By ANGELINE VALENCIA
On the slogan “From Soil to Oilâ€, Petrogreen Commodity Holdings, Inc. intends to groom
Bohol as the Jatropha capital of Visayas and Mindanao, considering the province’s strategic location that holds the edge in commerce and agro-industry.
Boasting of 25-35 hectares of intensive nurseries in Guindulman, Petrogreen assures a stable and even strong technical groundwork for the Jatropha Propagation Project (JPP) in Bohol.
Petrogreen Managing Director Poch Lamug urged Boholano farmers to get involved as the biodiesel and jet fuel markets continue to widen opportunities for jatropha oil.
Moreover, Lamug cited the support of Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC) Intensive Research and Development for JPP that had already spanned over two years as he hinted Bohol’s potential to even produce better variety of Jatropha in the future.
Petrogreen operates nurseries and plantation sites of PNOC-certified jatropha in Sierra-Bullones, Duero and Guindulman.
He also disclosed that oblivious to many, Petrogreen actually started establishing JPP in Bohol in the past few years yet and had already prepared 25 million seedlings as of December last year.
Since September 2008 until the present Lamug’s group has been continuously transplanting to a total of 1,000 hectares plantation at the rate of 2,500 jatropha seedlings per hectare and with BPRMO’s partnership, will soon expand to over 3,000 hectares plantation.
Of the hundreds of idle lands in Bohol, the provincial government and the environment department reserve sloping areas by above 12 degrees for jatropha plantations.
About 370 farmers coops under the Bohol Poverty Reduction Management Office (BPRMO) had already expressed interest in joining the project with Governor Erico Aumentado’s chief of staff, Antonieto Pernia, as the project director.
Many of them had already started processing documents necessary for their participation in the project.
The town of Valencia is just one of the areas that has been surveyed conducive to jatropha propagation with its “favorable climate and weather conditions†and its “over 5,000 hectares of rich and fertile landsâ€.
Though jatropha’s water requirement is minimal, the town’s abundant water supply will be necessary in the plant’s first six months, Lamug explained.
The ancestral domain site of JPP in Guindulman also serves the best manifestation of “food and fuel co-existenceâ€.
Moreover, to the tune of P18 million to P25 million, Petrogreen will be establishing an expeller-extractor facility in Bohol that will process jatropha seeds to produce oil for the jet fuel and other markets, Lamug added.
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