Information on jatropha and aviation

Some information on jatropha and aviation:

"Jatropha-fuelled plane touches down after successful test flight"

by Alok Jha, green technology correspondent

Guardian 30.12.2008 

The search for an environmentally friendly fuel for airplanes took a leap forward today with the world's first flight powered by a second-generation biofuel, derived from plants that do not compete with food crops.

An Air New Zealand jumbo jet left Auckland just before midnight GMT with a 50-50 mix of jet fuel and oil from jatropha trees in one of its four engines. The two-hour test flight, which took the Boeing 747 over the Hauraki Gulf, showed that the jatropha biofuel was suitable for use in airplanes without the need for any modifications of the engines. It forms part of the airline's plan to source 10% of its fuel from sustainable sources by 2013.

"At an emotional level, it was an exciting day today," said Air New Zealand's chief pilot, David Morgan, who was on the test flight. "We achieved everything we wanted to achieve and it as a significant milestone for the aviation industry, doing the very first jatropha-fuelled flight. We're thrilled."

The flight was completed as the US airline Continental announced its own plans to test second-generation biofuels: next week it will fly a plane over the Gulf of Mexico with fuel derived from algae.

Air travel contributes 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and is one of the fastest rising contributors to climate change, but the search for a greener alternative to kerosene jet fuel has been problematic. Airlines cannot use standard first-generation biofuels such as ethanol because these would freeze at high altitude. In addition, environmentalists argue that manufacturing biofuels can produce more emissions than they absorb when growing, and can also displace agricultural crops and push up the price of food.

Air New Zealand's biofuel was made from jatropha nuts, which are up to 40% oil, harvested from trees grown on marginal land in India, Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania. The fuel was pre-tested to show that it was suitable for airplanes, freezing at -47C and burning at 38C.

The flight included a series of tests to assess how the biofuel-powered engine operated compared to the ones running on kerosene at different speeds and at different stages of a normal flight. "The flight was notable for the lack of any surprises – everything ran normally and as expected," said Morgan. "The fuel was indistinguishable from jet A1, a true drop-in fuel. You could not see a difference in the four engines."

Continental's forthcoming demonstration flight will use a mixture of jatropha-derived biofuel and fuel made from algae, supplied by the San Diego company Sapphire Energy, seen as leaders in the search to make useful oil from micro-organisms. In the first commercial test flight of biofuels in the US, one of the engines on a Boeing 737-800 will be filled with a 50-50 mix of biofuel and traditional jet fuel.

"One of the reasons we chose algae and jatropha is that both are not food sources and can be grown in arid regions and virtually anywhere," said Leah Rayne, managing director of global affairs at Continental. "So they do not compete with food crops for water."

She added that, although the jatropha and algae fuels did not require any modifications to current aircraft engines, it would take several years of test flights for the biofuels to be certified for general use by airlines.

Robin Oakley, head of Greenpeace UK's climate change campaign, warned against overinterpreting the results of the test flights. When Air New Zealand announced its biofuel plans in November, he said: "We need a dose of realism here, because this test flight does not mean an end to the use of kerosene in jet engines. The amount of jatropha that would be needed to power the world's entire aviation sector cannot be produced in anything like a sustainable way, and even if large volumes could be grown, planes are an incredibly wasteful way of using it." Environmentalists argue that curbing flights is the only true solution.

The Air New Zealand and Continental planes are not the first to use biofuels: in February, Virgin Atlantic successfully tried a mixture of 80% jet fuel and 20% biofuel - made from coconut oil and babassu palm oil - in one engine of a Boeing 747 on a flight between London and Amsterdam.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/30/biofuel-test-plane

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Guardian letters    2.1.2009

Greenpeace is right to express reservations about the prospect of biofuels (of whatever nature) making a significant contribution to air transport (Report, 31 December). The land area that would be needed would be immense. Despite claims to the contrary, biofuels consume about as much energy to produce as they yield when they are burned. It is therefore also disingenuous to suppose that non-food crops are without impact on world food supplies.
David Alan Walker
Emeritus professor of photosynthesis, University of Sheffield

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/jan/02/4

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Guardian letters   1.1.2009

Bumpy take-off for aviation biofuel

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/01/avaition-biofuel-letter

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Quote by Philippine agricultural scientists:

" First, jatropha can grow in marginal soils but growth and yield will also be slow and marginal or low. There is a saying “you cannot get something from nothing!”  Second, for us agriculturists, there is no land, which is unfit for food-crop cultivation. Where jatropha grows, mangoes, cashew, siniguelas, duhat, jackfruit, bignay and many other tropical fruits will grow. Moreover, cassava, sweet potato and many legumes will also grow.Third, jatropha can survive dry weather but it will shed off leaves as an adaptive measure, to avoid dying due to excessive loss of water. But then, there is no growth and no fruit set. It will resume growth once the soil is moist again.Fourth, jatropha grows well under a favorable environment (high soil fertility, adequate moisture and weed management during its early years of growth). But using these lands will compete with lands grown to food security crops, which the proponents try to avoid. What are the latest observations? Fertilized jatropha plants grow well when irrigated but they become vegetative. This means that they do not yield the quantity of fruits that we expect."

This is part of a long article by Professors Ted Mendoza, Oscar Zamora and Joven Lales are on the Faculty of Crop Science, College of Agriculture, University of the Philippines in Los Baños, Laguna   at:

 http://opinion. inquirer. net/inquireropin ion/talkofthetow n/view_article. php?article_ id=87461 

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From the "Petroleum Conservation Research Association"  (India)

Jatropha is a drought resistant perennial growing shrub, non demanding, tolerant to extremes, suitable to tropical and non tropical climate and considerable climatic changes, even upto light frost. It grows considerably easily and lives producing seeds for nearly 50 years.
 
 
The overall advantage of the system is that all the processing procedure and the added value can be kept within the rural area or even within one village. No centralized processing is required.

BASIC FACTS:

- A seedling will start yielding seeds after a year of its plantation
- It is planted 2m x 2m and 2500 plants can be grown in 1 hectare
- 20 % of the plants transferred from a nursery would need to be replaced taking into account the usual rate of mortality of plantations
- Seeds have an oil content of 37%
- One esterification plant is required for 1000 ha Jatropha
- Jatropha Oil can be combusted as fuel without being refined.
- It burns with clear smoke free flame
- Tested successfully as fuel for simple diesel engine
- Jatropha can survive with minimum inputs and propagates easily
- Flowering occurs during the wet season and two flowering peaks are generally seen. The seeds mature about three months after flowering.
- Oil extraction is almost 91%
- 1.05 Kg of oil is required to produce 1 kg of biodiesel

EXPECTED YIELDS:
- 10 million hectares of waste land: 15 million tones of seeds yield (1.5 Tons/ Hectare) => 4.0 million tons of oil

OTHER POSSIBLE USES
 
In Industries for tanning, Candle making, soap manufacture, Chemical Industry as varnish, Cosmetic Industry for different types of non-edible oils, Fertilizer, Herbal applications.
 
 
Advantages of Jatropha:

Oil yield per hectare is among the highest of tree borne oil seeds. Seed production ranges from about 0.4 tons per hectare per year to over 12 t/ha. There are reports of getting oil yield as high as 50% from the seed.
It can be grown in areas of low rainfall (200mm per year ), on low fertility marginal, fallow, waste and other lands such as along the canals, road railway tracks, on borders of farmer’s field as boundary fence/ hedge in the arid / semiarid areas and even on alkaline soils.
Jatropha is easy to be established in nurseries, grows relatively quickly and is hardy.
Jatropha seeds are easy to collect as they are ready to be plucked before the rainy season and as the plants are not very tall.
Being rich in nitrogen, the seed cake is an excellent sources of plant nutrients.

http://www.pcra-biofuels.org/jatropha.htm

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From Carbon Commentary:

Thursday 13 November 2008 in Newsletter #11 by Chris Goodall | 2 comments

Alok Jha of the Guardian wrote about Air New Zealand’s trial of jet fuel based on jatropha berries here. This note looks at the percentage of the world’s land area that would have to be devoted to the crop in order to provide for the total needs of aviation, an industry that uses about 5% of the world’s oil.

Background
Jatropha is a medium-sized tropical shrub that will grow on a wide variety of soils including saline degraded land. Its berries contain about 40% oil which can be used as a potential substitute for both diesel and kerosene. Its proponents claim that because it will grow on poor tropical soil and can tolerate drought and some frost it will not drive food crops off productive land.

Opponents of jatropha point to production data from field trials which show that although the mature shrub will yield 2 tonnes per hectare on poor soils it will give up to 12.5 tonnes in better conditions and where water and fertiliser are applied. Their contention is that this yield difference will mean that large-scale farming of jatropha will inevitably gravitate to good land on which food would otherwise be grown.

How much land would be required to provide enough jatropha oil for the world’s aviation fleet, if it is grown on poor quality land?

- Total demand for aviation kerosene - About 240 million tonnes per year (extrapolated from OECD use)
- Jatropha berry yield   - 2 tonnes per hectare  (estimates from 0.4  to 12.5 tonnes)
- Oil content  - 40%  (could be a little lower or higher)
- Processing losses (estimate)   -  15%
- Therefore, Kerosene replacement per hectare  -  0.68 tonnes

- Number of hectares needed to replace kerosene  -  About 350 million hectares

- Percentages of world land area  
     Percentage of all land area  - About 2.5%
     Percentage of all arable land  - About 18%
     Percentage of all pastoral land - About 9%

So it is conceivably possible to grow enough jatropha to provide all the world’s needs for aviation fuel. It would require the berry to be grown on about 2.5% of all the globe’s land area. About 13% of the world’s area currently grows crops and if jatropha were grown on this land, it would use almost one fifth of total arable land. (Typical unirrigated yields would probably be substantially higher – perhaps 4 tonnes per hectare – so this calculation is somewhat unfair. The percentage of arable land used might be lower than 10%.)

Aviation fuel uses about 5% of the world’s oil so to replace the world’s entire demand for crude would require almost all the world’s non-desert land to be devoted to this single crop. This is not surprising – the energy we use from oil each day is about twenty times the energy we use from food. So if we grow oil instead of food, we would need twenty times as much land.

http://www.carboncommentary.com/2008/11/13/175/comment-page-1#comment-1377

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Greenpeace comment:

Hi Quentin  (Sept 2008)

We’re pretty much agreed on the devastating impacts biofuels can have – which is why we don’t support the 10% biofuels target (even the government has serious concerns about that one).

Given the rapacious demand of the aviation industry for fuel, it’s pretty unlikely that there is a sustainable biofuel out there for the sector which can meaningfully contribute to emissions reductions. Whichever biofuel the industry leaps on as an apparently easy way to reduce emissions is likely to have a huge environmental impact if used at scale.

(See the August New Scientist, which put the amount of productive area needed to replace the 2007 consumption of jet fuel - 238 million tones - at about the area of Ireland for biofuel from algae, three times the area of Germany for biofuel from biomass or around twice the size of France for biofuel derived from Jatropha...).

Technological / efficiency improvements are unlikely to alter the upward trend in emissions either; aviation is predicted to grow at such an exponential rate that efficiency improvements or alternative fuels just won’t be able to make any significant savings.

Because there are no sustainable low-carbon fuels available for aviation, the industry has been lobbying to get aviation removed from many emissions reductions targets and climate treaties (the climate change bill and international climate treaties, for example). Whichever way you look at it though, the reality is that aviation just needs to stop growing, which is why we campaign to stop expansion and cap flights at their current levels.

On the renewables directive, the target includes all sectors. Because there’s no realistic option for sustainable fuel for aviation, other sectors will need to pick up the slack and increase the proportion of renewables in their sectors - especially the electricity generating sector, which could practically and economically produce vastly more than it does now from renewables by 2020. (The government’s renewable energy strategy consultation assumes renewables will contribute 32 per cent, but in this recent analysis (pdf) we see if offering more like 40 per cent of the electricity generating sector by 2020).

If aviation was removed from the target though, it would be a disaster – as I write in the blog. A precedent will be set where other member states could come to plead their own special circumstances, asking for the removal of whichever industry is the most polluting in their own countries.

Keeping it in the target reflects the urgent need to find solutions where they can sustainably and safely be found, and that where those solutions aren’t forthcoming, that the industry in question has to start limiting its own growth.

To summarise, the best thing your industry can do to tackle climate change is to stop growing. Other sectors – where realistic renewable options are available – need to ramp up the contribution of renewables.

Cheers,

Bex
gpuk

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/uk-tries-sabotage-eu-renewables-deal-again-20080926

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Boeing to test biofuel on Air New Zealand flight - Aviation company to test biofuel next month using oil from jatropha trees

Guardian   13.11.2008

(20th June 2009)

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