Biofuel Is Good, But Could It Be Great?

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November 22, 2023

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by Treena Hein (Seed World) As demand rises for biofuels, plant breeders are working hard to increase biofuel feedstocks’ productivity and biofuel’s sustainability. -- ... (I)nfrastructure development and plant breeders’ efforts during the past decade have put biofuels on the map in various transportation sectors.

The main biofuel crops include starches like corn and sorghum, oilseeds such as soybean and canola, and sugar crops — primarily sugarcane and sugar beet. Fermenting sugar and starch-based crops produces bio-alcohols like ethanol, while oils undergo processing and blending to create biodiesel and renewable aviation fuel.

Biofuel’s impact hinges on its ability to replace fossil fuels, a metric that continues to steadily rise.

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Biofuels contribute to reduced greenhouse gas emissions across multiple stages of the production process, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Their impact towards sustainability increases further when producers grow feedstock crops on marginal land and/or use waste crop biomass as biofuel feedstock while retaining the highest value grain or oilseed for uses in food products or livestock feed. Also significant, biofuels support sustainability by reducing a country’s need for imported fossil fuels.

Even with these existing sustainability benefits, the biofuel industry remains committed to further enhancing sustainability. Due to the limits of available farmland globally, expanding feedstock crop biomass volume is challenging. Therefore, breeding crops for higher yields to obtain more fuel from each acre is critical to maximizing sustainability. For oilseeds like canola, the oil profile also matters.

Canada leading in canola

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Growing Feedstock Over Winter

One exciting way to boost the sustainability of biofuels is to grow biofuel feedstock crops as cover crops. Cover crops help improve soil health, reduce erosion and provide multiple other benefits.

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Rabobank estimates there are 170 million hectares of existing farmland in Europe and the Americas that could benefit from cover cropping.

“Nuseed estimates that by planting just 1.5% of that estimated existing cropland to non-food Nuseed carinata has the potential to annually produce 1 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel from 2030 and the potential to annually remove 8 million metric tons of CO2,” Ingalls (Justin Ingalls, commercial sales lead for Nuseed in North America) says.

Nuseed is currently scaling sustainable carinata contract production in both South America and the Southern U.S., with development programs underway in Europe and Australia.

Maximizing Each Ounce

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The corn wet-milling process removes corn fiber from the grain, explains Stoklosa (Ryan Stoklosa, research chemical engineer and lead scientist of the Sustainable Biofuels and Co-Products Research Unit at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS)), and since this component is enriched in carbohydrates, the process can recover and reincorporate the fiber ethanol fermentation. In a similar way, scientists can collect and chemically pre-treat the remaining corn stalks, allowing the polysaccharides within the plant cell wall to be more amenable for deconstruction to fermentable sugars. That also enables this plant fraction to be incorporated during ethanol fermentation with corn grain.

In terms of how breeding can help, Stoklosa says that corn and soybean breeders should focus on higher yields. So too, he says, should breeders of less-common grains that could play a role in improving biofuel production, such as grain sorghum, barley or hemp. The effort can’t end with breeders, however.

“This effort should not be left to breeders alone but should also include agronomists to entice farmers and other stakeholders to the potential benefits of growing these crops, not only for the biofuel industry, but also for the potential co-products that can be generated for a wider range of industries,” he says.

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Measuring Potential

The U.S. could produce roughly 1 billion tons of biomass (roughly 1,042 million dry tons) by 2030, which could theoretically displace 9.5% of fossil fuel-based energy and reduce 446 million tons of CO2-equivalent emissions each year, according to a report called ‘An Assessment of the Potential Products and Economic and Environmental Impacts Resulting from a Billion Ton Bioeconomy’ published in the energy journal BioFPR.

Stoklosa says that is one promising finding developed by the U.S. governmental agencies and a range of industry experts. However, to achieve this will require improved logistics and infrastructure to better support the growing, harvesting, transporting and conversion of crop biomass, he says. READ MORE

Nutrien acquires soybean breeder as demand for biofuels intensifies: The deal will expand the company’s line of row crop products sold throughout the South as burgeoning renewable energy markets take shape. (Agriculture Dive)

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