At the biodiesel confab in San Francisco, experts discuss ways to grow fuel in the desert and Ben Franklin's contribution to alt fuels.
According to Dick Auld from Texas Tech, the castor plant is drought tolerant, salt tolerant, grows on marginal land, probably amenable to genetic modification and is quite oily. The plant could yield 63 to 210 gallons of oil an acre-that's low compared to some crops but it would grown on marginal lands, thereby dropping the cost of production.
It's also not a food crop. The plant, originally from the tropics, produces the highly toxic ricin.But if there's a feedstock on everyone's lips, it's the Chinese Tallow tree, according to Courtney McColgan, an associate at Draper, Fisher Jurvetson.
Ben Franklin is credited with bringing the tree to the continent when the U.S. was still a set of colonies owned by Britain. Since then, it's become a pesky, invasive species in the South. Some experts say it could produce several hundred gallons of feedstock per acre.
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