Expanding Oil Seed Renewable Fuels

Expanding Oil Seed Renewable Fuels. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Camelina is an oil-seed crop that has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of years. More and more producers are taking advantage of it and the oil that can be processed into fuel. Scott Johnson is the president of Sustainable Oils who recently announced they were planning to almost double their acres. JOHNSON: We're just capitalizing on the activity we had in 2009 in terms of production and orders and as a small company we really can only contract with what we know we have in the book in terms of potential orders or solidified for the 2010 crop. But that actually means we are extending our acreage by about 30-40% from what we did in 2009. That much of an increase is a very ambitious undertaking. JOHNSON: We've demonstrated that we can contract a crop that we can get it through the supply chain and we can deliver to our customers. Most of the orders that we have been doing to date have been through contracts we have with the military although we have had some commercial orders as well. All of it has been for aviation fuel which is what we've focused on in the last couple of years. A number of foreign countries are working to get their bio-products exported into the market and Johnson says it needs to be local. JOHNSON: We believe that renewable fuels is essentially for the long term going to be a local business because of the logistics. And the more you handle any commodity the more you have to transport any commodity the more you're adding cost and you're also increasing the carbon footprint which is what all the policy makers are looking at. While the production of renewable fuels from oil-seed and other components is a relatively new process great strides are being made in not only the processing but in the crop itself. JOHNSON: It goes to not just how you crush it and handle it which yes, we are getting better at that. In addition to that our research and development effort within sustainable oils, particularly on our breeding and what we do with our breeding program is developing varieties which are capable of producing higher oil content and higher yields so that we improve on that side as well and that's really what we focus on in sustainable oils. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org