Start-Up Uses Plant Seeds for a Biofuel

Aviation Fuel (Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)), Brazil, Business News/Analysis, Farming/Growing, Feedstock, Feedstocks, Field/Orchard/Plantation Crops/Residues, Guatemala, India, Infrastructure, R & D Focus

December 26, 2013

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by Todd Woody (New York Times) … 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.

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“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.

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For instance, in November SGB signed a deal with the Yulex Corporation to use its molecular breeding technology to increase the yields of guayule, a wild plant harvested as a replacement for petroleum-based rubber.

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Most jatropha bushes are descendants of plants grown on Cape Verde, an archipelago off Africa’s west coast. Cape Verde became the epicenter of jatropha farming 300 years ago, and a single strain of the plant, then valued as living fence to corral livestock, was exported to tropical regions around the globe.

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Following up on Dr. (Bijan) Dehgan’s thesis that Guatemala was a jatropha Eden, Dr. (Robert) Schmidt went to Central America and began analyzing the genetic makeup of the plants there. “It was absolutely spectacular the amount of genetic variation that we collected from the center of origin,” he said.

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SGB’s technology allows its scientists to identify potentially productive hybrids in the laboratory at the molecular level before the plants are crossbred. READ MORE

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