Can Botanical Tweaking Turn Jatropha Into a Biofuel Wonder Plant?

Discover | Environment | Alternative Energy
by Eliza Strickland
published online July 21, 2009

One company sets out to domesticate the wild, oil-producing weed.


Jatropha, however, has a much shorter generation time. "From the time you plant a seed to the time it grows, matures, blossoms, flowers and produces a seed, it’s about nine months," Schmidt says. With such a quick turn-around, SG Biofuels says they expect to increase the oil yields of the scrubby jatropha trees by 50 to 100 percent in the next few years. Genetic engineering is also expected to augment traits, but that work is only beginning; another startup company, Synthetic Genomics, just announced in May that it had sequenced the jatropha genome.

But domestication won't just bring jatropha plants bedecked with plump, oil-rich seeds, according to some environmental groups—it will also bring new economic pressures that could trump the plant's environmental benefits. Currently, jatropha operations are "better than palm oil plantations in Malaysia where apes are going extinct," says Kate McMahon, an energy policy expert with Friends of the Earth, because virgin forests needn't be chopped down to establish jatropha farms.. "But just because it's better in the small-scale way in which it's being grown now doesn't mean it will always be grown that way. Every time you domesticate and industrialize crop production, there will be other impacts," she says.

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