Building a better bean

UK researchers get more oil from soybeans

By CHRIS ALDRIDGE, Kentucky Agricultural News

When Rudolf Diesel revealed his three-year-old invention, the diesel engine, to the world at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, he ran it on peanut oil.

In the days before gas and diesel pumps were on every corner, Diesel envisioned his engines would consume locally-available vegetable and seed oils. He hoped his invention would enable independent farmers, craftsmen and artisans to compete with large industries that then virtually monopolized the predominant power source of the late 19th century – the oversized, expensive, inefficient steam engine.

University of Kentucky researcher David Hildebrand is trying to return the diesel engine to its roots. He and his colleagues in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences are using biotechnology to genetically engineer a soybean that yields more oil. Soybean oil, commonly known as vegetable oil, is combined with petroleum-based diesel fuel to create a cleaner-burning biodiesel fuel that Hildebrand believes will help reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign petroleum.

“This could be worth billions of dollars to the U.S. economy,” he said of his research. “In 30-some years, we know all of the world’s known oil supplies will be gone, so this is not just something that’s good for the environment.”

Hildebrand said the environmentally-friendly aspect of biodiesel is that it’s “CO2 neutral,” meaning the soybean plants used to make it consume as much carbon dioxide as the fuel releases when it’s burned, thus its use doesn’t increase CO2 and other greenhouse gasses blamed for global warming.

UK researchers are currently working on a soybean that yields more oil. The common soybean is made up of 20 percent oil.

“We hope in the next three to five years to produce a soybean that yields 30 percent oil,” Hildebrand said. “We’re at 23 percent right now in field trials at two different locations, Princeton and Spindletop Farm in Lexington. And although this hasn’t been proven yet, I think we’re close to 25 percent. So we’re about halfway there.”

Several plants yield much more oil than soybeans, Hildebrand said. No. 1 is the fruit from palm trees, followed by macadamia nuts from Hawaii. But unlike those two tropical plants, soybeans can grow throughout the Southeast and Midwest and are easy to harvest, store and transport.

“One farmer in Kentucky, with the right equipment, can grow 2,000 acres by his or herself,” Hildebrand said.

Soybeans don’t have very many diseases, according to Hildebrand, but the biggest threat right now is Asian Soybean Rust. Its spores were spread into the southern U.S. a couple of years ago by a tropical storm, and it has been able to survive the mild winters in Florida and Louisiana growing on kudzu.

“We’re working on developing rust-resistant soybeans,” Hildebrand said. “We’re putting them into [soybean] rust trials this spring at the Northwest Florida Ag Research Station.”

For all their benefits as a seed oil crop, Hildebrand doesn’t see soybeans as the solution to the world’s energy needs.

“All the vegetable oil in the world would supply only 20 percent of the world’s diesel fuel needs,” he said. “Ecologists don’t want to use any more of the earth’s land for agriculture, and I agree with that. So that’s why we’re trying to increase the oil in the amount of soybeans that are currently grown.”

Hildebrand said $3-a-gallon gasoline is speeding the extinction of the antiquated internal combustion piston engine. “I think our grandkids are gonna think we were crazy for driving around atop tanks full of highly-flammable gasoline,” he said.

Hildebrand envisions a future 50 years from now when Americans drive electric cars that they recharge overnight equipped with a back-up fuel cell. But his fuel cell would not run on volatile hydrogen, as is often suggested.

Hildebrand’s fuel cells would run on something much safer – vegetable oil. “It’s been done in the lab already,” he said.

Rudolf Diesel would be proud.