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Jatropha: the Biofuel that Bombed Seeks a Path To Redemption
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Earlier this century, jatropha was hailed as a “wonder” biofuel. A simple shrubby tree native to Central America, it was extremely promoted as a high-yielding, drought-tolerant biofuel feedstock that could grow on degraded lands throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia.
A jatropha rush ensued, with more than 900,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) planted by 2008. But the bubble burst. Low yields led to plantation failures nearly everywhere. The consequences of the jatropha crash was tainted by accusations of land grabbing, mismanagement, and overblown carbon reduction claims.
Today, some scientists continue pursuing the evasive guarantee of high-yielding jatropha. A comeback, they state, is reliant on cracking the yield problem and attending to the damaging land-use problems intertwined with its original failure.
The sole remaining big jatropha plantation remains in Ghana. The plantation owner claims high-yield domesticated varieties have actually been achieved and a brand-new boom is at hand. But even if this resurgence fails, the world’s experience of jatropha holds important lessons for any appealing up-and-coming biofuel.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Jatropha curcas, an unassuming shrub-like tree belonging to Central America, was planted throughout the world. The rush to jatropha was driven by its promise as a sustainable source of biofuel that might be grown on deteriorated, unfertile lands so as not to displace food crops. But inflated claims of high yields failed.
Now, after years of research and development, the sole staying large plantation concentrated on growing jatropha is in Ghana. And Singapore-based jOil, which owns that plantation, claims the jatropha resurgence is on.
“All those companies that stopped working, adopted a plug-and-play design of searching for the wild ranges of jatropha. But to advertise it, you need to domesticate it. This is a part of the process that was missed out on [during the boom],” jOil CEO Vasanth Subramanian told Mongabay in an interview.
Having gained from the errors of jatropha’s previous failures, he says the oily plant could yet play a crucial role as a liquid biofuel feedstock, minimizing transport carbon emissions at the worldwide level. A brand-new boom might bring additional advantages, with jatropha also a prospective source of fertilizers and even bioplastics.
But some researchers are doubtful, noting that jatropha has currently gone through one hype-and-fizzle cycle. They warn that if the plant is to reach full capacity, then it is important to find out from past errors. During the first boom, jatropha plantations were obstructed not only by bad yields, but by land grabbing, deforestation, and social issues in nations where it was planted, including Ghana, where jOil runs.
Experts also suggest that jatropha’s tale offers lessons for researchers and entrepreneurs checking out new sources for liquid biofuels – which exist aplenty.
Miracle shrub, major bust
Jatropha’s early 21st-century appeal came from its promise as a “second-generation” biofuel, which are sourced from grasses, trees and other plants not stemmed from edible crops such as maize, soy or oil palm. Among its numerous purported virtues was a capability to prosper on abject or “marginal” lands; hence, it was declared it would never ever take on food crops, so the theory went.
Back then, jatropha ticked all the boxes, says Alexandros Gasparatos, now at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Future Initiatives. “We had a crop that seemed amazing; that can grow without too much fertilizer, too many pesticides, or too much need for water, that can be exported [as fuel] abroad, and does not compete with food due to the fact that it is toxic.”
Governments, worldwide companies, investors and business purchased into the buzz, launching initiatives to plant, or promise to plant, countless hectares of jatropha. By 2008, plantations covered some 900,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) in Latin America, Africa and Asia, according to a market study got ready for WWF.
It didn’t take long for the mirage of the amazing biofuel tree to fade.
In 2009, a Pals of the Earth report from Eswatini (still known at the time as Swaziland) warned that jatropha curcas‘s high needs for land would indeed bring it into direct dispute with food crops. By 2011, a worldwide review noted that “growing outmatched both clinical understanding of the crop’s capacity along with an understanding of how the crop suits existing rural economies and the degree to which it can prosper on minimal lands.”
Projections estimated 4.7 million hectares (11.7 million acres) would be planted by 2010, and 12.8 million hectares (31.6 million acres) by 2015. However, just 1.19 million hectares (2.94 million acres) were growing by 2011. Projects and plantations began to fail as expected yields declined to emerge. Jatropha could grow on degraded lands and tolerate drought conditions, as declared, but yields remained bad.
“In my viewpoint, this combination of speculative financial investment, export-oriented potential, and potential to grow under fairly poorer conditions, developed a very big issue,” leading to “underestimated yields that were going to be produced,” Gasparatos says.
As jatropha plantations went from boom to bust, they were also plagued by ecological, social and financial problems, say experts. Accusations of land grabs, the conversion of food crop lands, and clearing of natural areas were reported.
Studies found that land-use modification for jatropha in countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Tanzania caused a loss of biodiversity. A research study from Mexico found the “carbon repayment” of jatropha plantations due to involved forest loss ranged in between two and 14 years, and “in some scenarios, the carbon financial obligation might never be recuperated.” In India, production revealed carbon advantages, however making use of fertilizers led to boosts of soil and water “acidification, ecotoxicity, eutrophication.”
“If you look at the majority of the plantations in Ghana, they claim that the jatropha produced was positioned on limited land, but the concept of limited land is really evasive,” discusses Abubakari Ahmed, a speaker at the University for Development Studies, Ghana. He studied the implications of jatropha plantations in the nation over several years, and found that a lax meaning of “limited” suggested that assumptions that the land co-opted for jatropha plantations had been lying unblemished and unused was typically illusory.
“Marginal to whom?” he asks. “The fact that … presently nobody is using [land] for farming does not mean that nobody is using it [for other purposes] There are a great deal of nature-based incomes on those landscapes that you might not always see from satellite images.”
Learning from jatropha
There are crucial lessons to be found out from the experience with jatropha, state analysts, which must be hearkened when thinking about other advantageous second-generation biofuels.
“There was a boom [in financial investment], however regrettably not of research, and action was taken based on supposed advantages of jatropha,” says Bart Muys, a teacher in the Division of Forest, Nature and Landscape at the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2014, as the jatropha buzz was winding down, Muys and coworkers released a paper citing essential lessons.
Fundamentally, he describes, there was a lack of knowledge about the plant itself and its requirements. This crucial requirement for in advance research study could be applied to other possible biofuel crops, he states. In 2015, for instance, his group released a paper analyzing the yields of pongamia (Millettia pinnata), a “fast-growing, leguminous and multipurpose tree types” with biofuel promise.
Like jatropha, pongamia can be grown on degraded and minimal land. But Muys’s research showed yields to be highly variable, contrary to other reports. The team concluded that “pongamia still can not be thought about a substantial and steady source of biofuel feedstock due to persisting understanding gaps.” Use of such cautionary data might prevent inefficient monetary speculation and reckless land conversion for brand-new biofuels.
“There are other extremely promising trees or plants that could serve as a fuel or a biomass manufacturer,” Muys states. “We wished to avoid [them going] in the very same direction of early buzz and fail, like jatropha.”
Gasparatos highlights crucial requirements that must be fulfilled before moving ahead with brand-new biofuel plantations: high yields must be unlocked, inputs to reach those yields understood, and a ready market must be offered.
“Basically, the crop requires to be domesticated, or [scientific understanding] at a level that we know how it is grown,” Gasparatos states. Jatropha “was practically undomesticated when it was promoted, which was so odd.”
How biofuel lands are obtained is also key, says Ahmed. Based upon experiences in Ghana where communally utilized lands were purchased for production, authorities should make sure that “guidelines are put in place to check how large-scale land acquisitions will be done and recorded in order to lower some of the problems we observed.”
A jatropha resurgence?
Despite all these obstacles, some scientists still believe that under the best conditions, jatropha could be a valuable biofuel service – especially for the difficult-to-decarbonize transport sector “accountable for approximately one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.”
“I believe jatropha has some prospective, but it needs to be the right product, grown in the best place, and so on,” Muys said.
Mohammad Alherbawi, a postdoctoral research fellow at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University, continues holding out hope for jatropha. He sees it as a way that Qatar might decrease airline company carbon emissions. According to his quotes, its use as a jet fuel could lead to about a 40% reduction of “cradle to tomb” emissions.
Alherbawi’s group is conducting ongoing field research studies to increase jatropha yields by fertilizing crops with sewage sludge. As an included benefit, he envisages a jatropha green belt spanning 20,000 hectares (almost 50,000 acres) in Qatar. “The application of the green belt can really boost the soil and agricultural lands, and protect them versus any more degeneration triggered by dust storms,” he states.
But the Qatar task’s success still depends upon many aspects, not least the capability to get quality yields from the tree. Another crucial action, Alherbawi discusses, is scaling up production technology that utilizes the whole of the jatropha fruit to increase processing efficiency.
Back in Ghana, jOil is presently managing more than 1,300 hectares (1,830 acres) of jatropha, and growing a pilot plot on 300 hectares (740 acres) dealing with more than 400 farmers. Subramanian discusses that years of research study and advancement have led to varieties of jatropha that can now attain the high yields that were doing not have more than a years earlier.
“We had the ability to hasten the yield cycle, enhance the yield range and enhance the fruit-bearing capacity of the tree,” Subramanian states. In essence, he mentions, the tree is now domesticated. “Our first task is to expand our jatropha plantation to 20,000 hectares.”
Biofuels aren’t the only application JOil is looking at. The fruit and its byproducts could be a source of fertilizer, bio-candle wax, a charcoal replacement (important in Africa where much wood is still burned for cooking), and even bioplastics.
But it is the transport sector that still beckons as the perfect biofuels application, according to Subramanian. “The biofuels story has as soon as again resumed with the energy transition drive for oil business and bio-refiners – [driven by] the search for alternative fuels that would be emission friendly.”
A total jatropha life-cycle evaluation has yet to be finished, however he believes that cradle-to-grave greenhouse gas emissions associated with the oily plant will be “competitive … These 2 aspects – that it is technically suitable, and the carbon sequestration – makes it an extremely strong prospect for adoption for … sustainable aviation,” he says. “We think any such growth will take location, [by clarifying] the meaning of abject land, [permitting] no competitors with food crops, nor in any method threatening food security of any country.”
Where next for jatropha?
Whether jatropha can really be carbon neutral, environmentally friendly and socially accountable depends on intricate aspects, consisting of where and how it’s grown – whether, for example, its production design is based in smallholder farms versus industrial-scale plantations, state professionals. Then there’s the unpleasant issue of achieving high yields.
Earlier this year, the Bolivian government revealed its intent to pursue jatropha plantations in the Gran Chaco biome, part of a national biofuels press that has stirred dispute over potential consequences. The Gran Chaco’s dry forest biome is currently in deep difficulty, having been heavily deforested by aggressive agribusiness practices.
Many past plantations in Ghana, alerts Ahmed, converted dry savanna forest, which ended up being problematic for carbon accounting. “The net carbon was frequently negative in most of the jatropha sites, because the carbon sequestration of jatropha can not be compared to that of a shea tree,” he discusses.
Other scientists chronicle the “potential of Jatropha curcas as an environmentally benign biodiesel feedstock” in Malaysia, Indonesia and India. But still other scientists remain doubtful of the ecological viability of second-generation biofuels. “If Mexico promotes biofuels, such as the exploitation of jatropha, the rebound is that it potentially becomes so successful, that we will have a lot of associated land-use change,” states Daniel Itzamna Avila-Ortega, co-founder of the Mexican Center of Industrial Ecology and a Ph.D. student with the Stockholm Resilience Centre; he has actually performed research on the possibilities of jatropha contributing to a circular economy in Mexico.
Avila-Ortega cites past land-use issues related to expansion of different crops, including oil palm, sugarcane and avocado: “Our police is so weak that it can not cope with the economic sector doing whatever they want, in terms of producing environmental problems.”
Researchers in Mexico are presently checking out jatropha curcas-based livestock feed as an affordable and sustainable replacement for grain. Such usages might be well matched to regional contexts, Avila-Ortega concurs, though he remains concerned about possible ecological costs.
He recommends restricting jatropha expansion in Mexico to make it a “crop that conquers land,” growing it just in truly poor soils in need of remediation. “Jatropha might be among those plants that can grow in very sterile wastelands,” he describes. “That’s the only method I would ever promote it in Mexico – as part of a forest healing technique for wastelands. Otherwise, the involved issues are greater than the potential advantages.”
Jatropha’s global future remains unsure. And its prospective as a tool in the fight versus environment change can only be unlocked, say numerous experts, by preventing the list of problems related to its very first boom.
Will jatropha projects that sputtered to a stop in the early 2000s be fired back up once again? Subramanian thinks its function as a sustainable biofuel is “imminent” and that the resurgence is on. “We have strong interest from the energy industry now,” he says, “to work together with us to develop and expand the supply chain of jatropha.”
Banner image: Jatropha curcas trees in Hawai’i. Image by Forest and Kim Starr through Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
A liquid biofuels primer: Carbon-cutting hopes vs. real-world effects
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