Stinkweed could make a cleaner bio-jet fuel, study finds
Computer models estimate fewer environmental impacts than other crops


Date:
August 2, 2021
Source:
Ohio State University
Summary:
A common farm weed could make a 'greener' jet fuel with fewer
production- related environmental impacts than other biofuels,
a new study indicates.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A common farm weed could make a "greener" jet fuel with fewer production- related environmental impacts than other biofuels, a new study indicates.


========================================================================== Growing the weed, pennycress -- often called stinkweed -- as a crop
requires less fertilizer and fewer pesticides than other plants that can
be used to make renewable jet fuel, according to the study. Pennycress
also requires fewer farm operations, such as soil tilling, than
other potential biofuel crops, reducing the associated environmental
costs. Those costs include carbon dioxide emissions that cause the
climate to change, as well as other emissions that pollute the air.

Environmental impacts could be further mitigated through farm management techniques that keep fertilizer on fields, rather than allowing it to run
off into nearby watersheds, the study suggests. Such techniques can add
to the financial cost of growing crops, but reduce their environmental footprints.

"Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from air travel will mean not just incremental changes, but a fundamental change in how we have been
producing fuel and where that fuel comes from," said Ajay Shah, senior
author of the study and associate professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University in Wooster. "And what
we found is that pennycress might make a very good alternative fuel,
especially when you consider the environmental costs of producing it."
The study was published recently online in the journal Applied Energy.

For this study, the researchers estimated the environmental impacts of
growing pennycress, transporting it to a biorefinery and converting it
to a usable jet fuel. They also accounted for the environmental costs
of burning leftover byproducts of refining the pennycress seed into fuel.



========================================================================== Those environmental costs include fertilizer and pesticide use, water consumption and the energy required to harvest and transport pennycress
seeds from a farm to a biorefinery and process them into usable fuel.

The researchers built computer models to determine how much total energy
it would take to produce jet fuel from pennycress seeds and compared
those estimates with the energy needed for producing biofuels from
other crops. The data for the models came from existing studies about
biofuel production.

Their models showed that it took about half as much energy to produce
jet fuel from pennycress as it did to produce jet fuel from canola
or sunflowers, two other potential bio-jet fuel crops. Pennycress oil production used about a third as much energy as soybean oil production,
the researchers found, and the energy needed for turning pennycress
into jet fuel was about the same as that used to produce fuel from the flowering plant camelina, another biofuel crop.

Renewable jetfuels are not yet financially competitive with fossil
fuel-based fuels, Shah said. But calculating the environmental impacts of alternative bio- based fuels should help both farmers and policymakers
as they try to limit carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere and,
hopefully, to slow or stop climate change.

"Pennycress also makes an appealing alternative jet fuel because of its
growing season," Shah said. "It is a winter cover crop that can be grown between corn season and soybean season, giving the same body of farmland
an extra production cycle each year.



========================================================================== "Pennycress can be planted when corn is still standing in the field,
before the corn harvest," he said. "And it can be harvested before the
soybean crops are planted. The bottom line is it can be used as a cover
crop, it doesn't divert any agricultural production land, and it has
suitable properties for renewable jet fuel production." Greenhouse gas emissions from air travel contribute to climate change, accounting for
about 2% of all human-induced carbon-dioxide emissions, according to
various groups that study the effects of transportation on climate change.

"Reducing those emissions will almost certainly mean finding cleaner alternatives to jet fuels made from fossil fuels," Shah said. "Studies
like this one can help determine the best alternative.

"When it comes to pennycress, production and logistics are the big
contributors to both the environmental impacts and the costs, and those
are the challenge areas - they have to be streamlined and solved to make
it more efficient," he said. "If we could improve those areas, we could
make production more energy- efficient and substantially lower the costs
and environmental impacts." This work was supported by funding from
the U.S. Department of Energy.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Ohio_State_University. Original
written by Laura Arenschield. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Seyed Hashem Mousavi-Avval, Ajay Shah. Life cycle energy and
environmental impacts of hydroprocessed renewable jet fuel
production from pennycress. Applied Energy, 2021; 297: 117098 DOI:
10.1016/ j.apenergy.2021.117098 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210802114945.htm

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