more like 5 years. Still old.
Real biofuel folk know that Algae is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
J-plant's seeds are 40% oil. Some breeds of Algae are 50% oil by TOTAL PLANT MASS.
Not to mention it's the fastest growing plant - faster than bamboo.
Not to mention it's the easiest thing to grow (water, dirt, shit, sunlight). Just think about how much work people go through to keep it out of a chlorinated pool. What would happen if actually tried to grow it?
Not to mention you don't need arable land to grow algae - desert works exceptionally well. Beside a nuclear (pr. new-clear) power plant will let you use waste heat to keep the green stuff growing all winter as well.
Industrial algae production, 100's of hectares of 1m deep concrete pools and greenhouses. Constantly skimming fractions of the population allowing re-growth. We're talking constant production, no expensive equipment to harvest.
The man doesn't want you to know.
Great. Does it also require so few farmers and so little arable land that it has no effect on the production of food crop? Or will it push up the prices of food significantly in poor countries, as other biofuel crops have done?
Lies about crimes
But will we see more erratic driving? It was the cars fault officer.... honest.
I bet Exxon Mobil will try to buy this out..
Out west we have bindweed. It seems to grow best where I don't water. It's invasive and omnipresent, but at least it isn't poisonous, doesn't have thorns, and doesn't stink. On the other hand, it serves no useful purpose, gets in the way and ties up the other plants .... on the whole, kinda like Condoleeza Rice.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
IANAB (I am not a botanist), but I know that you can get quite sick burning things like poison ivy, poison oak, and so on -- you can inhale the irritants and basically end up with poison ivy in your windpipe and lungs. So I'd be curious as to exactly HOW this stuff is poisonous -- if its natural oils are irritants like the ones I mention above, I wonder what you'd have to do to extract all that poison before putting it in a combustion engine and, well, combusting it.
...
Or if the constipation cure would be the worst result of the exhaust, you'd have a whole lot of motorists driving very dangerously in a hurry to get home
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Did anybody else get the image of a car lighting up a big ol' fatty when they read about cars fueled by "wonder weed"? :)
Afghans could grow this... of course, this wouldn't make the West energy-independent.
Lex Worrall, chief executive of Helius Energy, claims Jatropha can produce 2.7 tonnes of oil per hectare. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2155351.ece
For comparison, corn produces about 0.15 tonnes per hectare, hemp about 0.30 tonnes, and canola (rapeseed) only 1.0 tonnes.
So if he's right, it's a very good oil producer, on the order of much harder to grow oil producers like avocado (2.2) or coconut (2.3).
Still 1/5 of algae though.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
animal feed, paper, you can make wine from the flowers and so far there is some good research on making a medicine from it that could possibly be used as a near cure for alcoholism and perhaps some other addictions. That comes from noticing from oriental medicine it was used for that, so some scientists looked into it and found some active ingredient in it that does seem to work, but I don't know if it is on the market yet or not. I do know the huge roots can be sold if they are clean and pure to oriental doctors sometimes. And seeing as how it is cellulose rich and grows like crazy, once we have good enough engineered yeasts to make cheap cellulosic ethanol, it could be used for that as well.
The energy solution silver bullet is "all of the above", there isn't one single tech that will do it all, but the combination of what we have now can be made to work, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, other hydropower, biofuels, etc. If we work just as hard at reducing demand by building more efficient devices and buildings and vehicles, then keep adding to the production mix from diverse sources, we can do it, we can finally break the back of the traditional dirty energy monopolies, and have cleaner, cheaper and more decentralized power. this jatropha is just another arrow in our energy quiver really, all are welcome. I appreciate that poorer folks all over the planet can now maybe have a chance at some sort of income, modest as it might be, instead of dumping cash by the truckload to already rich as snot radical oil-rich muslims or radical western capitalist pigs like exxon, etc. Those people take the cash and do "bad stuff" with it. Every buck they DON'T get and some poor farmers and new alternate energy companies get is a buck much better spent than going to the traditional military/industrial complex/war mongers.
Actually, man, the car doesn't move.
The man missed New Zealand then: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0605/S00030.htm
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
I thought this plant may be a relative of that Deep South vine that is rumored to grow a meter a day: Kudzu
Punctuation can make stories so much more fun.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Seeriously, mon.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Funny how the hemp promoters are uninterested in other coarse-fiber crops, like jute, sisal, kenaf, and manila. Or in other low-cost sources of cellulose, like straw, bagasse (sugar cane after sugar extraction), and similar agricultural waste. No, somehow they're attracted only to hemp.
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Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Petrobras (brazilian oil company) is researching a *lot* of seeds and already does create diesel from them. There is a lwa that states that next year brazilian diesel will have to use a small percentage of bio-diesel, so this isn't a "what if", but a growing market reality in Brazil.
You can get more info on Petrobras site:
http://www2.petrobras.com.br/portal/frame.asp?pagina=/minisite/bioenergia/terra/index.asp&lang=pt&area=bioenergia (portuguese). There is even a list of used plants.
A similar example here in south america is getting bio-diesel from Mamona (castor oil plant - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_oil_plant), that is also poison if eaten and very strong to plagues and easy to grown.
"its sap is a skin irritant, and ingesting three untreated seeds can kill a person."
"Western Australia banned the plant as invasive and highly toxic to people and animals."
"Jatropha needs at least 600mm (23in) of rain a year to thrive."
"20 per cent of seedlings planted will not survive"
"farmers in India are already expressing frustration that after being encouraged to plant huge swaths of the bush they have found no buyers for the seeds."
"needs two to three years to develop into a cash crop."
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
mekmitasdigoat
It's IETF approved!
Algae production requires a lot more water and shit than jatropha. They're complementary for different locations of the world.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Basically, the problem is thus: we need to have some sort of a way to store energy in a car so that it can move. We've been cheating all along by using pre-stored energy in the form of fossil fuels.
So, we either store the energy in the form of sunlight, using biofuels or some other weather derived process - like flowing ocean currents or wind, or we generate the energy from some non-solar, non-fossil source. That means nuclear power, charging up electric cars. Obviously, I would like to see fission but the enviro people are too large a constituency to ram it unilaterally down their throats. Plus, it would be nice to arrive at an energy solution the entire nation could live with.
That means fusion....
This is my sig.
Almost anything is poisonous in large enough doses, including oxygen and water. Likewise, (very) small quantities of mercury, arsenic, and/or uranium are probably in your drinking water (depending on where you live the chemical contamination will vary). Even Hemlock has been used as medicine to treat arthritis, but problems with accidental poisoning were too common.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
sigs, as if you care.
Just a week or two back, in my alumni group a friend posted the following info about Jatropha:
I heard about Jatropha before. While I don't have anything specific to
say about Jatropha, there are some general comments I have about
bio-based approaches.
1. Plants can absorb light only in the range 400nm-700nm, capturing
only 43% of the of the radiation.
2. It has to collect CO2, and hence can use only 25% of the available
energy.
3. That brings down the theoretical efficiency of photosynthesis to
11%. Figure in the absorption of light, and the plant has to spend
some energy on itself, what it can give you comes down to 6.5% at best.
I don't how Jatropha compares to algae, but you can can be sure that
it is not going to exceed 6.5%. Put the fuel in an IC engine, you are
probably talking 2% efficiency of photon-to-wheels at best.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Electric cars with a practical range approaching 200 miles would suffice for most of the driving needs of most of the populace. If people could buy the cars, then subscribe to a battery service, this would enable fast battery module swaps. But most of the time, people would just charge overnight at home.
The other 20% would still need some form of internal combustion vehicle for dealing with heavier loads. But this would be much easier to provide with biodiesel than all of the vehicular needs of North America.
So, we are going to abandon the politically unstable Middle East and start getting all of our fuel from Africa. Everyone knows that Africa has a reputation for political stability, and infrastructure.
Why is it that we never discovery an abundant fuel resource in Canada, Switzerland, or some other stable non-threatening geographical locale?
Pardon me for pointing out the obvious...
Perhaps no expensive equipment to harvest, but building all those concrete pools and greenhouse is going to require some substantial capital outlay just to get started.
Software Inventor
2007 arctic sea-ice is an unprecedented 20% smaller than the previousrecord low year - 2005.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-macdonald13jul13,1,4424613.story?coll=la-news-comment&ctrack=1&cset=true *shrug*
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I like to get high, and the government is wasting your tax money. Now do something about it, and stop voting for those Drug War assholes.
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Did some googleing...
First off: Jatropha can only tolerate a slight frost.
Second: Although the stuff prefers to live in arid to semi-arid (250mm-1000mm/year) its yields become greater when you water them. Look out water tables!
Third: Yields were often MUCH lower in trials. Like 20/25% of the hoped for 1900 l/hectare.
Lastly: There's nothing stopping corporations from stepping in and usign economies of scale (and goverment connections to grab water resources) to drive these new marginal-land farmers back into poverty.
Good thing one: These things are built to stop wind erosion (and water run-off, and soil compacting) so marginal land could eventually become more productive. Farmers are already using Jatropha as a one in every seventh rows.
Second: The pressed seeds are good ferterlizer.
Third: Marginal-land farmers can still press these 40% oil seeds and use the oil DIRECTLY into their own personal (abet, modified) diesel generator. Note: The oil needs to undergo "transesterfication" to be used as regular diesel fuel. What's transesterfication? Wiki it yerself, lazy!
Kudzu factor:Low actually.
One: It takes 2 years to produce seeds.
Two: Seedlings are edible by animals.
Three: Jatropha can't compete (naturally) in wetter climates.
Finally: It's a large bush/small tree (think hedge) not a vine that can grow 6 freekin' inches a day.
Bravo. I especially liked the part about "100's of hectares of 1m deep concrete pools" in the desert.
Be careful what you wish for! :)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Do you know what you car is smoking?
Algae biodiesel might happen some day. It's no silver bullet though, see e.g some points raised by an expert in the field.
Ok folks, we've seen this time and time again throughout history. Someone finds a cool plant that does something wonderful and then mass plants it outside its native habitat and it starts growing wild and taking over native plant stocks. Can you say kudzu!?!?!? I hope someone stops and thinks about this before they take a knee jerk reaction and start commercializing this stuff and we end up with a greater natural disaster than just polluting our environment. This plant sounds very hearty and seems to offer some interesting possibilities, but let's not go off half cocked at every possibility for replacing fossil fuels!
Yeah we'd never be able to get that much water to the desert
"Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation...
I can hardly wait to be stuck in a traffic jam where the smog could instill yet another kind of 'need to go' to the situation.
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
I've worn a hemp fibre shirt, but not one made of jute or sisal.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That cures constipation and produuces a lot of oil.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Not a troll. WTF?
The way I understood it the main problem with biofuels is that simply conservation of energy requires you to use a very huge area of land to grow the plants. Now the same area of land could instead be used to grow trees or other CO2 absorbing plants and this would have a [much] greater impact on the CO2 balance of the atmosphere. That is, even when you take into consideration that you displace a large quantity of fossil fuels, reforestation of farmland would be better for the environment.
I could be wrong but it seems to me that the best way to deal with energy distribution is through the electric grid. Whatever fuel will be used in the future it will probably be something that can be readily re-charged or regenerated using an electric current. That way you suddenly have a lot more options for actually generating the energy, ranging from renewables to nuclear or something else. Currently my bet is on batteries, probably not Li-Ion ones, but we shall have to see what comes out of nano-tech.
I have to admit thou, it would be rather cool to have a nuclear powered car. However, I'm guess giving every nut who owns a car access to a lethal radiation source is a rather bad idea.
You are a bit behind the curve as well.
Algae still hasn't left the pipe dream stage. I know, I bought into that pipe dream many years ago probably reading the same DOE papers you did. I even had a TDI Golf running soy biodiesel for a few years.
Nobody has figured out how to productize algae yet and they have been trying for a while. Maybe it'll actually occur, but given it's been 20 years since the first studies and over 10 since the final results it's obviously harder than they first expected.
All the desert ponds from salt water and heated by nuclear power is pretty pie in the sky.
One pet peeve of mine is the hippies driving around in their 1978 mercedes diesels with "I'm saving the world" stickers on them. Thanks for saving the world by giving everyone cancer, there are few things worse to inhale than the soot coming out of these clunkers. Especially cringe when they have a baby in the back seat.
Biodiesel is great and all, but it's not a full solution. If you want to support it, go for it, but at least get a late model diesel that isn't spewing tones of fine particulate matter. The next generation engines are much better in this regard.
-Nic
Seems to me you can say the same thing about Hemp.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What a fucking ignorant comment!! Hey, Cap'n Duh, we would look kind of silly fighting to make production of any one of the other coarse-fiber crops you listed legal in the US, now wouldn't we?
I think he is trying to convince you that hemp is a getaway fuel, not a gateway fuel.
Ethanol is most criticized, and with due cause. Traditional methods of ethanol production (for instance) deserve criticism. Using only corn kernels is horribly inefficient, particularly when corn is a food source.
But the old ways are changing. The State of Georgia will host the nation's first cellulosic ethanol production facility [dailykos.com]. Cellulosic ethanol production is more than 15 times more efficient than traditional production methods. Any green biomass can be used: corn kernels, corn stalks, corn roots, switchgrass, cane sugar, tree chips, industrial green waste, and even pig shit. This is the future of biofuels.
Range Fuels is building the new facility in Georgia. They do not use any biomass also used as a food source for humans or animals. The Georgia plant will use industrial tree waste from the many paper mills in the region.
A few years back, some European countires became infatuated with merits of palm oil- then thought to be the most efficient biodiesel feedstock. So farmers basically tore up thousands of square miles of jungle in Indonesia to meet demand. Then someone calculated the lost forest would take centuries to replace the carbon-recycling of existing vegetation with biodeisel.
Farmers are smart. They recognize short terms profits as well as any other entrepeneur.
Ideally you'd like to palnt these crops in carbon-poor areas like rangeland and desert. But farmers will convert rich croplands and forest for even more production.
Well I just did a search for "biofuel from algae" and found over a million hits.
That makes me think when you say this
"The man doesn't want you to know."
what you really mean is
"I'm an idiot who is easily convinced by people smarter than me to believe things that only makes sense to those with sub 70 IQs or severe brain damage"
And before you try to protest, do the search yourself, and witness the high profile publications that discuss algae as a fuel source. There's no way any intelligent person could claim what you claimed.
But wouldn't acres of open water coated with algae become a breeding ground for mosquitos?
I can see it now....
The good news: We've reduced emissions by 50% and the price of fuel by 70%.
The bad news: Every person on the Earth has contracted malaria or dengue fever.
> And that's also the reason why people will keep on dying until we make this punishmen
>t for this sort of corruption hurt like hell.
Except for one problem. Nobody died. No radiation leak, Nothing. Which make you a moron.
Looks like the greens and unions have teamed up to take that plant out, if I had to make a guess just from reading the one new account you linked, union goons were responsible for this 'accident'. News flash. There is nothing in a cooling tower that is more dangerous than steam. Which explains why they the operators weren't all that worked up over it, because they actually understand the technology they are using. The worst that could happen is what did occur, a total structural failure forcing them to drop to half generating capacity until they can repair or replace it.
Democrat delenda est
You can eat kudzu as well.
Since Jatropha is in the same family as the Castor oil plant (Ricinus communis), how similar are their oils? I do realize that a family is quite broad.
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
I spend several weeks in India last summer studying Jatropha.
My wife's father S.W. Mensinkai founded University of Agricultural Sciences in Dharwad, near Hubli in Karnataka India (8 hrs by train north of Bangalore). He is considers the father of plant genetics in India. They are doing genetic engineering of Jatropha there.
See photo's
http://www.dnull.com/~sokol/images6/index.html
One of the programs they are pushing is for farmer to plant Jatropha on the borders of other crops in the fields, turns out the bulls that wonder freely in India will not go near the stuff, so a row of these trees keeps them out of the farmers crops.
Very interesting work.
I brought back a hand full of seeds with me, and planted them, but they didn't take, maybe the Airport X-ray scanners killed them.
Anyhow;
Jatropha is related to the Castor bean plan that is responsible that the neurotoxin ricin is derived from.
It also have a toxin called curcin that is similar to ricin.
I don't know if burning Jatropha oil release this curcin toxin into the air?
But apparently when it's pressed to get the Oil out, the curcin remains in the "Cake" this is the solids left behind after the seeds have all the oils squeezed out.
From: http://www.intox.org/databank/documents/plant/jatropha/jhast.htm
-------------
2.5 Poisonous parts
All parts are considered toxic but in particular the seeds.
2.6 Main toxins
Contains a purgative oil and a phytotoxin or toxalbumin
(curcin) similar to ricin in Ricinis.
------------
Apparently Canola oil (Short for Canadian Oil)is a genetically modified Rape seed (in the mustard family) with the toxins removed.
So if Jatropha had it's toxins removed through genetic modification it could also be a valuable food product.
Later in 2006 I moved to Santa Barbara and it turns out the first company in the US to start producing Jatropha Oils and Bio-Diesel was here in Santa Barbara. http://www.biodieselindustries.com/ They were even doing a project with the local High School to grow Jatropha.
Also Jatropha Oil is being use on the Indian Railways for some time too. I guess the plan is to plant Jatropha trees along the tracks, it keep the animals off the tracks and also since labor is very cheap, they would use the same trains to harvest the tree's for oil to power the trains.
One of the projects I was thinking of was to develop an engine optimized to run on Jatropha Oil.
More importantly these three wheeled auto-rickshaws (called Tuck Tucks in Thailand) all use the exact same engines, so the idea is to make a direct drop in engine for rickshaws. The rickshaws there are Two-stroke gas engines and are a major source of pollution there spewing clouds of choking soot behind them. Maybe some day.
More good links:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2005/10/20/stories/2005102002021100.htm
http://www.biodieseltechnologiesindia.com/
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/04/tnt_starts_biod.html
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Cool. Got it. Thanks!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I think its interesting to note how biofuel crops compete with food production. Most of the feritile land in the world is already being used for food. In the long run, I don't see how biofules can produce enough fuel without starving us to death unless they can convert the food crop by-products into fuel (french fry grease). Jatropha can grow in a lot of places other plants cannot, so it may be one of the best biofules, but biofuel in general may not be such a great idea. Plants only get 1-3% effeciency in converting sunlight into energy, while solar arrays can get >40%. Obviously, solar arrays are much more expensive than plant seeds, so biofules may be worth it for poor countries, but there are a lot of clean alternatives to biofuel that won't starve us to death. Scientific American ran a similar article back in July. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=71EF7817-E7F2-99DF-3BD5B4BB0F2B9FBE&pageNumber=1&catID=2&colId=5
They had an opportunity to call it Chakan Oil and they didn't take it :(
Before everyone jumps on the bandwagon it would be good to look for the downsides of this wonderful, almost free, all-natural cure for our ailing internal combustion engines. A cursory look around at some sources (I'll let you do your own homework) will reveal several downsides to this plant.
Problem number 1: Not really good for anything but fuel. Plants currently grown provide food, clothing, or, in some cases, building supplies. Some plants grown now even provide for multiple outputs. Corn (food, feed, fuel, chemicals) is a great example. Soybeans are another good example.
Problem number 2: As I'm sure at least a couple of folks will figure out from the numbers, you'd need to grow this stuff on a truly massive scale to put a dent in the amount of hydrocarbon fuel now supplied by petroleum. That scale would be so massive as to make #1 a significant problem. Do you want to eat or drive your car?
Problem number 3: Some people will look at #2 at either a small or large scale and answer that they want to eat and to drive (or sell fuel to the people that drive). And that will likely mean cutting down and/or burning more forests to make more farmland which seems a bit counter-productive.
Problem number 4: A high enough demand for biofuel will tip the balance on what gets produced. As acres of land previously growing food are switched over to growing biofuels, the cost of food will rise. There are a couple of ways of looking at or explaining this the easiest being that as the supply of food drops against a constant (or, really, growing) demand the price people are willing to pay for that food rises. In any case, the poorest people, many of them in fact farmers, will then suffer a proportionally higher cost to feed themselves even though they may participate only indirectly in petroleum or biofuel consumption.
Problem number 5: YAIS (Yet Another Invasive Species). Read about this plant. It is a badass. It's a badass because it comes from a place where hardly anything else can live and all the animals and insects are looking for something, anything to eat. You don't want to plant this in Ohio. Or Brazil. Or China. Or anywhere else that you don't plan on having this as an invasive and problematic pest plant for the next 1000 years.
F'ed up, huh? I know things like biofuel are meant only to be a stopgap to bridge us over to more efficient and/or less immediately damaging fuel conversion technologies and fuel sources, so it's not 100% right to bash them and say 'This does nothing!' but I think it is useful to play the Devil's advocate given the amount of excitement often heard in the same breath and the corresponding lack of analysis that too often accompanies it.
1. Sugar Cane
>>>> 2. Poppy
3. Jatropha
4. Wheat
5. Corn
6. Pumpkins
7. Tomatoes
Personally I would grow Pumpkins because the seeds taste good when lightly salted.
Now that I'm home and can get to my bookmarks, check out the journey to forever if you want to know how to actually do it yourself.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Why isn't anybody being serious about doing this? Do you know? What's the big holdup?
I'm seeing giant windmill blades being carted up the freeways of my city every day these days, but no algae farms.
expandfairuse.org
Confucius say, never listen to experts with an @aol.com email address.
Bring on the Hemp/Aglae Biodiesel!
The new reactors are being shipped in on the ponies we're getting from Iraq, right?
..." Dept of Energy, that means we would need to have the solar flux of 402 square meters at perfect conversion efficiency in order to power ONE car at a rate of performance comparable to that of my old beloved 2004 GTO.
You can laugh at it all you want, but, the facts are inexorable.
a) economic wealth is directly related to energy consumption.
b) in order to produce more wealth, we have to have more energy per capita.
c) conservation flies into the face of a & b
d) therefor, we need to have more energy.
e) there are not enough fossil fuels to do the job, and there's enough science to say its bad to burn that much, even if there were.
f) nuclear fission is politically impossible becuase of environmental concerns about nuclear waste
g) solar power does not produce energy on the planet for us to use. If we use:
"Because of its spherical shape, at any instant the Earth receives on average half the incident solar flux, that is, 684 watts per square meter.
What other energy source is there? Please, clue me in! The answer is fusion! Now, I know that it's not "possible" right now. But, if we can blow a half a trillion on Iraq, why couldn't we take the next "blow" and do a systematic program to raise a generation of physicists, then, assign them to various aspects of the commercial fusion problem.
I just can't see why we can't just "get er done." Hell, the a-bomb was built in 4 years with 1940s technology, once we willed it.
This is my sig.
poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation
Sure, we all dislike being blocked up - but it's nothing to kill yourself over.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I look forward to purchasing my fuel from the back of High Times new fuel division!
www.isoHunt.com
Some strains of biodiesel-capable algae are salt-tolerant - I think that's a key for biofuels. There's plenty of saltwater on the planet, just not so much fresh water.
How long before the gov't makes this illegal like they did with hemp, to keep the oil companies in business? It's not like hemp gets you high, it would just hurt DuPont and a bunch of other big companies, like this might hurt oil companies. I'm tired of this big gov't, big industry circle jerk that we seem to have going in this country. I guess if you can bribe enough senators (and don't tell me "campaign contributions" aren't bribery), you can do anything. Hell, the boys in DC will even start a war to help their profits. Does anyone remember how in history, it's been corruption that has brought down every major civilization. I'm afraid we're heading for the same thing here in the US...
"after oil is pressed from its nuts"
So is fusion.
Unfortunately, this part is not true. They've tried for decades, and they could never make it work. Algae starts dying off early, and keeps dying.
If you're so sure about it being magic, go mortgage your house, empty your bank accounts, and invest.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'll accept it. First however, you need to produce the ethanol gallons/acre capability of Kudzu. Simply saying it does not make it true. And comparing it to corn is not saying much, corn is toward the bottom of the scale. Kudzu while being an avid grower produces a smaller amount of usable mass. So I'm confident we can easily best it.
...insertsomethinghere.. assholes" you know they are likely to be full of something themselves. Rational people with valid data generally don't start discussions like that.
So can you substantiate (back up) your assertion? Let's have a go at real numbers. Startign with the fact that Kudzu per acre biomass yields are in the 2-4 ton range for dry yield. That's really low. Switchgrass, by comparison is in the 12-15 ton range, and Miscanthus in the 12-30 ton range.
Cellulosic technology makes Miscanthus and Switchgrass the two most prolific ethanol yield plants for the US, not Kudzu, and not hemp. Oh and contrary to your claim cellulosic conversion is not cheap - yet. It will be in time, but not today.
While we're at it, harvesting of kudzu has it's own problems, such as it slow water shedding properties introducing difficulties in baling and storage of it.
Just goes to show, that when someone starts with "we've been shouting
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Diesel-electric trains work this way. There's a diesel engine which runs a a constant RPM generating electricity to drive the train.
The main reason for doing it is that you don't need a gearbox. A train which had to change gears would be a real disaster.
Electric motors have mountains of torque to get the train moving and the fact that the diesel part runs at constant RPM means the engine can be highly tuned for efficiency.
I don't know if a car could work this way, but it's a thought.
If you include some capacitors in the system they could give you a huge push for a quick getaway at traffic lights, overtaking, etc. This would reduce the overall power requirements of the generator and improve efficiency even more.
No sig today...
Kudzu you assholes
ok, I'll bite. How do you plan to harvest kudzu? It's not like wheat that just stands up in nice rows ready to be cut. Kudzu wants to climb something. If you plant it in the middle of an empty field it'll spread out, but not get more than two or three inches off the ground until it finds something it can climb. I hardly think the amount of usable biomass you get from something three inches off the ground justifies the cost of clearing the field. When kudzu climbs something, it wraps around it. How do you plan to pull it off a tree without killing the tree?
I'm not writing you off, I'm just pointing out a problem with your plan. Invent some kind of armature that you can let the kudzu climb, and that you can then get the kudzu off of, and patent it, and I think you'll be on to something.
Kudzu grows so fast that a cow can graze all day on it while standing still. What kind of marvels will this new wonder weed bring us?
ive seen systems where it is placed in containers above ground and constantly agitated. pefect for the desert or anywhere else.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
What about, God forbid, growing clovers and jatropha at the same time?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Jatropha requires no pesticides, little water other than rain and no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts
That last part sounds like the core of most perpetual motion machines. (or any other system they try to pass off as a "something for nothing" exchange, or "you get more out than you put in) To say that you can fertilze it with only its ground up remains implies that it somehow ends you up with more "nutrient-rich seed cake" year after year. You get out less than what you put in, never more, and almost never the same.
Saying that I suppose is true - practically any plant can be fertilized with ground up bits of itself. The way it's stated here it just sounds like it produces it in the quantity required to fertilize the entire next year's crop of equal size. Assuming it's efficient at reuse though, hopefully only a small amount of fertilization is required. Otherwise every year either (A) the crop is smaller than the year before it, or (B) the soil is more barren (and less productive) than last year.
Probably any plant that doesn't outright poison the soil it's grown in over time could do this.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
One 90's electric car startup used a generator on a small trailer. This gave the same benefit as a plug-in hybrid, but without the weight penalty when not in use. If there is a standardized battery module, this might be able to accommodate a fuel tank and a generator with a somewhat smaller battery. I expect that such modules will be quite a bit larger than the average fuel tank, so this could be doable, especially with a gas turbine engine. An attachment on the tail of a car might be better as well.
On second thought, if any technology comes along that makes these things practical, then it would make the plug-in hybrid even more practical anyhow.
I first read about Jatropha in the Wall Street Journal, weeks ago. The article focused on Jatropha production in India. They only offer a snippet of the article online ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118788662080906716.html ) but the pictures and captions are also interesting:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118720945016998802.html?mod=2_1172_1
http://phoenix.gov/WATER/drpers04.html This drought constitutes the longest in the past 110 years of recordkeeping.
I think fusion's been a failure because a lot of the current economic status quo would be irrelevant if the technology made it into the wild. Imagine that, instead of paying your pound of sweat to the electricity & oil companies every month, you ran your Mr. Fusion on tap water. You make a one time investment in the machine, and a trivial amount every month to supply your machine with H20. Pennies a month for all the clean electricity you could possibly use.
I say this having met a rather brilliant grad student who was working on 'cold fusion'. At the time (2002) he said that he'd have to revise one of his papers because of recently published Tokamak (hot fusion) research. It had come out just like he thought it would, but he had to mention it anyways...
Suppression wouldn't be so difficult - just indoctrinate students in the pre-ordained "Laws of Physics" (or "Laws of Thermodynamics"). This way, whenever the result doesn't come out like the Laws say they should, they'll figure the anomaly comes from their experimental setup. They'll never even suspect that their slight deviation from the expected result means that the Law itself needs to be revised.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Real biofuel folk know that Algae is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Ahh as in mythical, unobtainable, pipe dream?
Hey you used the phrase. Maybe that phrase does not mean what you think it means.
we're talking constant production, no expensive equipment to harvest.
Yeah because we all know equipment to constantly skim just a fraction of a algae growth pond is so cheap that doing it on hectare scales is a paltry amount of money.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio_Diesel#Algaculture
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Wouldn't it be funny/ironic if the next fuel boom came from those shit hole nations that we've been shipping food to for decades? I can just see their faces when they realize they are on the top of the energy pyramid (or is it the bottom).
I think it would be wonderfully overdue and ironic. And, in some way, it wouldnt' surprise me in the least.
Cause I never heard of any of them and w/ a little research... it appears you're right. Which makes me think it's more a lack of the word getting out. I was totally all for hemp, I was never presented with any information about better alternatives. I'm sure a lot of other help boosters are in the same boat. Hemp got a lobby, a grassroots one... but they got people talking it up.
... until we start growing it all over, and something decides to take advantage of this food source.
Its been years that my friend has been growing Jathropa in our desert town of Jaipur. He got the technology from Israel, one of the best places to learn about the plant. The seeds are sold for about USD60 per KG and are used to make aviation grade fuel. The rest of the plant is like a plant. I am not a farmer but I know that mustard oil can be used to light lamps and that vegetable oil can be used in furnaces after processing chemically.
Jathropa and bio diesel (made from sugarcane) are being tested to power vehicles because they are cleaner fuels and can help protect the environment, because they do not leave any heavy water, nuclear waste or ocean bed unstabilities behind. The projects are being funded by the Government of India and the IITs.
If anyone needs more information on this, I will try to find out and pass it on.
two cents..
shashank
http://www.techspeak.in/
Besides, the argument seems to be that it's not a harmful or dangerous plant, and it's in fact somewhat useful. The fact that there are other fibers that are also useful is beside the point.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It's called a pump, much like the one in your pool and a filter. Multiply by N pools.
/. crowd hasn't thought this out.
The reason no-one's doing this is simple:
- fuel makers aren't farmers, and don't want to get into agriculture.
It's more profitable to buy oil seeds below market prices from desperate farmers and turn it into fuel than grow it yourself.
Fuel makers are large chemical companies.
I don't like being flame-bait here - but clearly most of the
ps. Plant oils have the added bonus over ethanol of being usable for plastic production as well.
It will produce greenhouse gasses when used so it does not help us.
I'm surprised that the environmentalists here haven't cried foul about the cultivation of a non-native super weed. The potential for genetically modified plants to "take over" is one of the main arguments against GMOs. This plant sounds like it achieves that result with a plant that was genetically modified by nature.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
"An herbal constipation remedy that can be used as a fuel!? (Insert random joke about crapping in the woods.)"
... or something like that.
Because you sound like a tool who's shilling for them something fierce. I mean, wow. It would be quite sad if you were making an ass of yourself for free.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Coal is considered worse than wood as an energy source partly because methods of extracting it tend to be horrible destructive to the environment, and partly because when you're burning coal, you're releasing carbon which had been sequestered beneath the surface for a very, very long time. When you're burning trees, you're releasing carbon that was recently pulled from the atmosphere when the trees grew. The net carbon output of coal is positive; the net carbon output of the "grow a tree, burn a tree, grow a tree" cycle is zero.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This has been alluded to, but I want to make it explicit.
Something will change in order for this to be productive; diesel from dead dinosaurs will become more expensive. Twenty years ago, a process that could produce fuel for two bucks a gallon (in now-dollars) wouldn't find any buyers. Now, that imaginary process would be the hottest thing going. The difference over the twenty years wasn't in the process itself, but it nevertheless changed whether or not it was feasible.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
34 miles battery-only range, 444 miles with diesel generator. (Which is not even attached to the drivetrain.)
Plus, integrated Segway storage!
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/09/11/gm-opel-flextreme-concept-with-segway-storage/
Mass transportation sucks in most (at least many :) American cities, especially in the suburbs. I live in an Atlanta suburb, and it takes me almost the same time (and distance) to get to a MARTA station (subway) than to my work. I can't take a bus from my home, would need to take my car to go to the bus :)
I lived in Mexico, and mass transportation there is much more useful, or at least more widespread. In the US, it seems the only useful mass transportation is city trains (subways etc), but you need to live very close to a station.
Does anybody lives in a US city with good, citywide mass transit ?