A UF-led research team was awarded a $6.3 million grant Thursday to genetically enhance the chemical responsible for creating the scent of Christmas trees to make transportation biofuels.
The scent of pine trees comes from terpene, a chemical that is naturally produced and stored in the tree. The liquid terpene can be directly blended with transportation fuels like gasoline.
"Research tells us that terpene production and storage capacity are controlled in large part by pine tree genetics," said John Davis, co-principal investigator of the project. "This means that we can grow varieties with higher amounts of terpenes, which can be used as renewable biofuels."
The U.S. Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy awarded the three-year grant. The agency is a program within the Energy Department that is investing in renewable and domestic production of energy, including biofuels.
Davis, along with Gary Peter, the principal investigator of the project, are professors at the UF School of Forest Resources and Conservation. Their collaborators for the project include personnel from the University of California-Berkeley, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and ArborGen LLC, a leading commercial supplier of enhanced seedlings to the forest industry.
UF will receive about $2.4 million of the grant. The rest of the $6.3 million goes to the collaborators' portion of the work.
Existing pine tree varieties have a terpene content of 3 to 5 percent. The researchers hope to develop varieties that accumulate more than 20 percent.
At this level of terpene content, pine trees can produce about 100 million gallons of fuel from about 25,000 acres of planted pine, Peter wrote in an email.
"If our technology is successful, then we can directly produce in a plant," Peter wrote, "and extract a biofuel that will be more than two times lower cost than ethanol derived from maize starch and with a much higher energy content."
