SG Biofuels Expands Jatropha Platform; Confirms $99 Per Barrel Crude Jatropha Oil
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Jatropha 2.0 crude oil costs drops below Brent crude petroleum price
In California, SG Biofuels announced at Advanced Biofuels Markets that it has expanded its global network of hybrid trial and agronomic research sites to 15 with the addition of eight new JMax Knowledge Centers in Guatemala, Brazil and India, and has achieved costs of $99 per barrel or less across three continents.
By comparison, the Brent crude price is averaging $113.02 per barrel this month, according to Oilenergy.com.
Fully loaded costs This cost is “all-in, fully loaded, from buying our seeds, growing, harvest, crush into crude, capex, opex, all of it,” noted SG Biofuels CEO Kirk Haney. “We’ve partnered with energy companies and planted side by side with local material, and seen 200-900 percent yield increases.”
“All the airlines say that crude jatropha oil provides a best-of-breed biojet,” added Haney. “It’s been all about how to get the volume, the yield per acre, and we’ve solved that in a definitive way.
… The additional trials include four locations in India, three in Brazil and one in Guatemala, and are in addition to the company’s existing trials and research centers in each country and at its corporate headquarters in San Diego, California.
JMax Knowledge Centers use experimental design and statistical analysis to evaluate hundreds of hybrids in a range of environmental and agronomic conditions. The centers serve as outdoor classrooms where SGB agronomists and technical teams conduct training and field tours with customers and growers, develop localized agronomic studies and recommendations while advancing the top performing Jatropha hybrids for commercial deployment. SGB’s hybrids have been developed following five years of research, drawing from a diverse germplasm library including more than 12,000 unique genotypes. READ MORE and MORE (Biodiesel Magazine) and MORE (SG Biofuels)
