Jatropha Plant Oil

The jatropha curcas tree is native to southern Mexico, but it now grows in all of the non-arid, tropical regions of the world. Click here to read about the value of jatropha plant oil as a petroleum diesel fuel substitute and POP Diesel's method of supporting farmers to grow it on their own land in tandem with food crops.

From one scalable agricultural project, POP Diesel projects more than $30 million in annual revenues by:

• Providing POP Diesel-equipped fleet customers a $0.50 per gallon discount compared to petroleum diesel;
• Producing 4.6 million gallons of jatropha plant oil per year; and
• Generating 1.1 MW of electricity from the biomass that is jatropha's seedcake by-product, or making high-quality fertilizer or protein from this seedcake.

In so doing, POP Diesel will:

• Support 30,000 farming families each to grow 1 acre of jatropha trees and 1 acre of food crops;
• Produce enough food annually for 162,000 people to enjoy a diet of 2,000 calories per day;
• Provide education, training, assistance and financing to small-scale farmers so they can earn more than $30 million in new, annual income; and
• Re-forest 30,000 acres of savannah grass- and scrub-land.

POP Diesel works in countries whose agricultural sectors have great potential, but are underdeveloped. The Company provides material, such as seeds and organic herbicides, technical advice, and logistical support. Farmers sell POP Diesel their entire jatropha fruit harvest at a pre-arranged price. They also sell POP Diesel an agreed portion of their food crop harvest (soy, maize, rice, and peanuts, among others), which POP Diesel then transports and brokers to the marketplace.

Farmer partners consent to using only sustainable practices. For instance, planting cover crops to fix nitrogen to the soil reduces the need for petroleum-derived fertilizer. POP Diesel does not employ irrigation, relying instead on plentiful, tropical rainfall. The Company avoids cutting down forests and displacing existing cropland to plant jatropha trees. Instead, small-scale farmers plant on their own, fallow land or on land that is naturally savannah grass or scrub-land.

POP Diesel lifts the income of farmers, improves their food security, strengthens their communities, enhances biodiversity, and generates the low-cost diesel engine fuel of the future for POP Diesel's trucking customers in the United States.