Jatropha: the Biofuel that Bombed Seeks a Path To Redemption
If you liked this story, share it with other individuals.
Earlier this century, jatropha was hailed as a “miracle” biofuel. A simple shrubby tree belonging to Central America, it was extremely promoted as a high-yielding, drought-tolerant biofuel feedstock that might grow on degraded lands across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
A jatropha rush took place, with more than 900,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) planted by 2008. But the bubble burst. Low yields caused plantation failures nearly everywhere. The after-effects of the jatropha crash was tainted by allegations of land grabbing, mismanagement, and overblown carbon reduction claims.
Today, some scientists continue pursuing the incredibly elusive promise of high-yielding jatropha. A return, they state, depends on breaking the yield problem and attending to the hazardous land-use problems linked with its initial failure.
The sole remaining large jatropha plantation is in Ghana. The plantation owner declares high-yield domesticated varieties have actually been achieved and a brand-new boom is at hand. But even if this return fails, the world’s experience of jatropha holds crucial lessons for any appealing up-and-coming biofuel.
At the start of the 21st century, Jatropha curcas, an unassuming shrub-like tree native to Central America, was planted across the world. The rush to jatropha was driven by its promise as a sustainable source of biofuel that might be grown on broken down, unfertile lands so as not to displace food crops. But inflated claims of high yields fell flat.
Now, after years of research and development, the sole remaining large plantation focused on growing jatropha remains in Ghana. And Singapore-based jOil, which owns that plantation, declares the jatropha return is on.
“All those business that failed, embraced a plug-and-play design of scouting for the wild ranges of jatropha. But to commercialize it, you need to domesticate it. This is a part of the process that was missed out on [throughout the boom],” jOil CEO Vasanth Subramanian informed Mongabay in an interview.
Having gained from the mistakes of jatropha’s past failures, he says the oily plant could yet play an essential function as a liquid biofuel feedstock, decreasing transportation carbon emissions at the global level. A brand-new boom could bring extra advantages, with jatropha also a possible source of fertilizers and even bioplastics.
But some researchers are hesitant, keeping in mind that jatropha has currently gone through one hype-and-fizzle cycle. They warn that if the plant is to reach complete potential, then it is important to learn from past errors. During the very first boom, jatropha plantations were obstructed not just by bad yields, but by land grabbing, logging, and social problems in countries where it was planted, consisting of Ghana, where jOil operates.
Experts likewise recommend that jatropha’s tale uses lessons for researchers and business owners exploring promising new sources for liquid biofuels – which exist aplenty.
Miracle shrub, significant bust
Jatropha’s early 21st-century appeal came from its promise as a “second-generation” biofuel, which are sourced from yards, trees and other plants not originated from edible crops such as maize, soy or oil palm. Among its multiple purported virtues was a capability to flourish on degraded or “minimal” lands; therefore, it was claimed it would never ever take on food crops, so the theory went.
Back then, jatropha ticked all packages, says Alexandros Gasparatos, now at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Future Initiatives. “We had a crop that appeared miraculous; that can grow without excessive fertilizer, a lot of pesticides, or too much need for water, that can be exported [as fuel] abroad, and does not take on food because it is toxic.”
Governments, worldwide companies, financiers and business purchased into the hype, launching initiatives to plant, or pledge to plant, millions of 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 prepared for WWF.
It didn’t take wish for the mirage of the incredible biofuel tree to fade.
In 2009, a Pals of the Earth report from Eswatini (still understood at the time as Swaziland) warned that jatropha’s high needs for land would indeed bring it into direct conflict with food crops. By 2011, an international review noted that “growing exceeded both scientific understanding of the crop’s capacity in addition to an understanding of how the crop suits existing rural economies and the degree to which it can grow on minimal lands.”
Projections approximated 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, only 1.19 million hectares (2.94 million acres) were growing by 2011. Projects and plantations started to stop working as anticipated yields declined to emerge. Jatropha could grow on abject lands and endure dry spell conditions, as claimed, but yields remained poor.
“In my opinion, this mix of speculative investment, export-oriented capacity, and prospective to grow under reasonably poorer conditions, created an extremely huge problem,” leading to “underestimated yields that were going to be produced,” Gasparatos states.
As jatropha plantations went from boom to bust, they were also afflicted by environmental, social and economic problems, state 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 study from Mexico discovered the “carbon payback” of jatropha plantations due to involved forest loss varied in between two and 14 years, and “in some circumstances, the carbon financial obligation may never be recovered.” In India, production showed carbon benefits, however using fertilizers resulted in increases of soil and water “acidification, ecotoxicity, eutrophication.”
“If you look at the majority of the plantations in Ghana, they declare that the jatropha produced was situated on minimal land, but the idea of marginal land is really evasive,” explains Abubakari Ahmed, a speaker at the University for Development Studies, Ghana. He studied the ramifications of jatropha plantations in the nation over a number of years, and found that a lax definition of “limited” implied that assumptions that the land co-opted for jatropha plantations had actually been lying unblemished and unused was frequently illusory.
“Marginal to whom?” he asks. “The truth that … presently no one is using [land] for farming doesn’t suggest that nobody is utilizing it [for other functions] 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 key lessons to be gained from the experience with jatropha, say analysts, which should be observed when considering other advantageous second-generation biofuels.
“There was a boom [in investment], but sadly not of research, and action was taken based on supposed benefits of jatropha,” says Bart Muys, a professor in the Division of Forest, Nature and Landscape at the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2014, as the jatropha buzz was unwinding, Muys and associates published a paper pointing out key lessons.
Fundamentally, he discusses, there was a lack of understanding about the plant itself and its requirements. This important requirement for upfront research could be applied to other potential biofuel crops, he states. In 2015, for example, his group released a paper analyzing the yields of pongamia (Millettia pinnata), a “fast-growing, leguminous and multipurpose tree species” with biofuel promise.
Like jatropha, pongamia can be grown on abject and limited land. But Muys’s research study showed yields to be extremely variable, contrary to other reports. The group concluded that “pongamia still can not be thought about a considerable and stable source of biofuel feedstock due to continuing knowledge spaces.” Use of such cautionary data might prevent wasteful financial speculation and careless land conversion for brand-new biofuels.
“There are other very promising trees or plants that could act as a fuel or a biomass producer,” Muys says. “We wanted to avoid [them going] in the same direction of early hype and fail, like jatropha.”
Gasparatos underlines important requirements that should be met before moving ahead with new biofuel plantations: high yields must be unlocked, inputs to reach those yields comprehended, and an all set market needs to be readily available.
“Basically, the crop needs to be domesticated, or [clinical understanding] at a level that we understand how it is grown,” Gasparatos says. Jatropha “was practically undomesticated when it was promoted, which was so unusual.”
How biofuel lands are obtained is also essential, says Ahmed. Based on experiences in Ghana where communally utilized lands were bought for production, authorities need to make sure that “guidelines are put in location to check how large-scale land acquisitions will be done and recorded in order to decrease some of the issues we observed.”
A jatropha resurgence?
Despite all these obstacles, some researchers still believe that under the ideal conditions, jatropha could be a valuable biofuel solution – particularly for the difficult-to-decarbonize transport sector “responsible for roughly one quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.”
“I believe jatropha has some potential, however it requires to be the ideal material, grown in the best place, and so on,” Muys stated.
Mohammad Alherbawi, a postdoctoral research fellow at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University, continues holding out hope for jatropha. He sees it as a method that Qatar might lower airline carbon emissions. According to his estimates, its use as a jet fuel might lead to about a 40% reduction of “cradle to tomb” emissions.
Alherbawi’s group is conducting ongoing field studies to improve jatropha yields by fertilizing crops with sewage sludge. As an added benefit, he imagines a jatropha green belt covering 20,000 hectares (nearly 50,000 acres) in Qatar. “The execution of the green belt can truly boost the soil and farming lands, and protect them against any further wear and tear brought on by dust storms,” he says.
But the Qatar job’s success still hinges on lots of factors, not least the ability to obtain quality yields from the tree. Another important step, Alherbawi explains, is scaling up production innovation that utilizes the whole of the jatropha fruit to increase processing effectiveness.
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) working with more than 400 farmers. Subramanian explains that years of research study and development have resulted in ranges of jatropha that can now attain the high yields that were doing not have more than a decade earlier.
“We had the ability to quicken the yield cycle, enhance the yield range and improve the fruit-bearing capacity of the tree,” Subramanian says. In essence, he states, the tree is now domesticated. “Our very first job is to expand our jatropha plantation to 20,000 hectares.”
Biofuels aren’t the only application JOil is taking a look at. The fruit and its byproducts might be a source of fertilizer, bio-candle wax, a charcoal substitute (crucial in Africa where much wood is still burned for cooking), and even bioplastics.
But it is the transportation sector that still beckons as the ideal biofuels application, according to Subramanian. “The biofuels story has actually when again reopened with the energy transition drive for oil companies 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, but he believes that cradle-to-grave greenhouse gas emissions associated with the oily plant will be “competitive … These two aspects – that it is technically suitable, and the carbon sequestration – makes it an extremely strong candidate for adoption for … sustainable air travel,” he says. “We think any such expansion will happen, [by clarifying] the definition of abject land, [enabling] no competition with food crops, nor in any way threatening food security of any nation.”
Where next for jatropha?
Whether can truly be carbon neutral, environmentally friendly and socially responsible depends on intricate elements, including where and how it’s grown – whether, for example, its production model 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 announced its objective to pursue jatropha plantations in the Gran Chaco biome, part of a national biofuels push that has actually stirred dispute over prospective repercussions. The Gran Chaco’s dry forest biome is currently in deep trouble, having been greatly deforested by aggressive agribusiness practices.
Many past plantations in Ghana, warns Ahmed, converted dry savanna forest, which became troublesome for carbon accounting. “The net carbon was frequently negative in the majority of the jatropha websites, due to the fact that the carbon sequestration of jatropha can not be compared to that of a shea tree,” he describes.
Other researchers chronicle the “potential of Jatropha curcas as an ecologically benign biodiesel feedstock” in Malaysia, Indonesia and India. But still other scientists stay 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 ends up being so effective, that we will have a great deal of associated land-use modification,” states Daniel Itzamna Avila-Ortega, co-founder of the Mexican Center of Industrial Ecology and a Ph.D. trainee with the Stockholm Resilience Centre; he has carried out research on the possibilities of jatropha contributing to a circular economy in Mexico.
Avila-Ortega cites previous land-use problems associated with expansion of numerous crops, including oil palm, sugarcane and avocado: “Our police is so weak that it can not manage the economic sector doing whatever they want, in terms of creating environmental problems.”
Researchers in Mexico are currently checking out jatropha-based animals feed as an inexpensive and sustainable replacement for grain. Such usages might be well suited to regional contexts, Avila-Ortega agrees, though he stays worried about potential environmental expenses.
He suggests limiting jatropha expansion in Mexico to make it a “crop that conquers land,” growing it just in really poor soils in requirement of restoration. “Jatropha might be one of those plants that can grow in very sterile wastelands,” he describes. “That’s the only way I would ever promote it in Mexico – as part of a forest healing method for wastelands. Otherwise, the involved problems are higher than the possible benefits.”
Jatropha’s global future stays unpredictable. And its potential as a tool in the fight against environment modification can only be unlocked, state many specialists, by avoiding the list of troubles related to its first boom.
Will jatropha tasks that sputtered to a halt in the early 2000s be fired back up once again? Subramanian believes its function as a sustainable biofuel is “imminent” which the comeback is on. “We have strong interest from the energy market now,” he states, “to team up 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 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
A liquid biofuels guide: Carbon-cutting hopes vs. real-world effects
Citations:
Wahl, N., Hildebrandt, T., Moser, C., Lüdeke-Freund, F., Averdunk, K., Bailis, R., … Zelt, T. (2012 ). Insights into jatropha projects worldwide – Key realities & figures from a global study. Centre for Sustainability Management (CSM), Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. doi:10.2139/ ssrn.2254823
Romijn, H., Heijnen, S., Colthoff, J. R., De Jong, B., & Van Eijck, J. (2014 ). Economic and social sustainability efficiency of jatropha jobs: Arise from field surveys in Mozambique, Tanzania and Mali. Sustainability, 6( 9 ), 6203-6235. doi:10.3390/ su6096203
Trebbin, A. (2021 ). Land getting and jatropha in India: An analysis of ‘hyped’ discourse on the subject. Land, 10( 10 ), 1063. doi:10.3390/ land10101063
Van Eijck, J., Romijn, H., Balkema, A., & Faaij, A. (2014 ). Global experience with jatropha cultivation for bioenergy: An assessment of socio-economic and ecological elements. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 32, 869-889. doi:10.1016/ j.rser.2014.01.028
Skutsch, M., De los Rios, E., Solis, S., Riegelhaupt, E., Hinojosa, D., Gerfert, S., … Masera, O. (2011 ). Jatropha in Mexico: ecological and social effects of an incipient biofuel program. Ecology and Society, 16( 4 ). doi:10.5751/ ES-04448-160411
Gmünder, S., Singh, R., Pfister, S., Adheloya, A., & Zah, R. (2012 ). Environmental impacts of Jatropha curcas biodiesel in India. Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, 2012. doi:10.1155/ 2012/623070
Ahmed, A., Jarzebski, M. P., & Gasparatos, A. (2018 ). Using the community service technique to determine whether jatropha projects were found in minimal lands in Ghana: Implications for website choice. Biomass and Bioenergy, 114, 112-124. doi:10.1016/ j.biombioe.2017.07.020
Achten, W. M., Sharma, N., Muys, B., Mathijs, E., & Vantomme, P. (2014 ). Opportunities and constraints of promoting new tree crops – Lessons gained from jatropha. Sustainability, 6( 6 ), 3213-3231. doi:10.3390/ su6063213
Alherbawi, M., McKay, G., Govindan, R., Haji, M., & Al-Ansari, T. (2022 ). A novel approach on the delineation of a multipurpose energy-greenbelt to produce biofuel and combat desertification in deserts. Journal of Environmental Management, 323, 116223. doi:10.1016/ j.jenvman.2022.116223
Riayatsyah, T. M. I., Sebayang, A. H., Silitonga, A. S., Padli, Y., Fattah, I. M. R., Kusumo, F., … Mahlia, T. M. I. (2022 ). Current development of Jatropha curcas commoditisation as biodiesel feedstock: A detailed review. Frontiers in Energy Research, 9, 1019. doi:10.3389/ fenrg.2021.815416
Mokhtar, E. S., Akhir, N. M., Zaki, N. A. M., Muharam, F. M., Pradhan, B., & Lay, U. S. (2021 ). Land suitability for potential jatropha plantation in Malaysia. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 620( 1 ), 012002. doi:10.1088/ 1755-1315/620/ 1/012002
Chamola, R., Kumar, N., & Jain, S. (2022 ). Jatropha: A sustainable source of transport fuel in India. In Advancement in Materials, Manufacturing and Energy Engineering, Vol. II: Select Proceedings of ICAMME 2021 (pp. 395-408). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore. doi:10.1007/ 978-981-16-8341-1_32
Peralta, H., Avila-Ortega, D. I., & García-Flores, J. C. (2022 ). Jatropha farm: A circular economy proposal for the non-toxic physic nut crop in Mexico. Environmental Sciences Proceedings, 15( 1 ), 10. doi:10.3390/ environsciproc2022015010
Hao, M., Qian, Y., Xie, X., Chen, S., Ding, F., & Ma, T. (2022 ). Global limited land accessibility of Jatropha curcas L.-based biodiesel advancement. Journal of Cleaner Production, 364, 132655. doi:10.1016/ j.jclepro.2022.132655
FEEDBACK: Use this kind to send a message to the author of this post. If you wish to publish a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
