Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest)  In Washington, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded a five-year, $13 million grant to a nationwide research project to genetically strengthen Thlaspi arvense, commonly known as pennycress, for use in sustainable energy efforts.

CoverCress is an unfunded co-participant in this work, and you can see CoverCress CEO Jerry Steiner’s overview of that technology here.

Together, Danforth Center Principal Investigators Dmitri A. Nusinow, Ph.D., and Chris Topp, Ph.D., aim to increase pennycress’s tolerance to heat and drought through combining gene editing and traditional plant breeding techniques. They will focus on understanding and improving root system structure and function of pennycress, using X-ray CT imaging and a novel system developed in the Topp lab to grow and measure plants in field plot-sized containers outfitted with sensors in the greenhouse.

Why Huge?

If you’ve noticed there’s a renewable diesel boom going on around the world, award yourself one point. If you’ve spotted any project developers relaxing over mint juleps while lovingly gazing over their front-end engineering designs, score one thousand points. Because most of the good ones are running around trying to source feedstock. And we’re running out of drains to scour, fish to squeeze, renderers to rob and soybeans to crush. Which makes environmentalists nervous that future increases in renewable diesel production will involve making orangutans homeless in a sort of simian version of the Grapes of Wrath, forcing them off their land in the name of progress.

Arriveth pennycress to the rescue. Camelina is another horse in that race. So is virgin timber and timber waste (but both are also problematic with environmentalists).

The nice thing about pennycress is that corn and soy isn’t grown in the winter, cover crops are sound farming practice, and pennycress is a terrific cover crop, that just happens to yield up to 65 gallons of oil per acre under ideal conditions. So, in the 30 million acre “pennycress belt” in the United States alone, think something like a 2 billion gallon addition to the feedstock pool, at the optimal end of yields. Netting our hard-pressed farmers or other investors something like an extra $70 per acre in net profits. We might add, while combatting soil erosion.

CoverCress CEO Jerry Steiner ticked off the benefits of the crop, thus:

Grower: $50-70/acre new cash margin, plus cover crop benefits including sequestering soil carbon

User: new scalable low carbon intensity feedstock for bio- and renewable diesel and jet, as well as for food and feed

Scalable: realistic potential for > 10M tons of oilseed production in US alone

Synergy: uses open land, existing farm and processing equipment in their off-seasons  READ MORE