A new type of biofuel

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Yossi and the beanstalk
By SAM SER

Shlomi Jonas and Doron Levi are serious about a plant with a funny name. That's because jatropha, an otherwise puzzling and forgettable plant, may be the key to one of the most important alternatives to fossil fuels in the coming years - and because Jonas's and Levi's company, Galten, is at the forefront of making it so.

A castor bean plant field near Beit Dagan. The bean can produce about 100 kilograms of oil per dunam per year.
Photo: Courtesy
Jatropha is a long-overlooked plant that has recently begun receiving loads of attention. The seeds of the leafy green tree are rich in oil that can be used to make biodiesel, a "green" fuel which offers several benefits over other alternative fuels that are currently popular.

It's a perennial plant that can start producing oil in its second year of growth, and will continue to be productive for more than 30 years. It's so tough that it can survive up to three years of consecutive drought, and so versatile that its byproducts can be used to make soap, mulch, herbal medicines and more.

Galten is cultivating jatropha on some 200,000 hectares in Ghana, betting on the plant's ability to supply barrel upon barrel of one of the hottest new fuels in the world today.

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"We are planting oil wells," says Jonas. "It's as simple as that."

On the other hand, maybe the prophet Jonah was onto something. He may have wept over the "kikayon" - that is, the castor bean plant - because of the loss of the shade it provided him. But today the humble, inedible plant is receiving high praise for its biodiesel potential. Castor bean seeds contain as much as 54 percent oil by weight, much higher than most plants currently used for biodiesel. In fact, castor bean produces about three times as much oil per hectare as soy bean, one of the most popular biofuel crops.

"It's one of the most productive plants, in terms of oil produced per unit of land farmed," notes Dr. Oren Ostersetzer-Biran. He is leading a research team at the Agriculture Ministry's Volcani Center that is working to breed castor bean plants for optimum growth and production.

Both jatropha and castor bean are relatively new candidates for farming, so their growth characteristics are still being developed.

"The castor bean plant was cultivated for a short while in the '60s, but then it was pretty much abandoned thereafter," says Ostersetzer-Biran. "So we're really starting off from zero."

Already, he says, castor bean can produce about 100 kilograms of oil per dunam per year. His team's experiments in the fields in Beit Dagan, outside Rishon Lezion, will soon double that, he says.

Here's an example of how they're accomplishing that: In nature, the plant's seed sacs pop open so the seeds can scatter. It's an evolutionary development that helps the plant survive and spread. In terms of industrial production, though, it's counterproductive for efforts to collect the oil-rich seeds. So the Volcani researchers are breeding castor plants in which that genetic trait is suppressed. Likewise, they are developing plants that grow a larger number of seeds, in closer bunches, than the wild natural variety, whose home habitats include Israeli roadsides and neglected lots. All these things together, the researchers hope, will make the harvesting of castor bean seeds easier, faster and more lucrative.

A similar process is at play with Galten's jatropha plants, with a castor oil biodiesel venture in Namibia run by three other Israeli companies working in cooperation and with a number of other oil-rich plants in labs and fields around the world. There's a race, then, to see who can breed the most productive plants the fastest. Galten and the Volcani researchers believe they are several steps ahead of their competitors in making that happen.

THE SEARCH for alternatives to petroleum springs mainly from two concerns: the impact of carbon emissions from the use of fossil fuels, blamed for global warming in the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007, and most countries' unsettling dependence on fossil fuels for energy. A recent EU study found that biofuels lead to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and that this benefit will only improve as the fuels continue to develop.

But getting in on the biofuels boom is about more than lowering carbon emissions and diversifying energy sources. It is "green" in the business sense, too.

Recent legislation in Europe and the US mandates increased biofuels consumption, which means a guaranteed market. In 2003, the EU set a goal for biofuels use of 5.75% of total consumption by the end of 2010, and even higher afterward. In America, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandates biofuels consumption of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012.

Even if those targets are not ultimately met - and at the current rate of implementation, they will not be - they will at least have provided a significant push to the biofuels industry. In fact, they already have. If a company were to target just commercial trucking and municipal buses in the US, for example, it would be looking at a market that has jumped in the past few years to more than 1 billion gallons annually. And with the world biodiesel market averaging roughly 40% annual growth, global consumption is estimated to exceed 40 billion gallons within the next decade.

In addition to trucking and personal automobiles, in the next few years trains, aircraft and home heaters are also likely to enter the picture as biodiesel applications, each with tremendous business potential.

So, there is definitely a market. But can it be profitable? Absolutely, insiders say.

"Most people make the mistake of assuming that petroleum has to be a certain price for us to make money. They're wrong," says Galten's Levi. "If a company in Europe has to buy biodiesel because of the EU mandate to do so, then our oil is not in competition with petroleum, it's in competition with other biodiesels. When we went ahead with our plans to produce oil from jatropha, oil was at $50 a barrel. Since then it has gone up and come back down, but it doesn't really matter. The factors that make biodiesel profitable have to do with the costs of production, not the price of petroleum."