By S. Dutta
Alion Science and Technology, a US technology company has been contracted by the Biotechnology Research and Development Center (BRDC) to analyse the feasibility of converting pennycress seeds into biofuels, technically.
The company will develop models that will assess options for processing pennycress seeds under the contract, it said.
Pennycress is a potential biofuel source crop as it produces twice the oil per acre as soybeans without displacing food crops, but can be grown by US farmers in the winter and harvested in the spring between segments of a typical corn or soybean rotation, said Alion. Harvested pennycress seeds contain about 36 per cent oil and after oil extraction and conversion to biodiesel, according to Alion. Alion estimated that an acre of pennycress can produce 95 gallons of biodiesel and another 95 gallons of bio-oil.
The US Department of Agriculture will fund the contract of BRDC is funded in support of Arvens Technology, which has plans to establish geographically dispersed, advanced biofuel production plants using pennycress seeds.
Under the contract, Alion said “it will develop a set of models that will be used to assess the feasibility of various processing technologies, simulate overall process performance and provide an economic evaluation of the costs related to the construction and operation of pennycress processing plants.”
‘Alion’s development of these models will lead to an analytical tool that will help determine specific design features for pennycress processing plants and how to best apply development dollars,’ said Damon Griggs, Alion’s senior vice president.
‘Our scientists and engineers have performed similar analyses for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and our process engineering and manufacturing expertise makes us ideally suited to perform this work.’
The results of Alion’s work will help establish the suitability of pennycress for production of biofuels by guiding the selection of equipment and process options. ‘This work is also important to the agricultural industry as pennycress can potentially generate over $200m annually in new farm income per million acres cultivated,’ said Griggs.
BRDC was formed with an aim to encourage the development of better agricultural products in the US by funding and managing research projects at Agricultural Research Service Laboratories.
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