CABBI Researchers Collaborate on Oilcane Pilot Project

by Jenna Kurtzweil (Brookhaven National Laboratory/Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation) From southeastern Florida to northern Mississippi to the Midwestern Corn Belt, CABBI scientists have struck sustainable oil with sugarcane. But the crop’s potential value to the renewable energy sector earns this particular variety a more appropriate designation: oilcane.

A groundbreaking endeavor uniting CABBI’s Feedstock Production and Conversion themes is coming to fruition with the fall 2020 harvest. By analyzing a sugarcane variety specifically designed to divert natural sugars for oil production, researchers can provide sustainable, plant-based fossil fuel alternatives.

The initial seeds of this project were sown as a result of CABBI Feedstock Production Investigators John Shanklin and Fredy Altpeter’s work on the PETROSS (Plants Engineered to Replace Oil in Sugarcane and Sweet Sorghum) DOE ARPA-E project. Their teams at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and University of Florida, respectively, manipulated lines of sugarcane to accumulate elevated lipid content compared to their wild-type counterpart.

A team of CABBI field technicians, graduate students and postdocs harvested a substantial crop of oilcane at the Illinois Energy Farm in early October. The harvested material did not have far to travel before the next phase of processing and conversion. A juicer located on the Illinois Energy Farm plots crushes and compresses the harvested biomass to extract a dark, juice-like mixture of the plant’s natural sugars and oils.

Fresh from the juicer, the oil-sugar mixture is delivered to Illinois’ own Integrated Bioprocessing Research Laboratory (IBRL), where CABBI Conversion scientists and IBRL staff, led by CABBI Deputy Director of Science and Technology Vijay Singh, begin the treatment and processing phase. Two product streams are generated at IBRL: first, a rotating centrifuge is used to isolate the oil, which can be directly converted to biodiesel; second, the remaining sugar is fermented to produce bioethanol.

A potential third product stream relates to the bagasse; this is the dry plant material left after the sugarcane goes through the juicer. Should the biomass contain residual oil after being crushed, these can be recovered after proper pretreatment at IBRL.

“This project embodies CABBI’s overarching mission: to use the ‘plants as factories’ paradigm to grow innovative varieties of biofuel crops and convert the material into products that are not only economically feasible, but also environmentally sustainable. We are so pleased to integrate CABBI field operations with processing operations at IBRL in this way, and to continue innovating toward efficient and long-lasting solutions,” said Singh (CABBI Deputy Director of Science and Technology Vijay Singh).

In addition to actively engaging parts of CABBI’s Feedstock Production and Conversion themes at present, the project provides opportunities in the near future to develop valuable bioproducts by deploying newly engineered yeasts and engage the Sustainability theme on how high-oil content crops impact nutrient cycling in the fields. READ MORE includes VIDEOb