Sustainable evaluation of Jatropha oil as a biofuel in Colombia

In the last decades the depletion of oil reserves has become a major source of discussion worldwide, since oil constitutes the most important primary energy source. This situation has led the oil industry to develop new and more advanced technologies in order to achieve better oil recovery and more efficient. As a consequence, the prices of oil have been pushed up. In the same way, the global warming also became a major priority around the world due to the fact that show how human activities have disturbed the natural cycles on earth and the urge to look for sustainability. In such panorama, global community has been looking for energy solutions which permit a gradual replacement of fossil fuels to avoid the dependence on them due to their elevated costs and damage to the environment. Biofuels show up as a solution to apply basically on the transportation and generation sectors. With biofuels, both problems can be attacked by reducing the dependence on fossil fuels and reducing as well the negative impacts on the environment In Colombia, the energy security became a priority since major blackouts occurred in the early nineties and also due to the oil prices. Although Colombia is considered to be a net oil exporter, still is dependent on oil products imports such as diesel, which, considering the high prices, pushes the country towards alternative solutions like biofuels. The great advantage is that, Colombia has a great variety of environments and lands which permit vast agriculture. Today, Colombia is producing bioethanol from sugar cane and biodiesel from oil palm and has already established policies to promote and regulate this market. Nonetheless, the demand is still high and the projections for replacing fossil fuels are hard to achieve. Under this situation, new feedstocks are called to complement the actual production. Jatropha biodiesel shows up as a potential feedstock for biodiesel production due to its advantages as an energy crop as well as to the good aptitude of the tree to be cultivated in Colombia. However, the knowledge on this plant is still in its starting point and it is still considered as a wild plant. The knowledge gap in this situation needs to be filled up correctly reason why mane studies have been done in this area. The present work aim is to reduce this gap from the energy and sustainability point of view. A model was designed to analyze the possible production of Jatropha biodiesel in different regions of the country focusing on the energy performance of the system starting from the cultivation till the production of the fuel to be commercialized. With the results of this model plus the results of some other works done in Colombia on this topic, a sustainable evaluation is executed in order to determine whether if it is a good practice or not to be applied in this Country.