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Published online 10 October 2007 | Nature 449, 652-655 (2007) | doi:10.1038/449652a
News Feature
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.
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.
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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
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
Biodiesel, like starch-based ethanol, uses only a fraction of the plant. A winning strategy for biofuels would be based on converting the cellulose.
The perspective on Jatropha I mentioned above, has been published online and is available via http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bbb.39