Vijay Singh
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Title: Biodiesel and ethanol from modifi ed sugarcane
Biography
Biography: Vijay Singh
Abstract
A new bioenergy crop has been recently developed for the US: Lipid cane, a sugarcane engineered to produce non-food oil, as drop-in fuels, in place of sugar. Lipidcane present excellent potential to serve as a renewable fuel crops. Lipid cane is a crop suitable for land in the South Eastern US that is marginal, or unsuited for food crop production. At the current yields of sugarcane in the SE US, this would produce about 33 barrels of oil per acre, compared to about 1 from soybean. By increasing
the photosynthesis, even higher barrels of oil per acre can be produced. Sugarcane is far less demanding on soils and fertilizers than food crops in general, and can be grown on land unsuited to food/feed crops. Th e US south-east has large areas of land that have dropped out of food and fi ber crops agriculture, a decline that continues to this day. Yet this area receives high rainfall, suffi cient to avoid the need for irrigation, and the long growing season maximizes the amount of sunlight these crops can capture over the year. By modifying the plant’s own triaclyglyceride (oil, TAG) pathway to up-regulate synthesis in the mature stem and down regulate consumption, so causing accumulation. TAGs, in lipid cane are similar to those of soybean and can be easily converted to biodiesel. Preliminary estimates indicate that using the 23 billion acres of marginal land in the SE US that is not in food production, more than 25 billion gallons of oil could be produced with these crops. Techno-economic evaluation of lipid cane as biofuel crops will be presented.