The Oil Drum

29 comments on Jatropha Footnote

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kdolliso on April 20, 2008 - 1:07pm

We have a similar plant that grows wild all over the South called the Chinese Tallow Tree. It could, conceivably, churn out about 600 gallons of biodiesel, and about 500 gallons of cellulosic ethanol per acre. It's advantage is that it grows for about 90 years. It's disadvantage is once it's roots get into a farmer's field it's a real chore to get out. If algae doesn't go anywhere we might take a look at that in a few years.

The trick with all of these oilseed bushes, trees, etc is the human labor involved. We will, eventually, have to invent the equivalent of the mechanical cotton-picker. Once we have mechanized harvesting, I can't imagine that it would cost anywhere near $8.00/gallon to produce jatropha oil.

Knowing what I was like when I was in business, I can't help but suspect that our friend might just be doing a little poor-mouthing. I don't mean this in any way as an insult. It's just what I would have done to steer people away from competing with me. Anyway, we'll see. India's a twitchy place to do business with lot's of government interference. I seriously do wish him a lot of luck. Every little bit helps.

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memmel on April 20, 2008 - 2:30pm

I've been able to repeatedly come up with a maximum price for reduced organic liquid fuels of around 15-20 dollars a gallon using a number of approaches. I'd suspect your 8 dollars a gallon probably fits in this range once you include other costs and renewable power requirements.

The only reasons prices would go over that is because of limited supply not any intrinsic cost problem. You do have a feedback problem to some extent. I.e if supply is limited and prices went to 30 dollars a gallon then you would have increased production costs. But to a large extent with a bit of vertical integration the farmer need not pay the supply premium for fuel used in farming.

Although for our current lifestyle these numbers may sound scary. We are not out of fossil fuels and they can supplement organic fuels for some time. This would lower the costs vs a pure renewable organic solution.

So the bottom line is it seems that we have a real top to costs thats inline with supply for PRUDENT use of organic liquid fuels where substitution is not viable.

In my opinion this is probably airplanes, heavy equipment in remote areas, moving goods in the more remote regions etc.

On the organic fuel side solid oxide fuel cells are a viable solution that can be refined to power larger equipment. This would fit well with all electric solutions that use solid oxide stacks when grid power is not available.

The nice thing about the fuel cells is they have better efficiency. And of course at these pricing levels efficiency will become important. Also of course by simply extending the time scales and using PV/Wind you can probably limit usage even more.

Although a different world from what we have today it seems that viable renewable use of organic liquid fuels is possible and a beneficial to society.