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

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: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.

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

[ScrewMaster]

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

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?

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.

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: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.

[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.

[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.