GM India inks agreement with CSMCRI for Jatropha production

General Motors India has pumped in nearly US$ 0.5 million to obtain biodiesel from Jatropha and test it on its vehicles at CSMCRI. During the first phase trials, GM manufactured vehicle were run over 25,000 kilometres on bio-diesel blended fuel and the content of bio-diesel as fuel ranged between 10-20 per cent during the testing phase. The company is also in the process of setting up phase II of the project, which involves a CSMCRI proposal to conduct experimental jatropha cultivation in small scale trial plantations on a wasteland in Gujarat for biodiesel application as CSR activity, reported PTI. Furthermore, the state govt has already been approached for obtaining 50-70 hectares of wasteland in Panchmahal to commence the Jatropha plantation project.

Jatropha oil is vegetable oil produced from the seeds of the Jatropha curcas, a plant that can grow in wastelands. Jatropha curcas grows almost anywhere, even on gravelly, sandy and saline soils. It can also thrive on the poorest stony soil and grow in the crevices of rocks.According to highly-placed sources, the government of India has set an indicative target for blending 20 per cent in petrol and non-edible oil from plants like Jatropha in diesel by 2017.

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posted by Sudha @ 11:38 PM 0 Comments

Jatropha Investments

Several governments in the region have announced plans for massive planting programs. The Indian government is targeting 13.5 million hectares, or 33.5 million acres, for jatropha cultivation by 2012; in the Philippines, a British firm, NRG Chemical Engineering, has set up a joint venture with the state-owned Philippine National Oil to construct a biodiesel refinery and two ethanol distilleries.

NRG Chemical says that it will invest $600 million in jatropha plantations that will cover over a million hectares, mainly on the islands of Palawan and Mindanao.

Even Myanmar is joining the fray, with the director general of Myanmar's energy planning department being quoted over the summer saying that the country hopes to have 2.8 million hectares of jatropha plantations by the end of next year. The country has already planted 650,000 hectares, according to news reports.

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posted by Sudha @ 8:16 AM 0 Comments

Jatropha Oil for Energy Partners Chile Ltd...

Gold Star Biofuels, a Goldstar Farms Ltd. company based in Ghana, has secured a contract to build small biodiesel production facilities throughout Chile to produce a combined total capacity of 77 MMgy from Chilean jatropha oil for Energy Partners Chile Ltd. A B20 biodiesel blend will be used to produce electricity at Energy Partners Chile’s 43-megawatt power generation facility in Degan on the island of Chiloe.

According to Jack Holden, executive director for Gold Star Biofuels, the company has commitments from farmers in Chile to grow jatropha on 2.5 million acres. “We like to find land where other things don't grow very well or land that has been fallow,” Holden said. He said the biofuels company will set up eight separate refineries in Chile that will each produce more than 100,000 liters (26,400 gallons) of biodiesel per day. Holden said the technology provider will be USFuelTech LLC of Aiken, S.C., which provides turnkey, modular biodiesel refineries.

Gold Star Biofuels plans to begin cultivating jatropha in Chile and within two years will deliver biodiesel to Energy Partners Chile for power generation.

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posted by Sudha @ 9:31 PM 0 Comments

SBI, With D1 Mohan Bio for Jatropha Cultivation

The State Bank of India (Chennai, local headoffice) has signed a memorandum of understanding with D1 Mohan Bio, to finance an estimated Rs 130 crore for jatropha cultivation in Tamil Nadu (excluding Nilgiris) by farmers through contract farming of nearly 1 lakh acres in the first year. The MoU was signed last Saturday in the city by the two organisations.

The farmers will be jointly identified by SBI and D1 Mohan Bio – a joint venture of Chennai-based Mohan Breweries and UK-based D1 Oils. All the farmers who have not defaulted on their loans will be eligible for 90 per cent financing of the cost of cultivation.

Addressing the media after the signing of the MoU, P Chaudhuri, chief general manager of SBI, said “Small farmers and landless labourers will benefit as we shall finance the cultivation. They shall find a ready market for their produce from D1 Mohan Bio. The loans will be realised from the sale of the crop.”

The cost of cultivation is estimated to be Rs 10,760 per acre under dryland conditions and Rs 19,560 per acre under irrigation conditions. Read more info here

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posted by Sudha @ 10:41 PM 0 Comments

Jatropha Investment - Bionor Transformacion plans

Bionor Transformacion plans to invest $200 million in a 247,000-acre jatropha plantation in the Philippines. AME Bioenergy will conduct feasibility studies, pick sites, install infrastructure, and organize labor on behalf of Bionor.

The announcement came at the beginning of a state visit by Philippine President Arroyo to Spain.

Bionor operates biodiesel plants in Spain and Italy with a combined output of 39 Mgy, and ins constructing five more plants in Brazil and Spain with a planned capacity of 254 Mgy.

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posted by Sudha @ 10:32 PM 0 Comments

Investing In Jatropha

Jatropha Africa initial project in Ghana will take approximately 412,000 Metric Tons of CO2 out of the air each year. The technology is simple. Land, water, sunlight, nutrients and CO2 are the inputs. Through photosynthesis, the outputs are oil bearing seeds and oxygen.
We estimate that our machinery working on the farm and logistics, return 20% of the CO2 taken in by the plants, to the atmosphere. So our Ghana plantation will:

• Remove 412,000MT of CO2 out of the air each year
• Provide jobs for over 1000 people in rural communities in Ghana
• Bring into use, land in a semi arid area, which is not suited to food agriculture
• Reduce the use of fuels produced from crude oil

The average 35 Miles per gallon car running 15,000 miles per year uses 428 gallons of Fuel. It is widely accepted that 1 gallon of gasoline creates approximately 20lbs of CO2. Each Jatropha Tree absorbs approximately.006MT (14lbs) of CO2 annually. To have a carbon neutral average car, you would need to plant 580 trees.

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posted by Sudha @ 10:20 PM 0 Comments

Australian Jatropha Company

November 14, 2007 (Biofuel Review) - A new Australian company, Jatoil Limited, formed to invest in the global market for biofuels, has announced an initial public offering to raise up to Aus$10 million ahead of its planned listing on the ASX on 12 December. According to the company it will supply rising international demand for biofuels by both growing and selling low-cost biodiesel feedstock overseas. The company’s main business will be the supply of Jatropha oil.

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posted by Sudha @ 10:18 PM 0 Comments

Jatropha Investments-Tata Group Company

Mumbai: Tata Chemicals Tuesday said it has entered into a joint venture with Singapore-based company JOil for marketing the latter's Jatropha seedlings in India and East Africa.

JOil is a Jatropha seedling company and has been set up by the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) along with some other investors.

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The Tata Group company will be investing 25 million Singapore dollars for a 35 per cent stake in the joint venture over a period of four years.

"We have tied-up with TLL which is into research and development work on Jatropha and are trying to bring some fruits of their technology to India," Tata Chemicals Managing Director Homi R Khusrokhan told reporters.

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posted by Sudha @ 6:40 AM 0 Comments

Jatropha Investments-Bharat Petroleum invests

In India, state oil company Bharat Petroleum announced a $66 million investment in a joint venture with Shapoorji Pallonji and Nandan Biomatrix to produce jatropha-based biodiesel. The company expects to build 10 biodiesel plants within a 10-year period, from jatropha harvested in Uttar Pradesh, with a planned capacity of 300 Mgy.

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posted by Sudha @ 9:21 PM 0 Comments

Global Investment in Jatropha to Produce Biodiesel

Update on Jatropha Curcas: the world’s interest in using this plant to produce biodiesel!

1. United States: California: Allegro Biodiesel has commenced processing of jadtropha oil into biodiesel on a test basis.
2. England, De-Ord Fuel opened a new 100,000 GPY biodiesel facility in Mansfield that will use jatropha and waste vegetable oil as feedstocks.
3. China’s largest state oil company, Sinopec, said it will invest $5 billion in Jatropha and plantations in Indonesia. The Chinese and Italian governments have initiated a feasibility study for Jatropha biodiesel at Sichuan Universtiy. The project received $650,000 in support from Italy. The project is the third signed by Italy and China, promising cooperation in biofuels research since mid-April.
4. Integrated Biodiesel Industries said that it has acquired a 10 percent stake in Ireland’s South Cone Agriculture, a developer of Jatropha plantations. South Cone said that it would use the funds from the investment to develop plantations in Angola, Brazil and Argentina, and will initialize harvesting later this year in its first plantations. IBI, which will have a total production capacity of 135,000 tonnes by the end of 2008 from its plants in Argentina, said that it sought to develop alternative feedstocks to soy oil.
5. In Myanmar, “Biofuel by Decree: Unmasking Burma’s bio-energy fiasco,” was released by the Ethnic Community Development Forum detailing the use of forced labor and land confiscation to plant 8 million acres with jatropha to provide a solution to Myanmar’s fuel crisis. The first national Jatropha crops were ready for harvest this month, with up to 7 million acres planted by small farmers, after a national directive in 2006 that all farmers with more than 1 acre of land had to plant a minimum of 200 Jatropha seeds to establish a hedge around their landholdings.
6. In the United Arab Emirates, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi announced an $15 billion investment project in renewables, managed by Masdar. Masdar’s major initiative in bio-fuels is focused on Jatropha and other arid climate crops.
7. Archer Daniels Midland Company, Bayer Crop Science and Damiler to cooperate in Jatropha biodiesel project.
8. In Zambia, the Omnia group will invest $3 million in jatropha research, saying that the imperative to develop alternative fuels is stronger in landlocked Zambia than neighboring South Africa, and said that the company hopes to understand as much as possible about RH nutrients required by Jatropha so that it can develop and sell better fertilizers if cultivation of jatropha continues to increase in Southern Africa.
9. China Agro-Technology announced that it has secured $300 million in financing for biodiesel acquisitions and operations. The company is focused on building capacity to process jatropha oil to supply the growing demand for lower-cost biodiesel.

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posted by Sudha @ 8:44 PM 0 Comments

Jatropha in India-Hindustan Petroleum Investment

The oily seeds of the bushy plant are used to create biodiesel, and nearly 2.5 million acres have been planted so far in India, one of the world’s largest producers. In fact, it is one of the most popular biodiesel crops around because harvesters can get a large output of oil from the seeds (producing four times as much fuel as soy, and 10 times as much as corn) while needing to put in only minimal care and resources for growth. Hindustan Petroleum and Chhattisgarh Renewable Energy Development Agency plan to boost that by planting about 37,000 more acres on wastelands in India.

Hindustan Petroleum will refine the seeds from the harvest into biodiesel to sell across the state of Chhattisgarh. Jatropha is intriguing for biodiesel production because the plant grows in areas where edible crops fear to tread, so it is supposedly a non-competitor for farm land. But that doesn’t mean a whole lot if farmers can get more for a crop of jatropha seeds than another food crop they typically grow on their land. Additionally, the areas deemed “wastelands” are in fact used by land-right-less rural populations for grazing their herds. So jatropha cultivation – like most crops for biofuel and biodiesel – isn’t necessarily harmless and farming of it will need to be watched and regulated.

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posted by Sudha @ 8:29 PM 0 Comments

Jatropha Investment-BP & D1 Oils, Mission Biofuels...

Widespread interest among alternative energy corporations is leading to large-scale production across the globe; BP and D1 Oils, a UK-based biodiesel producer, recently announced a $160 million, five-year joint venture in development of jatropha as a viable biodiesel feedstock.

Mission Biofuels, an Australian company, owns a 22,000-acre jatropha plantation in Malaysia and has plans for expansion. Eco Solutions, based in Korea, grows jatropha in the Philippines. Jatropha has even emerged in the public sector in China, where the government offers subsidies for growth of jatropha crops in some southern provinces.

BP and D1 have similarly announced plans to plant jatropha in India, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and Central and South America, with an estimated total of one million acres dedicated to its cultivation.

The spread of jatropha production across the globe may have positive implications for developing countries. Not only do jatropha plantations offer the potential for job growth, but jatropha fuel may also supply energy to surrounding populations. Hundreds of villages in Mali are already utilizing jatropha as a major energy resource.

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posted by Sudha @ 8:23 PM 0 Comments

Jatropha Biodiesel Investment

In India, state oil company Bharat Petroleum announced a $66 million investment in a joint venture with Shapoorji Pallonji and Nandan Biomatrix to produce jatropha-based biodiesel. The company expects to build 10 biodiesel plants within a 10-year period, from jatropha harvested in Uttar Pradesh, with a planned capacity of 300 Mgy.

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posted by Sudha @ 1:24 AM 0 Comments