Jatropha: The Best Bet For Biodiesel?

When it comes to biofuel feedstocks, plenty of plants have been touted as ideal. But a little-known shrub named Jatropha seems to have unusual potential. After two years of research, Global Energy Trading Company (GETCO) has designated the plant as its biofuel feedstock and is moving forward with large-scale development.

GETCO is has partnered with Dr. Esperanza Morales and her Colombian agricultural research firm, Live Systems Technology. Morales, in turn, is responsible for acquiring the necessary land for Jatropha farming in Colombia and Peru — the current plan is for 25,000 acres.  From there, she will lead the research into developing cultivars of Jatropha that will yield as much biodiesel as possible.

So far, Jatropha has been successfully used in the Philippines, New Zealand and a number of other countries in biofuel production. But some major research questions remain for GETCO and Dr. Morales: the plant has yet to be properly domesticated and so has inconsistent levels of production. Furthermore, most of the Jatropha projects so far have been on a much smaller scale — GETCO’s 25,000 acres represent the most extensive test of long-term and large-scale use on the environment, soil quality and other questions.

Jatropha has, so far, been heralded as a wonder plant: it can be grown in power soil, revitalizing it for future agriculture. It can also be grown along with cash crops.  The plant’s fruit must be handpicked — and GETCO is selling that fact as an additional advantage. After all, if you can’t harvest a plant by machine it automatically lowers the carbon emissions associated with the production of biofuel. Furthermore,  GETCO believes that by working with impoverished villages in growing and harvesting Jatropha, the plant can be an instrument of change in their lives, bringing money and work into those villages.

It sounds like a good deal over all, though there are a few concerns that I think still need to be addressed. Primary among them is the fact that Jatropha sap is an irritant to human skin and ingesting even small quantities of Jatropha results in vomiting — it has been used for medicinal purposes in just that manner in the past. Gathering 25,000 acres worth of Jatropha fruit will result in a heck of a lot of irritating sap. Some provisions must be made.

But in the end, Jatropha could be one of the most promising biofuel feedstocks, as long as GETCO can prove that it is practical to grow on a large scale. 

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Photo by Nasori