Jet Fuel by the Acre
Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times
Robert Schmidt, left, SGB’s
chief scientist; Eric Mathur, chief technologist; and Kirk Haney, chief
executive, with a jatropha bush.
By TODD WOODY
Published: December 24, 2013
SAN DIEGO — In an unmarked greenhouse, leafy bushes carpet an acre of
land here tucked into the suburban sprawl of Southern California. The
seeds of the inedible, drought-resistant plants, called jatropha,
produce a prize: high-quality oil that can be refined into low-carbon
jet fuel or diesel fuel.
Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times
Jatropha seeds burn easily because of their high oil content.
The mere existence of the bushes is an achievement.
Hailed about six years ago as the next big thing in biofuels, jatropha
attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, only to fall
from favor as the recession set in and as growers discovered that the
wild bush yielded too few seeds to produce enough petroleum to be
profitable.
But SGB, the biofuels company that planted the bushes, pressed on.
Thanks to advances in molecular genetics and DNA sequencing technology,
the San Diego start-up has, in a few years, succeeded in domesticating
jatropha, a process that once took decades.
SGB is growing hybrid strains of the plant that produce biofuel in
quantities that it says are competitive with petroleum priced at $99 a
barrel. Oil is around $100 a barrel.
Call it, as SGB does, Jatropha 2.0.
The company has deals to plant 250,000 acres of jatropha in Brazil,
India and other countries expected to eventually produce about 70
million gallons of fuel a year. That has attracted the interest of
energy giants, airlines and other multinational companies seeking
alternatives to fossil fuels. They see jatropha as a hedge against
spikes in petroleum prices and as a way to comply with government
mandates that require the use of low-carbon fuels.
“It is one of the few biofuels that I think has the potential to supply a
large fraction of the aviation fuel currently used today,” said Jim
Rekoske, vice president for renewable energy and chemicals at Honeywell,
who has visited the company’s jatropha plantations in Central America.
Mr. Rekoske and biofuel analysts say SGB’s biggest challenge will be to
replicate the yields it generates in the greenhouse on a commercial
scale.
“Given that this crop has somewhat of a checkered past, ultimately
getting growers to plant the crop is going to be the key hurdle,” says
Michael Cox, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
At the greenhouse, the fruits of SGB’s technology are apparent. A
typical wild jatropha bush will produce a cluster of six to eight
seed-bearing fruits, according to Robert Schmidt, a specialist in corn
genetics who is SGB’s chief scientist. He picked up a grapefruit-size
cluster growing on a hybrid jatropha plant and counted 37 fruits. “We
have examples in Guatemala where we have 60 fruits in a cluster,” Dr.
Schmidt said.
SGB’s success at improving jatropha seed yields by as much as 900
percent persuaded a consortium that includes Airbus, BP and the
Inter-American Development Bank to sign a deal with the company to plant
75,000 acres of jatropha in Brazil. The consortium, called JetBio, aims
to develop sources of biofuel for the airline industry as the European
Union, Australia and other countries impose caps on aviation carbon
emissions.
“The demand is huge — every single airline would like to be flying on
biofuel today,” Rafael Davidsohn Abud, JetBio’s managing partner, said
in an email.
Jatropha’s value as a cash crop, though, may pale compared with a
potential genetic gold mine SGB has begun to discover, identifying
traits, for instance, that make certain strains of the plant resistant
to extreme heat or cold.
“If you figure out how to do heat tolerance for corn or soybeans, what
is that trait worth as climate change accelerates?” asked Arama Kukutai,
managing director at Finistere Ventures, a San Diego venture capital
firm that has invested in SGB.
For now, SGB plans to license its technology to energy companies. But
the company is securing patents on its hybridization process, creating a
technology platform that can be deployed to discover genetic traits in
other agricultural crops.
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end quote from:
Jet Fuel by the Acre
Advances
in molecular genetics and DNA sequencing technology have allowed a San
Diego start-up to domesticate jatropha, a plant with seeds that produce
high-quality oil that can be refined into low-carbon ...
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