St. Louis Startup Turning Weeds into Biofuel
by Jim Bafaro (St. Louis Business Journal) Some call it the “stinkweed.” Yet despite that inglorious moniker, there’s an awful lot to like about pennycress, say officials with one St. Louis startup company. That’s because pennycress seeds — five to seven thousand of them in a given plant — have the potential to produce the world’s next big biofuel, in addition to providing protein feed for livestock, benefiting the environment and providing an added source of revenue for farmers.
Biofuel made from pennycress seeds, “could end up in your tank, if you drive a diesel powered car or truck,” said Jerry Steiner, the chief executive of the two-year-old plant science startup Arvegenix. “We clearly could also make jet fuel, and provide the feedstock for some bio-based lubricants as well.” That’s why some U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers have been touting pennycress as it champions new biofuel choices.
But for that to happen, pennycress must first be domesticated. That is, turned into a viable commodity crop for farmers. And that, said Steiner, “is what we aim to do.”
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“We’ve collected pennycress from a number of locations across the country,” Steiner said. “We have the ability to cross the right parents and create the next generation (of pennycress) with more yield potential than any of the wild strains effectively have shown. It’s the same thing that happened thousands of years ago with crops that we know today, like corn, wheat or soybeans. It’s really the same process. People saw something in nature and liked it and started crossing to improve it. The difference that we have, of course, is that the tools that we have available are vastly superior, and therefore we can make more rapid progress.” READ MORE
