Farm to Flight – Carinata Crop Commercialization Takes off

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) In Australia, Qantas will operate the world’s first biofuel flight between the United States and Australiaearly in the new year in collaboration with World Fuel Services and Altair Fuels. Qantas’ new Dreamliner is being powered by Brassica Carinata (carinata), a non-food, industrial type of mustard seed that has been around for years but is seeing increased use and viability thanks to new developments and improvements with the feedstock for biofuels, animal feed, chemicals, and other uses.

The news of the flight follows Qantas’ signing of a landmark partnership with Agrisoma Biosciences, the Canadian based agricultural-technology company who developed the carinata seed. The two organizations will work with Australian farmers to grow the country’s first commercial aviation biofuel seed crop by 2020.

“Our long-term goal with this partnership is to grow the crop at a target of 400,000 hectares which will ultimately produce more than 200 million litres of bio jet fuel for the airline,” said Steven Fabijanski, Agrisoma’s Ph.D. President and CEO.

Qantas International CEO, Alison Webster said the early 2018 historic flight and the partnership mark the first step in developing an aviation biofuel supply in Australia. “We are constantly looking for ways to reduce carbon emissions across our operations but when it comes to using renewable jet fuel, until now, there has not been a locally grown option at the scale we need to power our fleet. Our work with Agrisoma will enable Australian farmers to start growing today for the country’s biofuel needs of the future. The trans-Pacific biofuel flight is a demonstration of what can be achieved locally.”

The University of Queensland field trials in Gatton, Queensland, and in Bordertown, South Australia, have demonstrated that carinata should do very well in the Australian climate. It is sown in either fallow areas where food crops fail or in between regular crop cycles, known as “cover cropping”. Rotational or break-crops improves soil quality, reduces erosion for food crops and provides farmers with additional annual income.

Florida-based Applied Research Associates, the University of Florida and about 40 partners in the project (including Agrisoma), was awarded a $15 million USDA contract for work on a carinata-based sustainable jet fuel and bioproducts supply chain, as reported in the Digest in October. The Southeast Partnership for Advanced Renewables from Carinata (SPARC) will work on the five-year project to remove technological, economic and social barriers to the commercial development of carinata for fuels, feed and chemicals.

As reported in October in the Digest, researchers from South Dakota State University developed a means of extracting glucosinolate from the oilseed meal, which may lead to high-value uses for the chemical. The presence of glucosinolate limits the amount of camelina and carinata meal that can be incorporated into animal diets to 10 percent due to its toxicity and it’s that toxicity that researchers want to utilize—to kill fungus and weeds or even cancer cells. This is great news for carinata producers who use the feedstock for things beyond biofuels like animal feed.

Agrisoma has also been busy with UPM, as reported in the Digest in July, with a long-term supply agreement to grow carinata in South America. Under the deal, the two companies will grow Carinata oilseed crops with third-party farmers in Uruguay and Brazil. UPM was testing carinata for sequential cropping in South America. The sequential cropping concept enables contract farmers to take agricultural land into use outside the main cultivation period, in winter time, without compromising existing food production. READ MORE