Can we move away from fossil diesel?

Renewable fuels can be a direct substitute for fuels like diesel (and aviation/marine fuels). These fuels drastically reduce the lifecycle carbon footprint of diesel powered farm machinery.  Availability of sufficient feedstock to make renewable fuels is often seen as limiting how much renewable fuel can be supplied. Understanding how these limitations can be overcome and the potential they offer to agriculture is valuable. To guide us through this area we were lucky enough to have ex-CSIRO researcher Allan Green, AGRENEW share some of his knowledge.

At the May Energy Smart Farming Community of Practice (CoP) meeting Allan Green presented on: “Scaling-up domestic fats & oils feedstock production for an Australian renewable fuels sector”.

Some of the key points:

• Australia is more reliant on diesel fuel than most countries, due to our large use of diesel in the agriculture and mining sectors. Opportunities for decarbonisation via electric options are more difficult in these sectors.
• Renewable fuels are already being produced overseas from agricultural oils and fats feedstocks (mainly soybean oil, palm oil, canola oil, and tallow fat) as well as used cooking oil (UCO) as a means to replace liquid fossil fuels. Supplies are constrained by limited feedstock availability.
• CSIRO has been developing new technology to engineer plants to also produce oil in their leaves, rather than just in their seeds and fruits. This opens the way for a step-change in scalability and affordability of plant oil based renewable fuels by production of dedicated high-oil vegetative crops, as well as by production of oil in the crop residue of food and feed crops.
• This game-changing approach promises a sustainable intensification approach to oil feedstock production that is complimentary to rather than competitive with food production. Our future agriculture can become a ‘food, feed, fibre & fuel’ system.
• Additional approaches to intensifying oil production include engineering oilseeds to have higher oil content and introducing oil-producing intermediate (or cover) crops into phases of the cropping systems that are currently left fallow.
• These breakthrough technologies provide pathways for Australia to move from being highly dependent on imported petroleum-based fuels to becoming self-sufficient on low-emission fuels based on renewable feedstocks grown and processed locally, generating increased regional economic prosperity.

Our future agriculture can become a ‘food, feed, fibre & fuel’ system.

Transcript: Scaling-up domestic fats and oils feedstock production – Webinar recording