The Shrub that Could--Perhaps! PART2

[rgiridhar]

Continued from Part 1
The Shrub that Could--Perhaps! PART1


“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
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.

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
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.

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.”