Could tobacco be the future of biofuel?

New research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory could see Tobacco become the new biofuel. A team at Berkeley is aiming to use microbial fermentation to convert the hydrocarbon molecules from tobacco directly into a fuel.

'We want to bypass downstream processes like fermentation and produce fuels directly in the crop,' says Christer Jansson, a biochemist at Berkeley. 'After the biomass is crushed, we could extract the hydrocarbon molecules, and crack them into shorter molecules, creating gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.'

However, in order for the process to be cost-effective, the tobacco needs to be extremely efficient at absorbing sunlight and converting carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon molecules. The team is attempting to achieve this by enhancing the tobacco with genes from cyanobacteria, a microbe already used as an energy harvester in the alternative fuels field.

The crop has various potential advantages over other non-food biofuel crops such as miscanthus or camelina. For example, due to the large amount of land already dedicated to tobacco farming, no new land would be required for production purposes.