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."

Comments

Re:Just use hemp.

[Smidge204]

A hectare (2.47 acres) of jatropha produces 1,892 liters (500 gallons) of fuel. 202 gallons per acre.

Hemp seed yields 15 gallons per acre.

As much as I think hemp is a valuable crop - which it certainly is - the jatropha seems like a better choice for biofuel production. Over 12 times better, in fact.
=Smidge=

Re:Just use hemp.

[mconeone]

I'm guessing the sun, water, and soil play a part...

Some numbers for comparison.

[AnotherBlackHat]

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?

Re:Just use hemp.

[budgenator]

it's from Vegoil and biodiesel.

Fun stuff

[evilviper]

"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."

Re:Just use hemp.

[rossifer]

In the coarsest terms, plants require both bioavailable carbon and bioavailable nitrogen along with a few other nutrients to grow. The atmosphere supplies bioavailable carbon to plants through CO2. But atmospheric nitrogen is not usable by plants. Bioavailable nitrogen must be supplied to plants through their roots, and it doesn't just appear in soil and water. Some nitrogen appears in topsoil, but agriculture will quickly deplete nutrient supplies. If they aren't replaced, you end up with productivity losses, loss of cropland, and in the worst case, desertification.

Means of nutrient replacement:

1. Tilling animal manure into the soil.
2. Tilling composted plant material into the soil.
3. Planting nitrogen fixing plants (peas, beans, etc.) and then tilling them into the soil.
4. Leaving the field fallow (without a crop) for several years (a slower version of (2)).
5. Adding fertilizer

So what this article is claiming is that the seedcake left over from oilpressing contains all of the nitrogen and other nutrients needed to restore the soil using just technique (2). That's an extraordinary claim. This plant is not a legume or one of the other nitrogen fixing plants, so by itself, cannot increase the amount of nitrogen in the soil. Some of the nitrogen will be unusable in the seedcake, some of the nitrogen needed to grow the plant will go into other parts of the plant that will have other economic uses or take too long to compost. A 100% cycle of nitrogen back into the soil would be great, but doesn't make any sense.

As for the sun and water, well, they can only do so much given that neither one is a supply of the nutrients needed to keep the soil healthy.

Regards,
Ross

Jatropha Photo's and my research on it.

[John Sokol]

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