Tobacco to Create Energy Efficient Biofuels

US scientists have come up with a new technique for converting tobacco into biofuel that could have the potential to make the plant a highly valued energy efficient fuel source. Based at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, the scientists have established a method to up the tobacco plant’s oil concentration, and this could lead to the future development of direct tobacco-to-biofuel conversion technologies.

The majority of tobacco oil is located in seeds, and the limited number of seeds per plant has generally discounted them from being used to produce fuel on a widespread basis. The focus of the US researchers, though, is not the seeds but the leaves.

“Tobacco is very attractive as a biofuel because the idea is to use plants that aren't used in food production”, Jefferson Medical College’s Doctor Vyacheslav Andrianov explained. “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.”

Tobacco Biofuel

The oil concentration of tobacco leaves usually falls between 1.7 and four per cent of its overall mass, but Andrianov and his colleagues adapted the plants for tobacco biofuel purposes, focusing on two genes especially. These were DGAT (diacyglycerol acytransferase – modifying which increased the oil percentage up to approximately 5.8) and LEC2 (LEAFY COTYLEDON 2 – which increased the oil a further one per cent over DGAT).

Biofuel from Tobacco

“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”, Dr Andrianov added. His study into creating biofuel from tobacco appears in the current edition of the Plant Biotechnology publication.

Towards the end of 2009, Swiss and Singaporean scientists suggested that biofuels created from waste materials could have the potential to reduce global CO2 emissions by up to eighty per cent. Whether the widespread use of tobacco as a fuel source could impact on this further remains to be seen, but Enviro News will provide further coverage of this issue as future facts emerge.