Magic Beans?

It isn't easy, driving green. Sure, ethanol is great stuff. It burns clean, it's renewable, and it works. It even makes race cars go very fast. But it's not perfect.

Ethanol is made from corn (that's maize to my best beloved readers east of Cape Cod). That's fine if all you want to do is use it to power your car, but not so great if you need it to live. Could ethanol become to Mexico what potato blight was to Ireland? Probably not, but perhaps we could tap the brakes a bit just to be sure.

If only there was some alternative. Imagine a plant that grows beans that can easily be converted to biodiesel. The conversion is so simple that even poor farmers can afford to do it. Imagine that diesel engines would need only a slight modification to use this new fuel. Suppose then that the bean is not a food and that the plant had previously been considered a weed -- a weed so hearty that you can harvest its beans over and over again. A weed that can grow in the poorest soil, soil that would not be suitable for any food crop. What do you suppose this miracle plant would look like?


Something like this, actually. Behold, jatropha.

According to today's Christian Science Monitor:

The leafy bush thrives in arid regions around the equator, has no use as food, and takes little refinement: a hydraulic press to squeeze the oil from the seeds, and a chemical solution to create and filter the fuel. When the necessary infrastructure is in place – sufficient farms, transport routes, and processing plants – jatropha oil could be no more expensive than regular diesel.

That's all well and good, but is anyone in the industry taking this seriously? When the fuel is ready will there be cars and trucks that can use it? DaimlerChrysler seems to think so.

There's one more thing to think about. Where does this stuff grow?It grows in some of the poorest countries in the world, in what used to be called the Third World. Let's do some more imagining. Imagine if all the money that the EU, the US, and China currently spend in petroleum exporting countries instead started heading to South and Central America, Africa, India, and Indonesia. Imagine less pollution, less petroleum dependency, and less poverty. Could these be magic beans? Imagine that.