Well for quite some time we have been working on bio-diesel areas of research. Jatropha is one area of major work. We started this work around 4-5 years back alongwith other major crops.
Jatropha seeds
We at that time were in Mumbai and wer operating a floriculture compnay by the name of Drishti floral which had a projct site at Karjat having around 15 acres. My earliest begiinings of Jatropha began when we saw that the crop was used a live fence and we liked the plant as a live crop because animals will never touch the leaves and stems of the same.
Later we explored entering into Jatropha as plantation for semi arid and arid zone crop. But we found Jatropha likes a better environment where it survives well. We documented from Nature its natural habitat. Belonging ot the family of castor family. At the time there wer not many who wer interested in the crop. But later interest became much as governmental institutions started promoting Jatropha as an energy crop.
We had customers from across the globe contacting us for a detail on the Jatropha and its advantages. There was one compnay from UK D1 Oils that had setup base in coimbatore and we saw they wer doing a lot of work in Jatropha.
We started working out of Coimbatore to create a model jatropha plantation as there were many araes which had a lot of windmills and most of these windmill locations had a land undeneath that we thought we could tap for Jatropha and vanilla.
Here is the pictorial story below:
Wild undergrowth
overview of the wind mills in the zone
windmills-2
land topography
overview
undulating landscape and topography
Jatropha plant and its seed pod closeup
Our team with me at the left end
We then got into the techno commercial aspects of the bio diesel production including the trans-esterification process. Well that is another great design story to be told.
Thanks
JAGS
