An Australian-led scientific breakthrough to increase oil yield from plants will help advance the production and use of biofuels, such as sustainable aviation fuel. Developed over a decade by scientists from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, the technology was acquired by Australian agricultural innovation company Nufarm.

Oils from plants are produced by specialized seeds and fruits, but CSIRO scientists looked at extending that to the biomass of the plant, including the leaves and stem.

The technology effectively utilizes solar energy captured by the plant to convert the leaf’s starch reserves into more energy-dense oil molecules, which significantly increases the energy value of the vegetative tissue where the oil accumulates.

In some plant species, CSIRO achieved 35% oil content in the leaves under greenhouse conditions, which is a similar range as in many oilseed crops. The high oil trait was largely confirmed when plants were grown in the field.

In the newly-launched Biomass Oil Project, Nufarm will lead a global research partnership to further develop the technology.

CSIRO’s Dr Thomas Vanhercke, who has been working on the project for more than a decade, said the technology would have the potential to create an important new global energy source.

With CSIRO’s existing expertise in the area and the partnership with Nufarm on the Omega-3 canola project, we started thinking about how to extend that to the challenge of developing industrial scale feedstock oil from plants. We took the genetics for seed oil production and incorporated them across a range of crops with promising success.

—Dr Thomas Vanhercke

Nufarm CEO, Greg Hunt, said the company is now bringing together researchers from CSIRO, the University of Florida (UF), USA and the Instituto Agronomico (IAC), Brazil to take the work to the next level.