According to a report on their website, Plants Engineered to Replace Oil in Sugarcane and Sweet Sorghum (PETROSS), funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), has developed sugarcane that produces oil, called lipidcane, that can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel in place of sugar that is currently used for ethanol production. With 20% oil—the theoretical limit—all the sugar in the plant would be replaced by oil.
"Oil-to-Jet is one of the direct and efficient routes to convert bio-based feedstocks to jet fuel," said Vijay Singh, director of the Integrated Bioprocessing Research Laboratory and Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at U of I. "Reducing the feedstock cost is critical to improving process economics of producing bio-jet fuel. Lipidcane allows us to reduce feedstock cost."
This research analyzed the economic viability of crops with different levels of oil. Lipidcane with 5 percent oil produces four times more jet fuel (1,577 liters, or 416 gallons) per hectare than soybeans. Sugarcane with 20 percent oil produces more than 15 times more jet fuel (6,307 liters, or 1,666 gallons) per hectare than soybeans.
"PETROSS sugarcane is also being engineered to be more cold tolerant, potentially enabling it to be grown on an estimated 23 million acres of marginal land in the Southeastern U.S.," said PETROSS Director Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at U of I. "If all of this acreage was used to produce renewable jet fuel from lipid-cane, it could replace about 65% of national jet fuel consumption."
Biorefineries could use lipidcane bagasse to produce steam and electricity to become self-sustainable for their energy needs and provide surplus electricity, providing environmental benefits by displacing electricity produced with fossil fuels.
The paper "Biorefinery for combined production of jet fuel and ethanol from lipid-producing sugarcane: a techno-economic evaluation" is published by Global Change Biology Bioenergy (10.1111/gcbb.12478).
For information: PETROSS
