Jatropa—The future fuel of India

For India, there is a need to take a mission approach to explore the possibility of using straight/unmodified vegetable oils, their blends or biodiesels and their blends with mineral diesel as alternative fuel in order to achieve the twin objectives of reducing the emissions from the diesel engine and to increase the energy security of the country. Jatropa seems to the answer for Indiaʹs energy woes. Millions of hectares of waste land is available in India and out of which about 33 million hectares of wasteland has been found to be suitable for Jatropa cultivation. Jatropa seems to be perfectly suited for India. However, all is not well for Jatropa in India. There are many social, technical and political issues to be sorted out before the dream of energy security through Jatropa cultivation could be realized. These problems and suggested solutions are dealt in detail in this paper. The suitability of Jatropa oil blends and Jatropa biodiesel blends in running of compression ignition has been evaluated and found that the performance of Jatropa oil and Jatropa biodiesel blends is very close to performance of diesel in the compression ignition engine. The break thermal efficiency, break specific energy consumption, CO, UBHC, NOx emissions have been experimentally determined. A SWOT analysis of Jatropa with specific reference to Indian conditions has been carried out and found that Jatropa indeed is a plant which can make the Indian dream of self-sufficiency in energy—a reality.