Airline industry could fly thousands of miles on biofuel from a new promising feedstock

A Boeing 747 burns one gallon of jet fuel each second. A recent analysis from researchers at the University of Illinois estimate that this aircraft could fly for 10 hours on bio-jet fuel produced on 54 acres of specially engineered sugarcane. 

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 of 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. "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% oil produces four times more jet fuel (1,577 liters, or 416 gallons) per hectare than soybeans. Sugarcane with 20% 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 the University of Illinois. "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."