Feel-good biofuel not all it's cracked up to be? Questions arising about
jatropha tree

Earlier this year, Time magazine ran a story on Florida entrepreneur Paul
Dalton's new business growing jatropha trees, and the headline said, "The Next
Big Biofuel?"

What made jatropha's biofuel seem promising, the story noted is that "unlike
corn and other biofuel sources, the jatropha doesn't have to compete with food
crops for arable land. Even in the worst of soils, it grows like weeds."

Well...not exactly, according to the latest issue of the Yale School of
Forestry's newsletter "Yale Environment 360," which reports that Robert Bailis,
an assistant professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies,
along with Yale Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Baka, recently launched the first
detailed “life cycle” environment assessment of jatropha as a biofuel.

"Although their study is in its early stages, Bailis notes that it’s already
clear that, while jatropha can indeed grow on lands with minimal water and poor
nutrition, 'if you plant trees in a marginal area, and all they do is just not
die, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get a lot of oil from them,' " the
story reports.

If you grow it in good farmland, though, it does just fine. But that's not good
news. “If you grow it in better agricultural conditions, all the alarm bells
go off as you get into the same food-versus-fuel debate we’ve seen with
[biofuel from] corn," Bailis told the newsletter.

It's no idle concern, either. "According to the Indian environmental group,
Navdanya, government foresters have drained rice paddies in order to plant
jatropha in the poor and mostly tribal state of Chhattisgarh," the Yale
newsletter reports. "As early as mid-2007, protests broke out in the mostly
desert state of Rajasthan over a government scheme to reclassify village commons
lands �" widely used for grazing livestock �" as 'wastelands' targeted for
biofuel production, primarily jatropha."

Meanwhile, on the Philippine island of Mindanao, "protests erupted in late 2008,
with indigenous leaders insisting that jatropha plantations had begun to
displace needed crops of rice, corn, bananas, and root vegetables."

This all hits home for the Tampa Bay area, incidentally, because last year a
Dallas company called GreenHunter Energy announced it would invest up to
$100-million in a biodiesel plant and terminal at Tampa's Port Sutton terminal
to produce 50-million gallons a year from biofuel -- including from jatropha
plantations in Central and South America.

[Associated Press photo of jatropha tree]

--Craig Pittman

http://blogs.tampabay.com/energy/2009/05/feelgood-biofuel-not-all-its-cracked-up\
-to-be-questions-arising-about-jatropha-tree.html