Sugarcane Into Diesel — Cold-Tolerant, Highly Productive, Oil-Producing Crop Developed For US

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

A new type of sugarcane possessing a photosynthetic rate that’s been increased by 30%, boosted oil production, and improved cold-tolerance has been developed by a multi-institutional research team. The new sugarcane was developed with the intention of allowing large-scale biodiesel production to be undertaken in the US, using the new crop.

With the improved cold-tolerance — and the accompanying increase in growing range — sugarcane biodiesel production could supply up to 147% of the US mandate for renewable fuels, according to the researchers. They also note that the crop could be (relatively) easily grown on the abandoned land that’s somewhat common throughout the Southeast.

Researchers are engineering sugarcane into a more productive, oil-producing plant that can grow in cooler climes. If their work proceeds as expected, growers will be able to meet 147% of the US mandate for renewable fuels with the modified sugarcane, the team reports. This crop could grow on abandoned land in the southeastern United States (about 20% of the green zone on the map). Image Credit: Stephen P. Long
Researchers are engineering sugarcane into a more productive, oil-producing plant that can grow in cooler climes. If their work proceeds as expected, growers will be able to meet 147% of the US mandate for renewable fuels with the modified sugarcane, the team reports. This crop could grow on abandoned land in the southeastern United States (about 20% of the green zone on the map).
Image Credit: Stephen P. Long


The research team will be presenting its latest work and findings on February 25th at the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, DC.

“Biodiesel is attractive because, for example, with soybean, once you’ve pressed the oil out it’s fairly easy to convert it to diesel,” stated Stephen P. Long, a University of Illinois professor of plant biology and leader of the initiative. “You could do it in your kitchen.”

Soybean-oil agriculture, though, isn’t productive enough to fully meet the country’s demands for renewable diesel fuels, Long noted. Sugarcane and sorghum are a different matter.

“Sugarcane and sorghum are exceptionally productive plants, and if you could make them accumulate oil in their stems instead of sugar, this would give you much more oil per acre,” he continued.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides more:

Working first with the laboratory-friendly plant Arabidopsis and later with sugarcane, the team introduced genes that boost natural oil production in the plant. They increased oil production in sugarcane stems to about 1.5%.

Using genetic engineering, the researchers increased photosynthetic efficiency in sugarcane and sorghum by 30%, Long said. And to boost cold tolerance, researchers are crossing sugarcane with Miscanthus, a related perennial grass that can grow as far north as Canada. The new hybrid is more cold-tolerant than sugarcane, but further crosses are needed to restore the other attributes of sugarcane while preserving its cold-tolerance.

“That doesn’t sound like a lot, but at 1.5%, a sugarcane field in Florida would produce about 50% more oil per acre than a soybean field,” Long stated. “There’s enough oil to make it worth harvesting.”

The researchers are ultimately looking to bring the oil content of sugarcane up to around 20%.

“Our goal is to make sugarcane produce more oil, be more productive with more photosynthesis and be more cold-tolerant,” he concluded.


Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

Latest CleanTechnica TV Video


Advertisement
 
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

James Ayre

James Ayre's background is predominantly in geopolitics and history, but he has an obsessive interest in pretty much everything. After an early life spent in the Imperial Free City of Dortmund, James followed the river Ruhr to Cofbuokheim, where he attended the University of Astnide. And where he also briefly considered entering the coal mining business. He currently writes for a living, on a broad variety of subjects, ranging from science, to politics, to military history, to renewable energy.

James Ayre has 4830 posts and counting. See all posts by James Ayre