< The FAO/IFAD report recommends short-term research focused on producing superior clonal plants, with longer-term work on developing improved varieties with reliable trait expression and a seed production system that ensures farmer have access to productive and reliable planting materials. >

Sounds eminently sensible. But for a plant with such promising biofuel potential, surely this is happening. Why on earth wouldn’t it be?

Some big company or organisation stands to reap huge profits. So surely the motivation is there for this urgent research to proceed, um ….urgently!

In this day and age, it surely wouldn’t take too long at all to develop the best strain of plants and get them out there and productive.

http://www.heatingoil.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/jatropha_curcas.jpg

http://www.tesagriculture.com/images/jatropha_lifecycle.jpg

The big trouble is land, this sort of crop will take vast amount of land and water to be of any value.
There's a lot of persistence to go with algae production yet, which makes a lot of cense, even hobby farms could harvest algae to be onsold to oil producers. Algae is up too 60% oil and needs very little to grow.

Careful there Ludwig, you're starting to look as naive as an ABC science presenter.

What's this one? Probably the millionth "miracle" plant discovered by some academic biologists who went for a walk in an area he didn't understand. Of course he had his head in the clouds, as he looked at the ground.

He found a seed with an oil content. Publish or perish kicked in, & he sent a press release to one of the clowns who run science shows at public broadcasters, like our ABC. These greenie fools can turn a nonevent into earth shattering news in seconds.

Now we have hundreds of poor folk, who can't afford it, investing in this fairy tale. So people going hungry because they believed the BS of an academic, who had a need to publish.

It makes me sick. No wonder university is becoming a dirty word.

I suspect there is a practical limit to how much fuel can be made from fats and oils (triglycerides) of plant and animal origin. The successful plant oils like canola, cottonseed, soy and palm oil all have professional farmers using strong chemicals and large cultivation machines. Interestingly those machines seem to run mostly on petroleum diesel so that the biodiesel purchaser is somewhere else (probably the city) trying make some kind of statement.

Jatropha and algae as sources of fatty oil seem even more limited. Ditto chicken fat and tallow. In Finland these fats are boosted with hydrogen from natural gas but I'd guess they still earn greenie points with the authorities, again needing to make a statement. In Tasmania some trendy government departments were going to run vehicles on biodiesel made from poppyseed oil, a leftover from opium harvesting. I heard it cost $9 a litre to make so that's some statement.

I think the answer to Third World fuel self sufficiency must lie elsewhere. Perhaps compressed biomethane made from wastes and weeds. It won't be enough but neither is jatropha oil or biodiesel.

Haz, methinks you are taking on a very polarised position. Yes there are dangers in over-promoting plants with some potential and making them out to be something that they are not. And yes we've got to be a bit careful of academics, just as we do of economists, businessmen and politicians.

But of course, there is an enormous danger in doing nothing and not striving to develop potential biofuel sources.

We should be doing everything we can to explore and develop alternative energy sources to fossil fuels, shouldn’t we?

And with a plant like Jatropha, which is widely grown already for other purposes and with a projected rapid expansion of its use, it sounds like a very good one to be putting a whole lot of effort into.

An oil crop has got to be separated from the earth, that is needed for food production.
An oil crop that is free flowing, grows day and nite, costs little to nothing to gro, sun dries, can be stored in a dry state, 65% dried weight is vegy oil, easy to handle, if you don't do the job today do it tomorrow, so wats hard about that.