Toyota Looking To Enter Biofuels Business With Jatropha Plantation
By John O'Dell December 30, 2009
Toyota Motor Corp., aiming to take more control of its future, is getting into the biofuels business as a hedge against rising crude oil prices.
The automaker, through its international trading arm Toyota Tsusho Corp., intends to begin growing the vegetable oil-rich jatropha plant (right) next year and is in negotiations with a Philippine banana plantation operator for a growing site, according to a Bloomberg news wire report.
Toyota Tsusho last year bought a piece of Singapore-based seed research company JOil(S) in order to push development of better jatropha seeds designed for increased yield and hardiness.
"We need to dramatically increase the plant's yield in order to make this profitable," project development manager Makoto Hattori told Bloomberg in an interview.
Jatropha is not only rich in oil, its seeds are inedible and it grows in arid areas unsuitable for farming - making it a biofuel feedstock that won't cut into availability of food crops, as does production of corn and sugar cane for ethanol.
A jatropha-based biofuel was used last year to help power a Boeing 747 in a test of non-petroleum jet fuel.
Hattori said in the interview that he expects Toyota's jatropha business to be profit-making within five years.
There have been a number of failed jatropha projects in recent years, but Hattori shrugged them off as "largely the result of a lack of consideration about the downstream logistics of processing and marketing the crop."
Those are areas we don't expect Toyota to neglect.The automaker appears to be seizing an opportunity to profit directly from an oil-restricted future by controlling a source of the fuel that cars and trucks will one day be using in lieu of petroleum-based gasoline and diesel.
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