The Shrub that Could--Perhaps! PART1

[rgiridhar]

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, Nature 10 October 2007


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 aplomb.

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.

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.

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.

Continued in Part 2
The Shrub that Could--Perhaps! PART2