URBANA — In the near future, Illinois farms could be producing jet fuel — or at least crops that can be used as the basis for jet fuel.
On Monday, U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth announced that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office is awarding the University of Illinois $10 million in federal funding.
That money, says crop sciences Professor DoKyoung Lee, will help take studies on “purpose-grown energy crops” to the next level to prove that the science works on a large scale.
Lee said that official term, “purpose-grown energy crop,” means pretty much exactly what it sounds like when you break it down: crops that have the necessary components to be good for creating fuel and are grown specifically for that purpose, not for food or anything else.
Most people are already familiar with the concept of corn being used to create ethanol to power cars, but UI researchers are looking at crops that can create fuel to power airplanes.
Lee said this is important in creating sustainability across the transportation industry.
“By 2035-40, we are expecting pretty much all passenger and small fleet vehicles to use electricity or hydrogen or something like that,” Lee said. “But an airplane cannot run by a battery. Maybe in the future we’ll have a completely different form of a battery and it won’t be a problem, but especially going continent-to-continent, long-distance flights, it’s obviously not going to be batteries.”
Using plants to make fuel would be more environmentally friendly than using fossil fuels, and would make the United States more energy-independent.
Different plants can be used to make different kinds of fuel, but Lee said that many of those used in jet fuel are already native to Illinois and the Midwest, which means they would also be healthy for the local ecosystem.
Miscanthus and switchgrass sequester carbon from the atmosphere and can be produced on land that isn’t suitable for annual production of crops like corn and soybeans, Lee said.
Lee and other UI researchers have been working with these plants for some time to understand how they can be used to make fuel, but this $10 million grant will allow them to begin expanding tests.
He said the plan is to plant energy crops across many acres and harvest them with large-scale machinery to begin understanding large-scale production.
“It’s basically exactly the same as what farmers are going to do,” Lee said. “We are trying to see how this crop can help farmers’ revenue generation while farmers can provide the biggest step for sustainable aviation fuel production and at the same time, they can provide another benefit to society and our environment.”
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