Jatropha Plant Gains Steam In Global Race for Biofuels

Hardy Shrub Is Tapped For Energy-Rich Seeds; Indian Farmers’ Big Bet

HIRIYUR, India — Until recently, B.K. Nagendrappa didn’t care much at all about jatropha, an ugly wild green shrub that thrives in India. Now, the coconut grower hopes to plant as many as 12 acres of the stuff on his land near Bangalore.

V. Venkateswarao is also raising the plants — on a dried-up stretch of dirt east of Hyderabad. So too is O.P. Singh, a horticulturist for India’s Ministry of Railways, in a quiet garden by an old airport in New Delhi.

“This plant will save humanity, I tell you,” Mr. Singh proclaims, as he points to 4-foot-tall jatropha shrubs nearby. Someday, “every house will have jatropha!”

With oil trading at roughly $70 a barrel, this lowly forest plant is suddenly an unlikely star on the world’s alternative-energy stage.

The seeds from jatropha’s golf-ball-size fruit contain a yellowish liquid similar to palm oil that can be made into biodiesel — an increasingly important renewable fuel used in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.

But unlike other biodiesel crops, jatropha can be grown almost anywhere — including deserts, trash dumps, and rock piles. It doesn’t need much water or fertilizer, and it isn’t edible. That means environmentalists and policy makers don’t have to worry about whether jatropha diverts resources away from crops that could be used to feed people.

These qualities are crucial at a time of intensifying concern over the environmental and social consequences of a global alternative-energy boom. It takes huge quantities of land, water and chemicals to grow crops to make ethanol and biodiesel. And as more governments set targets for their consumption, fears are rising that the world won’t be able to meet the demand without significant environmental damage.

Goldman Sachs recently cited jatropha as one of the best candidates for future biodiesel production. A Bear Stearns analysis last year found that U.S. farmers only have the capacity to replace about 7% of the country’s gasoline with corn-based ethanol, despite a new federal renewable-fuels target of 15% by 2017. To reach that goal, the U.S. would likely have to find a lot more land.

Wall Street Journal