Tobacco biofuel to solve energy/ environment crisis?

Boffins in Philadelphia, America have come up with a radical new plan for biofuels. Rather than the cars of tomorrow running on various forms of alcohol, sunflower oil, algae etc, the scientists propose that they should instead be fuelled by burning tobacco.

“Tobacco is very attractive as a biofuel because the idea is to use plants that aren’t used in food production,” says Dr Vyacheslav Andrianov of Thomas Jefferson University.
“We have found ways to genetically engineer the plants so that their leaves express more oil. In some instances, the modified plants produced 20-fold more oil in the leaves.”

It seems that typical baccy leaves contain 1.7 percent to 4 percent of oil as a proportion of dry weight. One gene modification tried out by Andrianov and his colleagues gave 6.8 percent of oil per dry weight.

Production of oil in the leaves is seen as the big trick. Tobacco seed oil has already been tried out in diesel engines, but baccy doesn’t produce enough seeds to be useful – just 600kg per acre. However it is a “high-biomass” plant overall, once the leaves are included.

“Based on these data, tobacco represents an attractive and promising ‘energy plant’ platform, and could also serve as a model for the utilization of other high-biomass plants for biofuel production,” says Andrianov, whose paper is soon to be published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal.

The Register