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

Just use hemp.

[lecithin]

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

Re:Just use hemp.

[QMalcolm]

Surely you jest. Everyone knows hemp is a gateway fuel. Sure, filling up your car with a hemp once every week or so isn't going to do any serious damage. But then it becomes every week, then twice, three times, and pretty soon you need a heroin fuel injection every half hour to even get to the gas station, just to buy more.

Re:Just use hemp.

[cromar]

The nations need to get their collective heads out of their collective asses and see what a Good Thing(TM) hemp is (and I'm not even talking about it's psychoactive properties). Hemp could solve so many environmental/economical/jocular problems it's ridiculous to regulate it so heavily.

"Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!" - The Writings of George Washington (1794)

Re:Just use hemp.

[Da3vid]

no fertilizer beyond the nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts You can't take oil from the plant, use the rest of the plant to grow more plants, take oil from them, rinse, repeat.

If you're going to take things from the system, you have to add things to the system somewhere. Whether those resources are added naturally or artificially, there has to be input somewhere.

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...

Re:Just use hemp.

[jtroutman]

Where did you get your figures? I ask because I'd be interested in reading more. What is the cultivation rate? Is that 202 gallons per acre per year? Per season?

Re:Just use hemp.

[h2_plus_O]

Using hemp as a fuel source would only further contribute to the growing problem of deforestation, something its proponents conveniently ignore.

Not necessarily. Hemp farmed for fuel could, once it's been processed for oil, be used as a source of fiber- which is one of the primary reasons we cut down trees today. Why would anybody clear-cut forests if hemp fiber was cheaper?
Hemp makes better paper with fewer chemical processes than wood pulp. It makes an outstanding fabric, and has been demonstrated to produce excellent building material- and it grows much faster than trees. It's a damn shame we've outlawed it.

Re:Just use hemp.

[evilviper]

It is a very good biomass source, it grows just about everywhere.

It's a terrible fuel crop, yeilding far less biodiesel than many more popular options like soy. It's better than corn, but corn is a terrible biofuel crop.

Your reasons for pushing Hemp surely have nothing at all to do with it's biofuel properties.

Re:Just use hemp.

[WalksOnDirt]

You can't take oil from the plant, use the rest of the plant to grow more plants, take oil from them, rinse, repeat. As long as you are just taking hydrocarbons out you can, since those can be produced from carbon dioxide and water. You're bound to get trace amounts of things like phosphorus, sulfur and potassium in the oil, but if the amounts are small then replacing them is easy. Wind blown dust will do some of that with no effort by the grower.

Re:Just use hemp.

[budgenator]

it's from Vegoil and biodiesel.

Re:Just use hemp.

[chad.koehler]

Don't forget that a lot of clear cutting (in tropical areas) is not for fiber but for agriculture. If hemp were more widely used and in higher demand there is potential for MORE deforestation as the price for the easily grown hemp would increase the potential profits from clear-cut agriculture in the rain forests.

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

Re:Just use hemp.

[Swaffs]

Why would anybody clear-cut forests if hemp fiber was cheaper?

To make room for more help fields.

Re:Just use hemp.

[Sandbags]

Me and several environmentalist friends have been screaming for years: "Kudzu you assholes!!!"

Not only is it a weed, it's practically a menace, damned near impossible to kill, grows over acres in a season, requires only rain as it produces its own nitrogen (no fertilizers needed) and grows almost everywhere in the USA and most other countries. It's also NOT poisonous, and actually smells quite nice (I wouldn't make perfume out of it, but at least not offensive).

Using celulostic conversion processes (like the new facility being built near Atlanta Georgia will be diing using wood from trees) it can produce massive ammounts of ethanol easily, efficiently, and most important, cheaply. It's easy to harvest and transport without complicated equipment (an industrial lawnmower would do just fine). We don't need any massive investments to start doing this TODAY. Other than building cellulostic ethanol factories, and some ethanol pipelines, we alredy have everything else (unlike corn, sugarbeets, biodiesel, hydrogen, dirtect electric, or other proposed systems)

In terms of ethanol per pound of material, it's not the best choice (some forms of algae do better), but in terms of ethanol per acre of land, or ethanol per dollar spent, I challenge you to find anything better!!!

Re:Just use hemp.

[h2_plus_O]

But that doesn't solve the problem of big agribusiness cutting down trees to grow such profitable cash crops.

True, but that's a different problem, and it's one we've already got (as you point out).

Using hemp solves a specific set of problems: it's better fuel than corn, better fiber than cotton or lumber, and it grows in places unsuitable for either. It's better than what we've got, and it doesn't introduce any new problems we don't already have. Is it the answer to all our ecological and energy problems? As you point out, no. But it's better than what we've got. We should use it, just like we should also use algae tanks, switch-grass, solar, wave, wind, and whatever else we can that'll be better than what we've got.

Re:Just use hemp.

[Rei]

If we believed that your list was the only way nutrients entered the system, we'd have to believe that Earth had "soil" before life evolved. ;)

Nutrients come from all sorts of sources. Erosion can lead to dust, and dust deposits provide nutrients (one of the prime seeders of life in the open ocean). Lichen can also break down rock. Microbes and simple abrasion can do their share in more typical farm environments. Then there's the waste and remains of transitory animals (birds, rodents, etc). As for nitrates in particular, there are all sorts of ways they can enter a given patch of soil (for one, they're water soluble...), and plants vary greatly in their need for them.

Basically, what this article is saying is that the oil from this weed removes so little nutrients that if you return the remains to the soil, whatever was lost is made up for by various means of natural replacement.

Re:Just use hemp.

[DerangedAlchemist]

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.

Given jatropha is described as a weed, easily grown in soil too poor(eg. low in nitrogen), rocky or dry for crops , I really doubt this is a concern. Certain plants are so easy to grow, they are damn hard to kill. Ask any gardener.

Re:Just use hemp.

[Amouth]

Simple answer - I live in the south - and if I ever catch someone planting Kudzu on purpose - i will beat the shit out of them.....

Re:Just use hemp.

[Chris Burke]

Not only is it a weed, it's practically a menace, damned near impossible to kill, grows over acres in a season, requires only rain as it produces its own nitrogen (no fertilizers needed) and grows almost everywhere in the USA and most other countries.

Uh... Yeah, "uncontrollable growth" isn't exactly what I call a strong selling point for agriculture.

Re:Just use hemp.

[Rei]

When people talk about how hemp is good for everything under the sun, it always reminds me of those snake-oil cure-alls hawked by travelling vendors in the 1800s. ;)

The simple facts are that industrial hemp is a useful product, and it's dumb that it's as regulated as it is, but it's not some sort of miracle plant. Its fibers make good rope, but as far as cloth manufacture goes, it's too coarse for most applications (most hemp fabrics used in clothing and upholstery are blended with linen, cotton, or silk). It's not even a standout, fiber-wise, when compared with jute, sisal, or manila -- similar strength, but hemp is more susceptible to rot. It's hardly the only replacement for wood pulp for the paper industry -- kenaf looks better, for example (whiter (less bleaching needed), higher yield, stronger, cleaner, etc). 15 gallons per acre is pretty absymal for a "next generation" biofuel; switchgrass ethanol is expected to produce hundreds of gallons per acre, and grow on similar "waste" land. Hemp oil is similar to linseed oil -- it dries on contact with air. Great for oil based paints, but not so much for many other oil applications. It also goes rancid relatively quickly, and is poorly suited to frying.

Yes, hemp has good things about it. And, wow, are they ever trumpetted from the hilltops by hemp advocates. Google search anything related to hemp products -- hemp paper, hemp rope, or whatever, and you'll be treated to result page after result page of all sorts of wild claims from sites like druglibrary.org, organic-items.com, marijuanalibrary.org, hemp-union.karoo.net, beyondpeak.com, hemptons.co.za, ecomall.com, hempline.com, webofcreation.net, hemphasis.net, and on and on. All sorts of "trippy" URLs (often, strangely, with "marajuana" in the URL, despite the invariable repeated pointing out that there's little to no THC in industrial hemp), with "trippy" sites, with crazy claims. You find very little from legitimate sources until you get way down the list, and the picture is no longer completely rosy.

Seriously -- settle down people. It's a plant, not manna from heaven.

Re:Just use hemp.

[rossifer]

Nitrogen fixing plants use nitrogen fixing bacteria to do their "nitrogen fixing" thing. That was number (3) on my list as the only way to get enough nitrogen fixing bacteria into the soil is attached to the root systems of the plants that support them.

Regards,
Ross

Re:Just use hemp.

[radl33t]

Using celulostic conversion processes ... can produce massive ammounts of ethanol easily, efficiently, and most important, cheaply.

What kind of cellulose processing is that? I don't know of any methods that can do any one of those three, let alone all of them. I claim that processing cellulose, hemi cellulose, and lignin is difficult, inefficient, and expensive. To me, this explains why tech has not developed commercially. Since you deny each of my claims, what do you propose have been the commercial constraints?

Other than building cellulostic ethanol factories, and some ethanol pipelines, we alredy have everything else (unlike corn, sugarbeets, biodiesel, hydrogen, dirtect electric, or other proposed systems)

Um except the science. Please forward me to a description of a process that is "easy, efficient, and cheap." No top secret Company X propaganda either please.

Me and several environmentalist friends have been screaming for years
Screaming nonsensical claims won't advance your agenda.

Re:Just use hemp.

[rossifer]

If we believed that your list was the only way nutrients entered the system, we'd have to believe that Earth had "soil" before life evolved. ;)

That list is of the means that can supply agriculturally significant quantities of nutrients. i.e. agricultural replenishment. Sure there are other mechanisms that create natural topsoil, but they operate over timeframes that don't permit dedicated agriculture.

Basically, what this article is saying is that the oil from this weed removes so little nutrients that if you return the remains to the soil, whatever was lost is made up for by various means of natural replacement.

Yup. And that's a truly extraordinary statement. Not to completely shoot down the possibility that this wonder-weed can do everything claimed. But it would be the first primary crop plant that was actually self-fertilizing.

I'm just a skeptic. Not that I wouldn't be excited if this stuff was real, but the claims made by the proponents seem way beyond how all other plants work.

Regards,
Ross

Re:Just use hemp.

[Rei]

It's not really that exceptional; there's even a term for it ("pioneer species").

Re:Just use hemp.

[tburkhol]

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

The US consumes about 400 million gallons of gas and 70 million gallons of diesel per day. At 200 gallons per acre per year, we'd need to plant 850 million acres of jatropha to replace petroleum. According to Google, that's about 1.3 million square miles, or about a third of the land area of the United States.

Since we currently only cultivate 440 million acres[pdf], that would be a significant challenge.

Re:Just use hemp.

[h2_plus_O]

NOTHING is better than what we've got.

One thing we've got today is corn-based ethanol, soaking up appalling amounts of subsidies, sitting on prime farm acrage. Hemp would, among other potentials, be a much better use of those resources with today's technology. As noted elsewhere in this thread, not a miracle plant, but it is regulated in a dumb way.

Oil and coal an order of magnitude easier/cheaper to use than anything else.

Oil and coal are easier and cheaper because:

• We've already invested in the infrastructure and technology needed to efficiently exploit them, and
• We don't figure many of the costs of using coal and oil (environmental, health, war, economic, etc) into the real cost- we instead externalize those costs from the way we measure and call it cheaper and better when in fact it is neither.

Economic growth will slow, and people will starve.

People are starving today, too- switching to sustainable fuel (if not done moronically, which you seem to suggest is the only way) won't be the cause of it- it'll just be happening at the same time.
Economic growth is slowing today, as well- some of that due directly to our use of fossil fuels (think: pollution, environment, health care, mercury in food, etc).

Technology is, I think, the key out: for every gas-pumping job lost (this will probably happen when gas becomes more expensive than the alternatives), there'll be another gained somewhere else- developing infrastructure, technology, installing solar panels or writing software for a domestic energy exchange among micro-producers, whatever. Fuel won't crowd food out in the market, it'll hit the same price ceiling fuel does and people will buy food, or grow it and show a profit- next to food, fuel demand is elastic. As energy production and distribution technology becomes something affordable by the average person (who can't bear the expense of drilling, exploration, transport, refining, etc. themselves) expect to see distributed micro-generation systems that will to some extent democratize the production of energy. To wit, I don't think we're in the best of all worlds and the future is bleak; I think we're pretty hosed now and we can (and will) do better.

Re:Just use hemp.

[kiracatgirl]

I'm not a farmer or anything, but you should take into account that most crop plats have entire substantial portions of the plant completely removed. The fruit, the seeds, the leaves, sometimes the entire plant, and so on. In this case, however, all that's being actually removed is the oil from the fruit, and the rest of the fruit is being dropped back on the plants. I don't think there are any other primary crop plants where the bulk of the harvested material is even considered for being used as fertilizer, as the point of a crop plant is that the harvested material is wanted as the crop.

Not that I'm saying it will work; just that it doesn't seem as blatantly impossible to me as you say.

Re:Just use hemp.

[rthille]

My god, if we let these plants go wild, they'll strip the atmosphere of everything we need to live!

<grin>

Re:Just use hemp.

[G-funk]

From where in the word "hydrocarbon" did you get "nitrogen"?

You fail.

Poor farmers

[Descalzo]

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."

How dare they exploit the poor farmers like this?

Plus, this takes important jobs away from corn farmers in the USA.

Re:Poor farmers

[mi]

Just wait 'till someone like the evil Monsanto figures out a way to genetically modify this weed to either boost the oil contents even further, or make it capable of growing in Antarctica, or both... Then we will get the showdown...

Sounds similar

[jtroutman]

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.

This could be a problem...

[eln]

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?

Re:This could be a problem...

[SatanicPuppy]

Theoretically it could be used for animal feed...That's part of how it was originally pitched to farmers in the South, that their cows would eat it. Well, they may nibble the leaves, but that's about it.

Goats, on the other hand, go to fricking TOWN on the stuff...They'll eat it right down to the roots, and can actually permanently clear kudzu from an area making them and napalm the best methods for getting rid of it. Considering how much goats eat, the two could form a hell of a relationship, assuming we could persuade anyone in this country to eat goat.

Re:This could be a problem...

[skeevy]

Sure! Ground cover, tree cover, house cover, car cover, fence cover, road cover, crop cover, ... The possibilities are endless!

I am more impressed...

[HerculesMO]

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.

Re:I am more impressed...

[Penguinisto]

It is nice on the surface.

OTOH, it makes perfect sense that an energy company wants to maintain their dominance even after their original product (petroleum) runs out. Now if BP is busily publishing their research results on all of the alternate energies, cool... but if they're keeping it a secret (or at least hard-to-get), then it's merely a matter of going from being a dominant force in one segment of the energy industry towards being a dominant force in the others, before the rest realize what's up and tries to muscle in on its new-found turf.

Now if BP was busily passing knowledge of its research along openly (a'la FOSS), then props to 'em. Otherwise they're not much more in my eyes than, say, MSFT adapting their products to run in some new technology with a lot of growth potential.

/P

Re:I am more impressed...

[Colin Smith]

Belief in exclusivity is what drives business, and innovation. Giving something away just lowers the apparent value.

Problem in the math

[tjstork]

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.

Re:Problem in the math

[h2_plus_O]

Yes, but it's much better than anything we're doing right now in the realm of biofuel generation.

I think the point here is not that any one strategy will solve everything- as you note, it won't. That's no reason to shoot down something better than what we've got.

Re:Problem in the math

[ThosLives]

Except it's not petrol, it's diesel. If you were running nice fuel-efficient modern diesels, you'd be using about 1/6th the fuel of the wheezy gutless petrols you have now.

Dude! Where can I get these diesel engines with 6 times the fuel economy of my gasoline car? (By the way, my car gets about 36 mpg - gasoline - on the highway...)

...Seriously...

Nut pressing

[mpoulton]

"nutrient-rich seed cake left after oil is pressed from its nuts"

Anybody else cross their legs and cringe when reading this?

Contradiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jatropha is a poisonous weed, yet it cures constipation? In the same way hemlock would cure constipation?

Re:Contradiction?

[ScrewMaster]

Last words of Socrates: "I drank what?"

Re:Contradiction?

[Jorgandar]

Yes it's a cure. You cant feel constipated when you're dead.

It'll never happen in the U.S ...

[ScrewMaster]

Too many billions in subsidies going into the maw of ethanol production.

Re:It'll never happen in the U.S ...

[jollyreaper]

Environmentalists have been shrieking and crying about government funding for alternative fuels, and now that we've rushed to pacify them, we discover it's not such a great investment afterall.

Well that's what tends to happen when energy policy is influenced by knee-jerk alarmists. No, this is what happens when you let big business co-opt a public desire for change and turn it into another money-making scam. People want real alternative fuels, not smoke and mirrors like ethanol. But oh, doing that would actually cost money and eat into profits. Can't have that.

That new car smell

[Quiet_Desperation]

The new weed burning cars will be available is many, many, many different colors.

So many colors...

Wait... what?

Not cost effective

[ChrisMaple]

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.

Re:Not cost effective

[Colin Smith]

Yeah, cos the price of Diesel will only go down in the future.

What the article fails to mention...

[Jonboy X]

"Jatropha, an ugly, fast-growing and poisonous weed that has been used as a remedy for constipation..." What the article fails to mention is the the "refinement" of this fuel source includes feeding it to the poor farmers, attaching a collection bag and waiting 12-24 hours to harvest the resultant natural gas.

Incineration

[Silentknyght]

I'm at a loss as to why incineration isn't being touted as the next wave of energy production. I suppose the common man doesn't understand that the fuel stock doesn't greatly matter or differ when it comes out of the stack, provided the usual pollution control devices.

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...

Re:Incineration

[Politburo]

One thing is that until recently, installing all of the devices to control NOx, SOx, PM, and heavy metals such as mercury was cost prohibitive than using a more refined fuel. Fuel for vehicles needs to have a consistent energy density and be generally clean so that it does not foul the mechanisms or poison the catalyst. You can't do that with RDF, which is why it's used for cogeneration. Plus there is all sorts of monitoring you must do to ensure you're not burning something that got in the waste stream by accident.

Well, that's why their tagline is...

[BUL2294]

..."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...

Re:Well, that's why their tagline is...

[QMO]

even Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam called attention to it

And if that's not enough to convince you, you just don't have critical thinking skills.

And if BP changes it's mind?

[mnemotronic]

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?

Seeds? What about the whole plant?

[jlcooke]

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.

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?

NZ

[jbeaupre]

The man missed New Zealand then: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0605/S00030.htm

Hemp isn't that useful

[Animats]

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.

Re:Hemp isn't that useful

[Darth Liberus]

Yeah, it's like the "medical" marijuana brigade. Stop trying to convince us that hemp/marijuana is the Miracle of Miracles and start telling the truth: you like to get high and the Gummint is wasting my tax money.

Re:Hemp isn't that useful

[Comen]

Ok you got me, I want to smoke the stuff already! and it makes great rope also!
I see no reason to grow hemp that does not get peopel high, waht a huge waste.

Re:Hemp isn't that useful

[Bemopolis]

If someone genetically engineered a variety of tomato to contain THC, would you then ban all tomatoes?

No, but I might start using a lot more ketchup.

There is a lot more than this one

[protomala]

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.

Re:Goat is del-licious, mon.

[SatanicPuppy]

I'm a big fan of goat cheese, and I've had goat before and found it tasty. That's me though. I served a pork tenderloin to my in-laws (they're my middle-america touchstone...if I want to find out what people who love Wal-Mart like, I ask them) last week, and they looked at me like I was fricking crazy...Pork for them was sausage, barbeque, or bacon, or maybe a chop. Jesus, if you can't even get people here to eat the whole pig, then pushing goat (or lamb for that matter) is a lost cause.

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."

Sentence that really hurt

[RealProgrammer]

This one hurts on so many levels:

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.

1. No plants require pesticides.
2. Very few land-based plants require water other than rain, plants being unable to distinguish the source of their H2O.
3. As someone mentioned, most plants are able to live on soil and their own detritus.
4. I cannot contemplate for long the prospect of all those poor plants having their nuts crushed. Ooh, I hate when that happens!

Coincidence. Info on efficiency

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.

Re:Done and done.

[Maxo-Texas]

And when you give them money, you pretty much destroy their ability to self-govern as well.

If we would just back off for 10 years*, leave africa alone, a lot of people would die but afterwards they would have their act together.

* including large multi-national quasi governmental corporations.

Patent infringement

[tepples]

Nobody is forced to use Monsanto's products, right? Citation needed. Patent infringement is a strict liability offense. If your neighbor buys land next to yours and plants patented seeds on it under a contract with Monsanto, and some seeds blow over to your property and grow, you may be liable for patent infringement. See Monsanto v. Schmeiser and foreign counterparts.

Re:Patent infringement

[hawk]

>See Monsanto v. Schmeiser and foreign counterparts.

Please do.

The court there found that it was not a matter of his fields being contaminated, but of him using Roundup to kill the regular plants before harvesting "his" seed . . .

hawk

Re:Patent infringement

[hawk]

Ahh,nuts. As long as I'm wasign time on this (the game is boring at the moment).

From your own source:

As established in the original Federal Court trial decision, Schmeiser first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997.[2] He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional three to four acres of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km) of canola. ...
While the origin of the plants on Schmeisers farm remains unclear, the trial judge found that "none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality" ultimately present in Schmeiser's crop. And then, from the Supreme Court decision itself,

Tests of their 1998 canola crop revealed that 95-98 percent was Roundup Ready Canola. ...
In this case, the appellants' saving and planting seed, then harvesting and selling plants that contained the patented cells and genes appears, on a common sense view, to constitute "utilization" of the patented material for production and advantage, within the meaning of s. 42. ...
By cultivating a plant containing the patented gene and composed of the patented cells without license, the appellants deprived the respondents of the full enjoyment of the monopoly. The appellants' involvement with the disputed canola was also clearly commercial in nature. ...
Second, the appellants did not provide sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption of use. ...
The appellants actively cultivated Roundup Ready Canola as part of their business operations. In light of all of the relevant considerations, the appellants used the patented genes and cells, and infringement is established. Amazing, actually reading the case utterly wipes out the claims made as to what happened (not a rare thing on slashdot).

But wait, it gets better. From reading your post (and the similar ones in oh-so-many-threads, one might think that this farmer that deliberately selected for the monsanto genes had been wiped out.

Now I'll switch to being a *real* wet blanket. Again, from the Canadian Supreme Court:

The appellants' profits were precisely what they would have been had they planted and harvested ordinary canola. Nor did they gain any agricultural advantage from the herbicide resistant nature of the canola since no finding was made that they sprayed with Roundup herbicide to reduce weeds. On this evidence, the appellants earned no profit from the invention and the respondents are entitled to nothing on their claim of account. For those too lazy to read understand the issue, such as the author of the grandparent of this psot, I'll translate to English:

1. The fammrer was not an innocent who happened to have a few stray plants with the Monsanto seed contaminate his crops. Rather, after litigation, the court found that he deliberately selected for the monsanto plants, killing his other crops to generate seed that was 95-98% monsanto.

2. He still paid no damages.

But, hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a good political screed . . .

hawk, esq., still not giving legal advice.

p.s. you can find the Canadian Supreme Court ruling at http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2004/2004scc34/2004scc34.html ...

The 85% SOLUTION

[StCredZero]

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.

Re:The 85% SOLUTION

[Rei]

The Tesla, a $100k electric sports car with lithium (read: "expensive and problematic") batteries, only gets 200 mi. More realistic electric cars for the general public (with NiMH or some of the reduced capacity but greater safety and lifespan lithiums) are in the 50-100 mile range.

Yes, that sort of range covers city driving. But people don't like having options eliminated from them, and don't want to have to rent or borrow someone else's vehicle when they need to go long distances. For good reason, too.

I think the right solution until we can get battery power densities up is that used by the Volt -- a plugin hybrid. There's a small gasoline motor that only runs a generator (so it's light, simple, and cheap), and stays off unless you're going on long trips. When the gasoline motor is running, the car isn't quite as efficient as a normal hybrid, but is still more efficient than a regular car. It's similar to how modern trains work (except they use diesels for the generators).

Around town, you run on batteries. When you want to go far, you still can. Seems ideal to me until the tech catches up..

Re:The 85% SOLUTION

[pixelpusher220]

In a perfect world I'd agree completely.

I'd hardly call today's US suburban sprawl *perfect* though.

We need something that can do the routine driving around town jobs, reliably and efficiently without the negative impacts we're seeing from the internal combustion engine of today. Batteries do have environmental impact, but given how heavily recycled todays car starter batteries are (like 95%) this isn't something that can't be handled.


200 miles on a charge would go a loooooong way towards solving our foreign fuel dependency too...

Re:The 85% SOLUTION

[mcrbids]

This argument gets heard all the time. But it's simply not true. Yes, you can satisfy 80% of the trips made by an average family with an electric vehicle. But that's quite different than satisfying 80% of the USERS. That occasional trip, that 1 in 5 trip that can't be done by an EV (easily) is a show-stopper.

Take a look at the 80/20 myth for a good explanation of how this dynamic works out in practice.

Re:The 85% SOLUTION

[Tim Doran]

Somebody mod this up - the current crop of hybrids are a bad idea, designed to sell cars rather than conserve fuel. Your hybrid Camry, Accord or SUV engages the gasoline engine directly through the gearbox to assist in acceleration. This necessarily adds significant complexity and weight and requires a more powerful engine than would be used to simply charge the batteries.

The parent post talks about the right way to do it - a small, simple gas or diesel engine used only to charge the batteries. No complex gearbox, no need for a lot of power from the engine, no bloat. And the engine can always run at peak efficiency.

When ordinary small cars get comparable or better mileage than high-tech, expensive hybrids, you know marketing has run amok.

Re:The 85% SOLUTION

[FrankieBaby1986]

I have been wondering why some of the best technologies haven't been combined yet?

All-electric drive allows for very efficient accelerating, cruising and regen-braking. (and if four individual motors are used, good traction control).

Use a plug-in charger and a high-efficiency, smaller, gasoline engine with a generator to extend battery life (not having it run drive train means the engine runs at peak efficiency).

Charge it at night, or while parked at the lot (run the motor for a little while). The gas engine doesn't have to be big enough to continually power the car, simply to extend the distance to something well within to daily commute.

Combine that with the 6-cycle engine (injects water into hot cylinder to create steam, adding a second, weaker power cycle re-claiming waste heat), and you should have a pretty efficient hybrid car. Or perhaps use a different power-generating technique involving gasoline.

I would wager that there are LOTS of people who don't need to go on >200 mile trips very often, and could use such a vehicle quite effectively.

Re:Goat is del-licious, mon.

[illegalcortex]

My thoughts exactly. The only place I have typically seen goat is at Indian restaurants. As long as it's not too filled with bones and difficult to disassemble (sometimes a problem even at good buffets), it is terrific.

i'm reminded of a quote by Raplh Waldo Emerson

[non]

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."

Environmental impact from industrialized growth

[multimediavt]

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!

Got to go

[Jon Luckey]

"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.

Re:hemp is a gateway fuel

[yerM)M]

I think he is trying to convince you that hemp is a getaway fuel, not a gateway fuel.

Re:Signs point to nuclear fusion.

[Rei]

Well, obviously. What did you think we were doing with all of the flowers that the Iraqis were throwing at us, if not feeding them to ponies?

Re:Hemp is not that course

[Shatrat]

If you think hemp isn't course[sic] it is because hemp clothing is generally about half cotton.
100% hemp is going to feel like canvas, which might have something to do with the fact that the word canvas comes from cannabis.
Hemp is good for lots of things, but the only logical reason to wear it as clothing is a political statement.

Re:Done and done.

[Maxo-Texas]

Modquark,
I agree. It is a difficult decision.

You can doom millions of people for generations of torture, starvation, and genocide by helping them.

Or you can allow a few million of them to die and then they learn to stand on their own feet, stop overbreeding, stop tolerating and supporting screwy belief systems
* unprotected sex is good!
* males should have sex with many female partners!
* It is a good thing to treat women like property and slaves
* you should have 8 babies even when there is no arable land left!
* It is best to be evil and corrupt and take all the money and stuff for myself (or my tribe).

Which is ultimately more compassionate?
To me a lot of the "aid" we give does immense harm to the people it is supposedly helping.
I believe letting it fall over as soon as possible is ultimately a lot more compassionate.
I'm not talking about pushing it over... I'm just saying stop propping a clearly broken system up.

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

Everyone goes rushing in...

[Mr Otobor]

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.

Diesel-electric trains work this way...

[Joce640k]

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.

How do you harvest it?

[oni]

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.

Jathropa oil available

[techspeak(c)]

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.