Bunge Teams with SG Biofuels for Jatropha Seed Biofuels

Jatropha curcas is a non-edible shrub native to Central America. Its seeds have high oil content, and can be processed to produce a high-quality energy feedstock. It can be effectively grown on marginal lands that are considered undesirable for food crops. _GCC

Jatropha curcas is a tropical oil seed shrub, with a non-edible oil content. Jatropha oil is a high quality oil for many uses -- including consumer products such as cosmetics and for industrial use. In order to process the seed in North America as a fuel, large quantities of jatropha seed would need to be supplied to process and refining plants. This will require a massive, multi-disciplinary effort to ramp up the growth and production of jatropha seed for a North American market.

SG Biofuels, a bioenergy crop company developing and producing elite seeds of Jatropha, has established a strategic partnership with Bunge North America, the North American operating arm of Bunge Limited to research and develop a model to process Jatropha seeds into a biofuel feedstock.

Bunge, a global leader in oilseed processing, joins an industry-leading team of partners, including Flint Hills Resources, a refining and petrochemical company and wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries; Life Technologies Corporation, a global biotechnology tools company; and others that are collaborating with SG Biofuels to develop Jatropha as a viable source for cost-effective, sustainable crude plant oil.

The development of a successful market for Jatropha requires that all aspects of the value chain are met, from crop science and proper agronomics all the way through processing and refining. Bunge, together with Life Technologies and Flint Hills Resources, provides a fully integrated platform from which our customers can develop, produce and profit from large volumes of crude Jatropha oil.
—SG Biofuels President and Chief Executive Officer Kirk Haney

Jatropha curcas is a non-edible shrub native to Central America. Its seeds have high oil content, and can be processed to produce a high-quality energy feedstock. It can be effectively grown on marginal lands that are considered undesirable for food crops.

The company’s integrated breeding and biotechnology approach forms the foundation for its JMax Jatropha Optimization Platform, providing research agencies, growers and plantation developers with access to the company’s germplasm library, Jatropha curcas genome sequence, molecular markers and advanced biotech and synthetic biology tools to optimize elite Jatropha cultivars for unique growing conditions around the world. _GCC

Jatropha Aims to be King of Biodiesel

The future of biodiesel may belong to algae, but the present belongs to palm oil. Palm has the highest yield for all oilseeds, but unfortunately palm requires intensive cultivation and leads to the destruction of rainforest habitat.

Jatropha is a shrub native to Central America that grows in dry harsh conditions, and requires very little cultivation. It thrives across the entire tropical swath of the planet, requiring only generally warm conditions to prosper. The Mexican government is beginning to promote jatropha for small farmers, perhaps hoping to eventually balance shortfalls in petroleum production with growth in bio-"crude".

Now it turns out the weed, jatropha, could be used to fuel jet planes and the Mexican government wants farmers to grow entire fields of it to turn into biodiesel.

Known locally as "pinon," jatropha is a hearty shrub that grows with no special care. Its oil-rich seeds are being eyed as an attractive feed stock for biofuel since the poisonous plant does not compete with food crops.

...Jatropha is native to Mexico and Central America but was likely transported to India and Africa in the 1500s by Portuguese sailors convinced it had medicinal uses.

Now India is planting the bush en masse, converting it into a green energy source used to power trains and buses with less pollution than crude oil. Mexico hopes to follow suit.

President Felipe Calderon signed an agreement with the president of Colombia in January to build a 14.5 million peso ($936,000) experimental biodiesel plant in southern Mexico with a production capacity of 12,000 liters (3,170 gallons) of biofuel a day.

Mexico passed a law last year to push developing biofuels that don't threaten food security and the agriculture ministry has since identified some 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) of land with a high potential to produce jatropha. _Bioenergy

Both jatropha and pongamia have a lot of potential to replace palm oil, thereby saving a large portion of rainforest habitat. Eventually desert-grown algae may well replace the oilseed plants for biofuel production. That will take at least 30 years. In the meantime, jatropha is a very good bet for the tropics.

Jatropha Catching On As Biodiesel Oilseed

Jatropha has many things in its favour as a biodiesel feedstock: It's a hardy tree that requires little cultivation, and can be co-cultivated with other crops. Its oil yield per hectare is second only to palm oil, but is much less expensive and far less environmentally destructive than palm oil. Read on:

The drought-resistant jatropha plant and its biofuel potential have presented an exciting opportunity for investment in low-cost land that is not currently arable for most crops or suitable for other agricultural development. Interestingly, since the jatropha fruit is non-edible, using it to produce biodiesel would not affect or be affected by demand for food, a major problem that is constantly faced by the palm oil-based biodiesel and corn “ethanol” industries.

The upshot is that jatropha oil should be a cheaper alternative than the popular “edible” fuels made from rapeseed, corn and palm oil. Jatropha offers a new source of income for smallholders.

To date, the big corporations that lead large-scale production globally include BP and D1 Oils, which announced a US$160mil joint venture with a target to plant an estimated total of 405,000ha in India, South-East Asia, southern Africa, and Central and South America.

Others include Vietnam-based GreenEnergy Ltd with over US$20mil of successful placements, both private and public, for jatropha-specific ventures; Australia-based Mission Biofuels which owns about 8,903ha of jatropha plantations in Malaysia, and South Korea-based Eco Solutions with plantations in the Philippines. _Bioenergy

5 Tonnes Oil per Hectare w/ Jatropha?

Selectively bred Jatropha plants may boost yield from the traditional 1.7 tonnes oil per hectare up to 5 tonnes per hectare. And on marginal lands unfit for growing food!

"From the wild jatropha seed the best you can expected is about 1.7 tonnes of oil per hectare, but because there has been hardly any plant science applied to the plant there is huge potential for improvement," he said. "There is enough genetic material to cross fertilise and selective breed to increase yields."

D1 Oils believes that some of the seeds it is working on could result in yields of 2.7 tonnes per hectare and Prince maintains that yields on a par with palm oil of about five tonnes per hectare could be feasible.

He added that the company's plantations were living up to expectations that jatropha can prove successful on marginal dry land unsuitable for agriculture. "We are encouraging farmers to plant on land not used for food crops such as marginal land or areas used for cash crops such as tobacco," he said. "It does not need to be planted on the high-quality arable land that is used for food crops."

.....The company is now seeking to rapidly scale up its plantation operations in response to soaring demand worldwide for an energy crop that promises to be both more sustainable and cheaper than more established alternatives.

Prince said that jatropha-based biofuel would cost between $800 (£453) and $900 a tonne, compared with about $1,200 for biofuel made from soya or rape seed. "Of all the energy crops being looked at for biodiesel, jatropha definitely looks the most attractive," he said. "The issue is now with supply rather than demand. We are looking to undertake more planting with an initial aim of selling into markets in Africa and Asia where the plantations are. As we scale up, we can look to build up a supply chain to import into Europe, though you need large production levels to start thinking about hiring tankers." _source

Jatropha cannot yield as much oil as palm oil, but it grows in a wider range of climates and soils. It requires much less cultivation and water than palm, as well.

Eventually algal oils will outproduce other sources of bio-oils, except perhaps for pyrolysis "oil." But for now, algal oil costs $20 a gallon to produce, which is not competitive with soy, palm, rape, jatropha, or other current sources of biodiesel.

India Still Aims to Produce 20% of Its Diesel from Bio-fuels By the Year 2017

India's climate can support a large number of tropical oilseed crops that do not grow well in colder climates. The country is proceeding with ambitious plans to produce large portions of its liquid fuels from oilseeds within the next ten years. Jatropha is a main contender, but a number of other tropical oilseed plants are also being studied.

...jatropha oil is not the only source of biodiesel. The shrub has a more elegant rival in pongamia pinnata, or Indian birch, a silvery tree revered for its shady canopy and medicinal properties. Its crescent-shaped pods also contain seeds which can yield about 30% of their weight in oil, according to Roshini International Bio Energy, a firm based in Hyderabad. It has joined hands with the Andhra Pradesh government to plant the trees in three of Andhra Pradesh’s 23 districts. It is also venturing into neighbouring states and to Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Uganda. The goal, says Anil Reddy, Roshini’s founder, is “to plant 1 billion trees on this planet”, covering an area half the size of Denmark.

India’s enthusiasm for biofuel may seem odd only months after the country’s finance minister described conversion of food crops into biofuel as “a crime against humanity.” But D1-BP and Roshini point out that their favoured crops need not compete with food crops for land or water. Both are hardy plants that can grow on dry, stony soil. S.K. Kothari, Roshini’s technical director, says 150 acres of pongamia requires only as much water as a single acre of traditional crops.... _Economist

These crops require a lot of care in their early growth, and do not produce high yields until between 5 and 10 years of growth after planting. Farmers need to be patient.

But both jatropha and pongamia provide benefits beyond the oilseed. Farmers will need to learn to integrate the oilseed crops into an integrated system of multiple synergistic crops, and not rely on monoculture farming. If local farmers are unable to provide the necessary self-discipline to grow these crops, it is quite likely that large financial interests such as national and multi-national energy corps, will move in on the best land to grow the much needed alternative to petroleum.

Jatropha Update

New jatropha growing projects are being initiated in Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Argentina, Indonesia, and Brazil. Intensive investigation into the use of jatropha energy is being undertaken by researchers from China, Italy, the UK, and India. The crown prince of Abu Dhabi is pledging a $15 Billion investment in a project that focuses on jatropha energy. __Source

It is a mistake to concentrate exclusively on any one approach to solving the problem of unfavourable energy economics. Both electric power production and the production of chemical fuels are important. Pursuing safe and abundant nuclear energy is a complementary approach to pursuing bioenergy.

Likewise, neither jatropha, algae, nor any other bioenergy approach should be fixated upon exclusively. Instead, we should fit the energy approach to the particular location and need. The fixation upon maize ethanol by ADM and "corn state" US Senators, has restricted the options of biofuels in the US unnecessarily.

Solar thermal, PV, wind, geothermal, and other "elemental" renewable energy methods continue to make incremental improvements--although the huge problem holding back wind and solar continues to be the need for utility scale storage.

Electricity is the easiest form of energy to move in bulk, once the infrastructure is in place. HVDC is the best way to move large quantities of electricity--particularly underground and underwater, or where multiple power grids may interface together.

North America possesses trillions of barrels of oil equivalent at 1/3 or less current oil costs, using available processes. While there will always be a need for improvement in efficiencies and less polluting processes will always need to be developed, there comes a point where obstructionism (as per Pelosi and Boxer) does far more harm than good.

Jatropha Fuel $43 a Barrel to Undercut Petroleum

Jatropha Curcus is an oil seed shrub/tree that grows well in warm weather climates such as South Asia, SubSaharan Africa, and the tropics of the Americas. With improvements in cultivation and refinement, jatropha fuels could cost close to $40 a barrel--instead of the over $130 a barrel of petroleum.

The jatropha-refined fuel is significantly cheaper than crude oil. It could cost an estimated $43 a barrel, or about one-third of Friday's closing price of $138.54 for a barrel of crude oil....The weed, which resembles a fruit tree, can be grown virtually anywhere, doesn't need much water or fertilizer and is not edible. In India, the plants are mainly used as hedges to keep cows out of farm fields. In the U.S., some researchers have been growing the trees to process biodiesel that can be used in automobiles and factory machines.

...Within the nut were two seeds resembling peanuts. They contained 30 percent to 40 percent oil. Researchers looking at various crops discovered that the quality of jatropha oil was better than most for making jet fuel. Jatropha fuel also produces about half the harmful carbon emissions of fossil fuel....Researchers here have found that an acre of the plant can yield about 300 gallons of oil, or five to seven times more than feedstocks such as soybeans. __Bioenergy

Better methods of refining plant oils to fuels are quickly removing the barricades to using biofuels in aircraft and large diesel engines. High oil prices are driving industry to develop alternative fuels, in the face of growing inflationary pressures.

Unless the US Congress wakes up from its long "nap at the wheel", the only alternative to bioenergy as a replacement for petroleum is a deep worldwide recession. Of course, if the US Congress takes its handcuffs off US energy producers, nuclear and domestic fossil fuels will take off and help the US economy rebound from the oil-price induced doldrums. Recovery of the US economy would go a long way toward driving the global economy to recovery.

The US Congress shows no sign of sanity, so if industry knows what is good for it, it will push full speed ahead for bioenergy.

Is Jatropha a "Dream Fuel?" We'll See

According to some researchers, Jatropha Curcus can produce four times the fuel per area than soy, and ten times more than maize. My Dream Fuel LLC in La Belle, Florida, is gambling that jatropha will work as well in the US as it is beginning to work in other parts of the world.

Nearly 1 million seedlings are in the ground at a nursery in Hendry County and promoters are looking for farmers – here and across the country – to raise them as oil-producing plants....Researchers say the plant can produce four times more fuel per acre than soy, and 10 times more than corn.

...The Jatropha tree, native to Mexico and Latin America, has been grown in other countries, such as India and Africa, for fuel and medicine. It produces fruit with oily seeds that can be crushed to make biodiesel.

In India, there are large plantations with millions of Jatropha trees and My Dream Fuel has a contract with the government to train 1,500 farmers to grow the trees. In China, there are now more than 1 million acres of Jatropha growing.

Locally, Dalton has so much faith in the trees that he expects to put another 1 million in the ground in LaBelle before June. ___Source__via__NextEnergy

Bio-energy will be an actively expanding area for small to medium scale investment in new business enterprise. The demand for new fuel is being driven by the international oil market, as well as by environmentalist restrictions on oil drilling and refinery construction in the US.

A regional approach to bio-energy is the wise approach. Each new enterprise should be based upon the needs of the particular region, and its bio-assets. Jatropha will not grow in areas that are subject to frost, so are not an answer for regions too far away from the tropics. Switchgrass, on the other hand, can be grown in cold and arid regions, and can be converted into almost any hydrocarbon fuel using gasification methods. Not quite as economical as jatropha for diesel, certainly, but with the price of oil ever rising, it makes sense to start looking at processes that were uneconomical when oil was under $40 a barrel.