The “new jatropha”: SG Biofuels partners with Life Technologies to accelerate new cultivar development by 60 percent; product line this year, says CEO

In California, jatropha pioneer SG Biofuels announced a strategic alliance with Life Technologies Corporation, a provider of innovative life science solutions, to advance the development of Jatropha as a sustainable biofuel.

The alliance brings together SG Biofuels’ Genetic Resource Center, featuring the largest and most diverse library of Jatropha genetic material in the world, with the advanced biotechnology and synthetic biology tools of Life Technologies.

The partnership will initially include sequencing the Jatropha curcas genome, allowing for the rapid introduction of new traits targeted toward increasing the yield of the oil-producing plant. Life Technologies will also become a strategic partner in SG Biofuels.

Life Technologies is a global biotechnology tools company with more than $3 billion in sales, formed by the 2008 merger of  Invitrogen Corporation and Applied Biosystems. The strategic alliance is the first announced by Life in the biofuels arena, and Life CEO Greg Lucier is expected to announce the alliance as the first step in a broader engagement with biofuels at the JP Morgan investment conference today.

By combining our library of Jatropha DNA with the extensive genetic expertise and resources of Life Technologies, we have the opportunity to unlock the true potential ofjJatropha as the most profitable and sustainable biofuel feedstock,” said Kirk Haney, President and Chief Executive Officer of SG Biofuels.  “Sequencing the genome will allow us to rapidly develop region-specific cultivars from the promising traits we’ve already identified.”

For SG and jatropha, the alliance represents, one one level, validation — based on the technical deep-dive that presages such an announcement on SG and its development path. It also says something about the development prospects for jatropha.

In terms of metrics, the Life alliance is expected to reduce the cycle time for bringing new jatropha cultivars to market by 60 percent, from five years to two years. “Most companies in the space said that our molecular genetics were the best in the world,” said Haney. “What was missing was the gene sequencing horsepower that would accelerate our drive to produce the most profitable jatropha cultivars for our customers.”

SG is on track to release its first product this year, and to commence rapid commercialization of its library of jatropha DNA. The company is ultimately expected to release a set of genetically-modified jatropha cultivars and a set of non-GMO cultivars. Prospective customers: jatropha developers, strategic investors from the oil and chemical industries looking for long-term substitutes for fossil petroleum, and landholders in jatropha’s potential geographies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where jatropha has grown wild for many years but has struggled to make the transition from locally produced genome to industrial bioprocessing platform.

“Jatropha the plant did not fail,” Haney contends, “jatropha the business model failed.”  D1 Oils Plant Science execs confirmed last year that, in their view, 90 percent of global jatropha plantings should simply be pulled up, as they were improperly selected and poorly tended, and the plants in the ground were unlikely to thrive.

For newer readers of the Digest, SG represents a new fork in jatropha development. In the 2000s, a number of developers emerged in jatropha, hailing it as a high-yield, stress-tolerant, non-food “wonder crop” that could be grown on fallow and otherwise unproductive land. As the Digest’s March 2009 story “The Blunder Crop: a Biofuels Digest special report on jatropha biofuels development,” detailed, “things would be going great if they weren’t going so badly.”

But even that report, which detailed a series of missteps in jatropha developement, suggested that “Kirk Haney tells me there’s nothing to worry about with his jatropha biofuels company, SG Biofuels, and I believe him. A successful practioner of sustainable forestry in Central America via the teak trade, Haney has assembled a top-tier team for SG and is doing the soil testing and the extensive planning — the “hard, dirty work of progress”, to borrow Rob Elam’s memorable phrase — that will turn jatropha dreams into actual viable industry.”

In recent months, jatropha has begun to turn a corner. Though pioneers such as D1 Oils have fallen further into difficulties — with major investor Principle Capital now calling for the company to exit jatropha developemnt altogether — there is good news these past week and months. GEM Biofuels has commenced shipping crude jatropha oil from Madagascar, Mission Bioenergy in Australia has steadied its balance sheet, the aviation industry has embraced jatropha as a near-term candidate for aviation biofuels feedstock and conducted successful flight tests, and now SG’s alliance with Life promises to accelerate the next generation of high-profit cultivars. Of particular interest: SG’s announcement from last year that it had identified cold-tolerant jatropha varietals in its collection efforts in Central America. Work on those traits — using SG’s existing breeding techniques, now combined with Life’s genome sequencing tools — may well expand the geography for jatropha over the next 5-10 years.

Though airlines would like jatropha oil — a lot of it — at parity pricing with crude oil, and now, thank you — the turnaround for jatropha should continue to be measured in years, rather than weeks or months — SG’s news that it will release products this year is exciting, but it takes several years to realize a major harvest from newly planted jatropha. But if the horizons must be long-term at this stage — the SG concept of applying the disciplines of molecular genetics to the platform of jatropha is beginning to bear fruit.

Thoughtful investors might well begin to revise jatropha yield and geography expectations towards the late-middle 2010s, just when proposed national carbon emission targets are really starting to bite.

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