Pongamia Poised to Be the Next Big Oil

An agricultural innovation company based in California called Terviva has announced an investment from Chevron Renewable Energy Group to help scale production of pangamia for low carbon renewable fuel. What is Pongamia? It's a regenerative, permanent tree crop that stores carbon and produces a bean pod that can, in turn, be used to produce food, feed and fuel. The tree is mainly grown in Florida, Hawaii and Australia. Terviva, founder and CEO, Naveen Sikka.

"After extensive plantings and research and development, we've got non GMO tree varieties that can produce more oil per acre than the best Midwest soybean land. In fact, multiples that four to five times that than the best Midwest soybean land, and you're growing on land where, you know, you couldn't grow so at all. So I think it's a very exciting prospect for the space. I think, moreover, because it's a bean, you have that secondary stream of protein, basically a protein carbohydrate bean meal, like a soybean meal, and we can use that in the growing markets for animal feed around the world. And both of these things, the oil and the protein, can be upgraded into human applications, which gives, just gives you a little bit of diversification."

Another benefit of Pongamia is the potential to produce high pod volumes, which could rival palm oil, which he says is currently the highest form of oil yield per acre.