Biofuel: The little shrub that could - maybe

India, like many countries, has high hopes for jatropha as a biofuel source, but little is
known about how to make it a successful crop. Daemon Fairless digs for the roots of a
new enthusiasm.

Daemon Fairless

STRINGER INDIA/REUTERS

With a top speed of about 110 kilometres an hour, India's Shatabdi Express is not much
to brag about by the standards of a French TGV or a Japanese Shinkansen train.
Nonetheless, as the stock for one of the country's fastest and most luxurious passenger
lines, the Shatabdi trains have a certain prestige. So when, on New Year's Eve 2002, the
Shatabdi train from New Delhi to Amritsar was powered in part with biodiesel for the first
time, it was a clear statement of the government's desire to wean India off imported
petroleum.

Diesel is India's main liquid fuel: the country burns roughly 44 million tonnes, or 320
million barrels, of the stuff a year, as opposed to about 94 million barrels of gasoline. The
trains account for a significant part of that. Kunj Mittal, who heads the government-
operated rail service's engineering and traction division, says its fleet of 4,000 engines
currently burns about 1.7 million tonnes a year, and that he wants to replace at least
10% of that with biodiesel at some unspecified point in the future. But he would need
200 million litres of biodiesel a year. Which is a problem. “At this stage,” says Mittal,
“there is no mass production of biodiesel.”

Like many others around India, the rail service is looking to an unprepossessing,
poisonous scrub weed to try to do something about that. It has planted a million Jatropha
curcas seedlings on unused land along its tracks and elsewhere. It's just one symptom of
the jatropha fever that is spreading around the country and the world — to the slight
bewilderment of some of the scientists who best understand the shrub.

Jatropha, a member of the euphorbia family, originated in Central America. It has long
been used around the world as a source of lamp oil and soap, and also as a hedging
plant. One of its great selling points as a biofuel is the fact that growing it need not
compete with the cultivation of food. Of 306 million hectares of land considered in a
report by India's Ministry of Rural Development, 173 million are already under cultivation
but the rest is classified as either eroded farmland or non-arable wasteland. That's the
sort of land that jatropha can thrive on, with bushes living up to 50 years, fruiting
annually for more than 30 years and weathering droughts with aplomb1. In the early
2000s then-president A. P. J. Abdul Kalam repeatedly endorsed the plant for its potential
contributions to energy security and as a route to greening barren land. Jatropha has
been held to promise a reliable source of income for India's poor rural farmers and
energy self-sufficiency for small communities — all while reducing fossil-fuel greenhouse-
gas emissions and soil erosion.

Oasis in the desert: jatropha

cultivation can halt soil erosion, increase water storage in the soil and transform
barren expanses into lush, productive land.J. CHIKARA

In 2003, India's Planning Commission recommended a national mission on biofuel, a two-

phase project for wide-spread cultivation of jatropha on wasteland across much of India.
The first phase of the mission aims for 500,000 hectares of jatropha grown on
government land across the country. The biodiesel would be produced primarily by
panchayats — local governing bodies — at the village level, coordinated at the national
level by a consortium of government departments. Should the first phase go according to
plan, India's central government would embark on the second phase of the mission —
planting a total of 12 million hectares of the plant and privatizing the production of
jatropha biodiesel.

Although it seems likely to go ahead eventually, various ministerial meetings that might
have given the national mission on biofuel the seal of approval have been postponed in
favour of higher-priority issues. Despite this, several states have enthusiastically hopped
aboard the jatropha express, providing free plants to small-scale farmers, encouraging
private investment in jatropha plantations and setting up biodiesel processing plants. The
Ministry of Rural Development, which is set to coordinate the national mission on biofuel
when it is approved, estimates that there are already between 500,000 and 600,000
hectares of jatropha growing across the country.

And India is not alone in its hopes for the shrub. In February 2007 China, which claims to
have 2 million hectares of jatropha already under cultivation, announced plans to plant
an additional 11 million hectares across its southern states by 2010. Neighbouring
Myanmar (Burma) has plans to plant several million hectares; and the Philippines, as well
as several African countries, have initiated large-scale plantations of their own. India
looks forward to encouraging more such schemes and quite possibly profiting from them.
“Once we have an operational programme and have something to offer the world,” says
Krishna Chopra, the recently retired principal adviser to India's Ministry of New and
Renewable Energy, “I think exporting the know-how would certainly be one of the first
areas to develop.”

The great unknown

Although there is reason to be enthusiastic about jatropha's potential as a biodiesel

feedstock in India and beyond, there is one rather sobering concern: despite the fact that
jatropha grows abundantly in the wild, it has never really been domesticated. Its yield is
not predictable; the conditions that best suit its growth are not well defined and the
potential environmental impacts of large-scale cultivation are not understood at all.
“Without understanding the basic agronomics, a premature push to cultivate jatropha
could lead to very unproductive agriculture,” says Pushpito Ghosh, who has been working
on the plant for the best part of a decade, and who is now director of the Central Salt and
Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSMCRI) in Bhavnagar.
When Ghosh first arrived at the CSMCRI, the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) had already given the institute funding for the cultivation of a modest jatropha
plantation, although not for biofuels work. The idea was to see “how to make use of
waste land, coastal areas and sand dunes”, Ghosh says.

“I saw all this green in what is otherwise a complete desert.”

Klaus Becker

The plantation started off as an unirrigated, unfertilized, 20-hectare patch of exhausted

scrub: Ghosh wasn't particularly impressed when he first saw it. “There were shrubs and
they were growing,” he recalls, “but it didn't look to me that it had what was required to
make a successful plantation. 'Where are the seeds?' I said to myself. I didn't see too
many of them. Merely planting and letting jatropha grow doesn't necessarily lead to
productive growth.” Nonetheless, the fact that jatropha lived up to its reputation as a
shrub that could eke out a living on relatively barren land piqued the interest of India's
Department of Biotechnology, which provided a little further funding for exploration of
biofuel possibilities using cuttings from three of the most productive plants in the UNDP
trial.

The seedlings were planted in small plots spread over patches of degraded, untended
land in the eastern state of Orrisa. “The results were not outstanding,” says Ghosh, “but
they were consistent.” Several plants yielded around 1.5 kilograms of seed, enough for
about 0.4 litres of diesel. As modest as the results were, says Ghosh, they created a lot
of interest. “For the first time,” he says, “we were doing something in a systematic way.”

The CSMCRI's work also caught the imagination of Klaus Becker, who arrived at the
institute in 2000 as a visiting agricultural scientist from the University of Hohenheim in
Germany. The original UNDP plot inspired him far more than it had the sanguine,
measured Ghosh. “I saw all this green in what is otherwise a complete desert. There was
absolutely nothing else around it. 'Look,' I told Ghosh, 'if you get this working, you'll be
the first in the world'.”

From seed to oil

Becker returned to Germany and set about fund-raising. By 2003 he had cobbled
together a €1.7-million (US$1.9-million) research fund comprised of grants from
DaimlerChrysler, the German Investment and Development Company in Cologne, India's
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the University of Hohenheim. With these
funds, Ghosh and his team — working in collaboration with Becker and scientists at
DaimlerChrysler — began exploring the transesterification needed to turn jatropha into
biodiesel. The process had already been established by Nicaraguan researchers during
the 1990s2 and it wasn't long before Ghosh and his team were producing small batches.

“You could tell simply by looking at it that it was fairly good quality,” says Ghosh of their
first attempts. Chemists at DaimlerChrysler's Stuttgart labs analysed it in more detail
than the CSMCRI was able to and judged it easily good enough to meet European
standards. Further tests at the Austrian Biofuels Institute (ABI), which pitted the
CSMCRI's jatropha biodiesel against fuels from other feedstocks, showed that it “clearly
outperformed biodiesel from rapeseed, sunflower and soya bean oil in [its lack of a
propensity to oxidize],” says the ABI's Werner Körbitz, adding that the fuel “showed a
fully satisfying performance concerning power, efficiency and emissions”.
Ghosh's vision — and part of the CSMCRI's mandate — was to create a version of this
transesterification process that was both inexpensive and easily replicable at the village
level. Nearly 80,000 of India's 600,000 villages currently have no access to fuel or
electricity — in part because there isn't enough fuel for a fuel distribution network. “If
people can grow oil directly in villages and produce biofuels themselves in decentralized
plants,” says Ghosh, “then they can achieve energy self-sufficiency. My colleagues and I
are deeply committed to this principle.”

“The constant urge to simplify and to ensure that every gram of jatropha is turned into
something valuable was a tremendous motivator,” he says, looking back at the project.
But while he and his colleagues were still congratulating themselves on a job well done,
the Times of India ran a story announcing that DaimlerChrysler was set to test two of its
Mercedes C-Class cars on a 6,000-kilometre road test across the length and breadth of
India using the CSMCRI's jatropha biodiesel.

Up the Khardungla pass

“Our focus all along has been biodiesel as a fuel for village folk, not for fancy
urban folk.”

Pushpito Ghosh

It was the first Ghosh had heard of it. “Our focus all along has been biodiesel as a fuel for
village folk,” he says, “not for fancy urban folk.” And on top of that there was an obvious
practical difficulty. Up to this point, Ghosh and his team had only ever produced a few
litres of it at a time: you can't get across India on that.

Within a few months, though, Ghosh's team had developed a transesterification unit
capable of producing about 250 litres a day — adequate for use in villages and small-
scale industry3. The Mercedes ran entirely on 100% jatropha biodiesel from this unit
throughout April and May 2004 without any significant engine modifications. In the
summer of 2005, DaimlerChrysler had several automotive journalists take the cars on a
high-altitude test through the Himalayas, including Khardungla pass, which, at 5,359
metres above sea level, is one of the world's highest motorable roads.

Pushpito Ghosh tops up a vehicle that has

covered 48,000 kilometres powered only by jatropha biodiesel.S. L. PUROHIT

While Ghosh and his colleagues were making sure that jatropha could be processed as a
reliable source of biodiesel, several of India's state governments were busy promoting
their own jatropha cultivation campaigns. The state of Chhattisgarh, which has the most
well-developed biodiesel programme in the country, has distributed 380 million jatropha
seedlings to farmers, free of charge, over the past 3 years, enough to cover 150,000
hectares with the shrub. Shailendra Shukla, executive director of the Chhattisgarh Biofuel
Development Authority (CDBA), says the state has also provided 80 oil presses to various
village panchayats, and guarantees to buy back jatropha seeds — which have to be hand-
picked off the shrubs — at 6.5 rupees (about US$0.16) per kilogram in order to stimulate
confidence in the crop. Several local businesses have popped up across the state, says
Shukla, that are now operating micro-refineries. “These are small businesses that provide
biodiesel for the use in tractors, irrigation pumps, jeeps and village power generators.”

Ghosh says that the CSMCRI has received an order for a refinery from the country's
Defence Research and Development Organisation, part of India's Ministry of Defence. He
explains that the unit would be capable of producing about 1,000 litres a day and would
cost about 14 million rupees to install. In such a plant, he says, each litre of biodiesel
would have a net production cost of about 26 rupees if the seed pods are bought at 6
rupees per kilogram and every scrap of seed and seed pod is converted into something
valuable, with the seed going into oil, the bi-product seed cake into fertilizer and the seed
husk into a high-density brick that can be burnt for fuel.

The wide governmental support has also attracted substantial business interest. D1 Oils,
a UK-based biodiesel producer, is the world's largest commercial jatropha cultivator,
responsible for around 81,000 hectares of jatropha in Chhattisgarh and in the southern
state of Tamil Nadu, with plans for an additional 350,000 hectares over the next few
years. “The entire programme revolves around the government-funded jatropha seeds,”
says Sarju Singh, until recently managing director of D1 Oils India. “The government
gives farmers free or subsidized seedlings and D1 Oils guarantees to purchase the seeds
at the price prescribed by the state.” The company claims to have invested more than £3
million (US$6 million) in plant science and financing its share of the plantings, which are
joint ventures.

Cautious approach

Jatropha is already under cultivation in

Tamil Nadu, India, where it can be grown with other crops such as sunflowers.G.
JAWORSKY

Source: United Nations Development

Programme/World Bank. Jatropha figure from Indian Planning Commission
Yet most of these plantings have yet to reach whatever maximum level of productivity
they might eventually attain — the plants need a few years to bed in. And Ghosh is wary
of subsidizing jatropha too much before mass cultivation of the plant is fully understood.
“A lot of government funds may go down the tube,” he warns. Ghosh doesn't want the
farmers to take on too much risk, so he is suggesting that they intersperse jatropha
between their current crops, rather than banking on it as a cash crop. Shukla has similar
reservations. “My immediate concern,” he says, “is that because the seeds are derived
from wild plants there is no assurance of yield.” Shukla says the CBDA, like Ghosh, is
promoting jatropha as something farmers limit themselves to planting between their rice
fields. The only situation where all are agreed that it makes sense for small farmers to
cultivate whole fields of jatropha is on farm land that has become or is becoming
unproductive. It is a good fallow crop, says Becker: “It has a deep root system which
stops ground erosion and increases water storage in the soil.” This, he says, leads in turn
“to more biomass growth and an accumulation of organic carbon in the soil”.

Henk Joos, D1 Oils' director of plant science and agronomy, agrees that assured yields
and the techniques needed to achieve them on a large scale need a lot more research.
Yield estimates currently vary a great deal. India's Planning Commission estimates about
1,300 litres of oil per hectare, but Ghosh, conservatively, foresees a figure of about half
that. Yield research is the main focus of D1 Oils' Indian operations, he says. The company
is currently testing a number of jatropha varieties to see which ones grow best in India's
varied climatic zones. “It will be two or three years before we get real scientific data to
base an industry on,” he says. “We are not there yet, we have a lot of work to do.”

This is the sort of work Ghosh is currently overseeing at the CSMCRI's test plots. “It isn't
the most glamorous work, but the mass multiplication of reliably producing plants is key
to developing an industry, he says. Ghosh and his team are looking at precisely what
kind of soil conditions and just how much water jatropha needs in order to reliably
pump out oil-bearing seeds. The fact that jatropha plants can survive droughts does not
mean they will not be more productive if they get more water. The optimum amount of
water is still unknown.

STRINGER INDIA/REUTERS

The team is also continuously on the lookout for plants that could be potential
progenitors for a generation of a high-yield crop. “We have one plant which has given us
5 kilograms of seed,” says Ghosh. “We have yet to get that from any other plant.” The
CSMCRI is trying to perfect the use of shoot-tip cuttings as a means for mass-replication
of jatropha plants so it can capture their best attributes. Culturing tissue cuttings from
the plant's growing tip, says Ghosh, is the most reliable means of propagating exact
copies of a parent plant, an important step in creating an army of dependable high-yield
clones. It's a common enough technique — but like so much technology, it hasn't yet
been reliably adapted to jatropha. “The problem is, we just don't have the protocol right,”
says Ghosh.
 These various efforts are not part of any overarching plan. Despite the general
enthusiasm for India's national mission on biofuel, there is a definite lack of cohesion at
the national level. “Right now, ad-hoc research is being done by different agencies,” says
Chopra, “but it doesn't add up, because they each do their own thing.” A national biofuel
policy that was written by Chopra and his colleagues shortly before his retirement might
help. It envisages an authority that would coordinate research and provide funding
through various government agencies in order to cultivate jatropha on an industrial scale.
But this policy, like the national mission on biofuel, has yet to go through the cabinet. In
this case, it has been stalled by disagreements between various ministries on how to
price jatropha — the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy suggests subsidizing seeds;
other government ministries suggest subsidizing biodiesel itself. But, says Chopra, “I
expect it will come together, perhaps this year or early next year”.

Ghosh remains cautious and optimistic in level-headedly equal measure. “We must
neither get carried away by hype nor get despondent if the initial results of cultivation are
not as per expectation,” he says. “The future will depend on how seriously and
scientifically we pursue our goals.” 

See Editorial, page 637. . Daemon Fairless is this year's winner of the IDRC-Nature
fellowship.
 References

1. Francis, G., Edinger, R. & Becker, K. Nat. Res. Forum 29, 12–24 (2005). | ISI |
2. Foidl, N., Foidl, G., Sanchez, M., Mittelbach, M. & Hackel, S. Bioresource Technol.
58, 77–82 (1996). | Article | ISI | ChemPort |
3. Ghosh, A. et al. Int. J. Environ. Stud. — special issue on India's future energy
options (in the press).

 Jatrophraud. Those hyping this species rarely give its common English names (vomit nut or
purge nut) nor those of its oil (hell oil or oleum infernale). It has surface irritants, yet must
be hand picked and dried and the nuts removed by hand from the outer coating. Its pollen
is allergenic, it contains a protein curcin (similar to ricin- and as with castor beans, eating
not too many seeds is lethal), and its oil has some pretty awful components. Most of the
problems could be rectified transgenically. While there is no regulatory scrutiny of the
dangerous wild type being cultivated, the regulatory costs to render it safer and easier to
cultivate would be prohibitive. The rural poor will not be richer from growing an unmodified,
undomesticated crop such as this, they will just be less healthy. Jonathan Gressel
1. Report this comment
2. 2007-10-10 03:07:58 PM
3. Posted by: Jonathan Gressel
 #40

Gressel you are the fraud. I wonder if perhaps you can speak of your years of field experience or
the 71.38% reduction in carbon emissions from the jatrobased biodiesel BA100. Or the Millions of
Rupees now going into the hands of farmers instead of OPEC's greedy little hands. I have seen this
and so much more with my own eyes using non-GM crops in India and Indonesia. Yes, if you drink it
you will get sick its feedstock for biofuel what do you expect. The road to solving global warming
will be beset upon all sides with people that want to stand on there soapbox and pronounce it all a
hoax. Without a shred of any real credability or experience. If anyone would like to see
photographs, facts or figures from my research please e-mail me. tyson@diplomats.com

1. Report this comment

2. 2007-10-10 10:35:33 PM
3. Posted by: Tyson Bennett
 #45
The reader is invited to official and peer-reviewed sources to ascertain the toxicity of Jatropha. The
oil was initially claimed to contain a fatty acid curcanoleic acid, structurally and functionally related
to ricinoleic and crotonoleic acids, and like them, is a of skin tumors 1. The irritant/cancer
potentiator/synergist seed oil is now known to contain 0.03 and 3.4% curcusones, irritant
diterpenoid phorbol esters. The best extraction procedures available for the removal of the phorbol
esters remove about half 2, which is unacceptable toxicologically in accessions with high initial
content. As jatropha seeds have a pleasant taste, the plants are particularly attractive to children 1,
possibly because the seeds contain dulcitol and sucrose 3. Numerous cases of toxicoses from the
toxicalbumin lectin (curcin) are reported in the medical literature and ingesting four seeds can be
toxic to a child, with symptoms resembling organophosphate insecticide intoxication, yet with no
known antidote for the lethal mixture 1. Some selections have been performed to find accessions
that are less poisonous. The results are still quite poisonous, probably because the screening was
performed to assay amounts of a single poisonous component, forgetting that jatropha contains a
suite of toxic compounds. For example, a “non-toxic� Mexican variety has 5% the amount
phorbol esters, but still has half the amount of toxic lectins as the toxic varieties, and about 25%
more trypsin inhibitors and 50% more saponins 4. The poisons could all be removed using RNAi
technology, and the meal would then be appropriate for animal feed, and not as a dangerous
environmental pollutatnt. 1. INCHEM. Jatropha curcas L. Intl. Programme Chem. Safety
http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/plant/jcurc.htm (1994). 2. Haas, W. & Mittelbach, M.
Detoxification experiments with the seed oil from Jatropha curcas L. Industrial Crops and Products
12, 111-118 (2000). 3. Gübitz, G. M., Mittelbach, M. & Trabi, M. Exploitation of the tropical oil
seed plant Jatropha curcas L. Bioresource Technology 67, 73-82 (1999). 4. Makkar, H. P. S.,
Aderibigbe, A. O. & Becker, K. Comparative evaluation of non-toxic and toxic varieties of Jatropha
curcas for chemical composition, digestibility, protein degradability and toxic factors. Food
Chemistry 62, 207-215 (1998).

1. Report this comment

2. 2007-10-11 01:11:08 AM
3. Posted by: Jonathan Gressel
 #50

Jatropha curcas: toxic disaster or fuel for the future? Bennett and Gressel both have a point.
Although even some basic agronomic characteristics of J. curcas are not yet fully understood, the
plant enjoys a booming interest, and this may hold the risk of unsustainable practice. While our
qualitative sustainability assessment, focusing on environmental impacts and to a lesser extent on
socio-economic issues, is quite favorable as long as only degraded land is taken into J. curcas
cultivation, there are several tradeoffs between different sustainability dimensions cautioning us
against jumping on the Jatropha Express too soon. Please see Achten WMJ, Mathijs E, Verchot L,
Singh VP, Aerts R, Muys B (in press) Jatropha bio-diesel fueling sustainability? Biofuels, Bioproducts
and Biorefining, at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/114204229

1. Report this comment

2. 2007-10-11 05:55:42 AM
3. Posted by: Raf Aerts
 #55

Your article was very well researched and indeed offers to India (and other Countries with equal
requirements for providing alternative sources of fuel to fossil derived fuels) a temporary respite
from 'Peak Oil.' With the developments in India moving forward apace and the population likely to
exceed that of China in less than twenty years and the aspiration of all to have personal transport
there will surely be a need for more fuels including substitutes for refined fossil fuels Diesel and
petroleum/gasoline. I wonder then though whether the authors and researchers have taken note of
the other potential sources of Biofuels available to India. One of these is Pongamia - the Indian
Beech Nut - which was recognised by Dr. Udipi Shrinivasa from the Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore as being of equal importance for its oil derived fuel to be a useful source of Bio-Diesel
and an equal substitute for fossil fuel derived Diesel. From the reading of his work it would appear
that this could be of more importance to the Indian economy than Jatropha. Yet in all of these
issues about the developments of BioFuels little if ever mention is made of the fact that growing
crops on land that might also be used for growing foods has its disadvantages. With the scarcity of
such land across the world we should be careful in all that we do in case we upset the fine balance
between ecosystems in the area. Perhaps the two events in recent time that should be referred to
as a warning in this area are the destruction of the Aral Sea basin as a result of the diversion of the
source rivers to feed the Cotton Industry and the effects of the Communal Farming initiatives in
China during the 1950s and 1960s. (There will be others in historical terms of equal note!) In
respect to the options for the other Biofuel substitute - Ethanol - for petrol/gasoline there is as
much an obvious need in India as there is elsewhere in the World (be it China, Korea, Indonesia,
Nigeria, Brazil and the rest of the South Americas or in the 'Western Nations.') The traditional route
to manufacture Ethanol again relies on the use of crops that are primary sources of food (Sugar
Cane and Beet or Corn, Wheat, Rice and Grains etc.) or they are grown on land that should
preferentially be used to grow food. This conflict between the use of Crops (and land) for the
Production of Fuel or Food will bedog us for some time unless we take action to redress it at the
earliest opportunity. One of the easiest ways to do this is to intercept the Biomass from Waste
sources and use this to manufacture the fuel Ethanol. The process to do this Mild Acid Hydrolysis is
well founded and established having been developed in the late 19th Century and early 20th
Centuries to make batch small quantities of Ethanol for transport in the USA and Europe prior to the
development of the mass development of cheap oil in the USA and the European North Sea. With
the developments of the process in recent time by Genesyst and the use of its Internationally
patented Gravity Pressure Vessel the process is now continuous and the resulting efficiency of
conversion of Biomass to Ethanol means that it can be used on any sources of Biomass including
that found in Waste (previously considered unusable) in an emission free environmentally
acceptable and economical way at around a quarter of the cost of the Thermal Destructive - or the
Incineration - and Waste to Energy options. The sources of the raw material available to make
Ethanol now includes Biomass found in Waste from Agriculture and Farming, Forestry, Food
Production and Discards, Commerce and Industry (including Saw Mill and Paper Manufacture, etc.),
and Construction Debris and the likes. Importantly though for Society it includes the Biomass we
discard in our Municipal Solid Waste. This source of Biomass is available from every community
around the World, and it is a constant source of material that is not affected by Climate, Seasons or
Internationally defined Commodity Prices established outside the Country of production. In the
Metropolitan City of Mumbai some figures were quoted by Surika Kamil (for the Indira Gandhi
Institute of Development Research) which gave an insight into the issue for Greater Mumbai as
follows. In 2001 the total daily production of Municipal Solid Waste was 6260 tonnes (rounded up to
the nearest 10:) The Biomass equivalent in this same source of Waste was 3950 tonnes: Assumed
Water Content of the Biomass as a percentage 50% Potential Ethanol yield at 200 litres per dry
tonne of Biomass = 144+ million litres per year. If it was possible to consider all the potential
Municipal Waste collected in the major cities in India then from the report given in the Hindu on
Wednesday March 07th 2007 where it is stated '..."The present annual solid waste generated in
Indian cities has increased from 48 million tones in 1997 to 95 million tonnes, which might exceed
150 million tonnes over the next seven years," says Mr. Dhoot.' Supposing just half of this 150
million tonnes was made into the fuel Ethanol then the comparative quantity of Ethanol derived
would be nearer 4700+ million litres of Ethanol (a not insignificant sum)! And by adding to this
other waste sources of Biomass it is possible that even India could become self sufficient in
substitute Biofuels. The comparison elsewhere around the world though is even more startling.
City/Population/MSW tonnes per day/Ethanol litres per year Buenos
Aries/12.4m/7,800/480,000,000 Beijing/15.3m/13,300/820,000,000 São Paulo
City/18.7m/15,900/985,000,000 MetroSeoul/23.9m/22,800/1450,000,000 If Brazil was to exploit
the production of Ethanol from Municipal Waste it could increase the total country's production very
significantly! By converting Biomass from its Municipal Waste to Ethanol Metro Seoul could replace
over 40% of the total petrol used in the area. So in returning to the article in the current press We
should be looking at the wider picture when it comes to addressing the potential of Biofuel
production. This should embrace the use of Biomass as it does not impinge on the use of Crops that
should primarily be used for Food or grown on land that ought in the first instance be used for
growing food. The use of Jatropha (or indeed Pongamia) may be such a crop but even then in
certain areas it may have distinct advantages for Society.

1. Report this comment

2. 2007-10-11 09:13:13 AM
3. Posted by: Peter Hurrell
 #59
Thanks for the nice, well researched reviews on Jatropha. Biodiesel from Jatropha oil is a huge
potential to reduce the spread of desert and cover arid/semi-arid land with green shrubs. It also can
enable poor, rural people in countries like India, Chain, Africa etc to get some extra earnings.
Though I have enough doubt if it can solve the problems regarding fossil fuel in future in large
scale, even in those countries. The main bottleneck for using Jatropha is very high labour
requirement collect seeds. This will be real long-term problem for its use in industrialized countries
where labour cost is very high. Seed cakes of jatropha is known to contain toxicity and not suitable
for cattle feed and fertilizer. In countries like India, jatropha has invited private investment. Their
goals are not necessarily the elevation of rural poverty and provide green cover for arid and
semiarid land. They are mostly interested to gain from Govt subsidy associated with jatropha
plantation. This also has the potentiality to force and exploit poor and mostly illiterate farmers in
villages to cultivate jatropha instead of their normal crops. This will be of great concern in countries
like India with huge population to feed. Unless proper and systemic studies are completed to
ascertain its agronomic and environmental impact, economic feasibility (mainly for rural mass),
Jatropha should not be allowed for mass cultivation. Its use by private investors also should be
properly monitored.

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2. 2007-10-11 12:47:03 PM
3. Posted by: jayanta chatterjee
 #73

I am really interested to see these opinions about Jatropha curcas, not least because I am involved
in an EU AidCo funded project called RE-Impact (www.ceg.ncl.ac.uk/reimpact) in which we are
planning to develop integrated tools and methodologies to help stakeholders and policymakers see
the bigger picture when planning energy plantations. We are looking at water resource,
socioeconomic, biodiversity and climate change (CDM and JI) impacts from global to local scales,
with case studies in India, China, Uganda and South Africa. As discussed in the article Jatropha is
already planted up in a big way in India and China with more planned, whilst interest in Uganda is
scant and there is currently a moratorium on the crop in South Africa. All very interesting stuff, and
we hope to develop the project meaningfully over the next 3 years with input from any interested
stakeholders at any level. For more information, workshop details, or to get in touch, please do go
to the website.

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2. 2007-10-12 08:56:34 AM
3. Posted by: Jennifer Harrison
 #80

Biodiesel, like starch-based ethanol, uses only a fraction of the plant. A winning strategy for biofuels
would be based on converting the cellulose.

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2. 2007-10-12 02:39:11 PM
3. Posted by: Paul Braterman
 #514

The perspective on Jatropha I mentioned above, has been published online and is available via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bbb.39

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2. 2007-11-20 12:17:01 PM
3. Posted by: Raf Aerts