Tobacco Biofuel for All Your Energy Needs?

You've heard of biofuel from corn, algae, sugar cane, and switch grass.  Now researchers from the University of Central Florida have recently published a study in the Plant Biotechnology Journal showing how to produce ethanol from tobacco.  Could tobacco be the next big form of renewable energy in the US?

Corn ethanol has proven to be less than stellar for the local and global environment.  It takes almost as much energy to produce corn-based ethanol as it provides.  This negates some of the greenhouse gas savings corn ethanol might offer.  Nitrite fertilizers also harm the local environment, sending runoff into streams.

Sugar cane is more efficient to produce than corn ethanol because you can use the leftover plant matter to fuel the factory.  However, it damages to the local environment as rainforest is cleared to plant cane.  And the US currently has high tariffs on it, making it prohibitively expensive to import much of.

This leaves a swath of second generation biofuels.  Both switch grass and algae are cost and energy efficient.  However, algae requires specialized facilities to grow and if switch grass were to become popular, it would potentially reduce land currently being used for crops.  Enter tobacco.

The reason tobacco hasn't been considered for use as a biofuel until now is because the enzymes needed to break the plant matter down into ethanol have been prohibitively expensive.  The researchers at UCF have found a way around this by taking the genes from certain enzyme-producing plants and inserting them into the genomes of tobacco plants.  Eureka!  The researchers note that the cost of the enzyme-snipping process is 1000-3000 times cheaper than using comparable enzymes from fungi.  You read right.  1000-3000 times cheaper.   This makes tobacco a uniquely appealing source of renewable energy.  It could be efficient to produce and have an added public health benefit.

Public interest groups have sought to reduce cigarette use by asking tobacco farmers to stop growing the primary ingredient.  Farmers have been reticent to do this for a number of reasons.  Family tradition, years of developing specialized knowledge, and uncertainty about earnings from another crop all affect farmers' decisions.  Its understandable.  How would you feel if someone told you to forget history and your knowledge and throw away your secure investment for something less certain?  Clearly not a winning argument.

Tobacco ethanol could solve the problem.  Tobacco farmers could continue to grow tobacco plants.  The government could offer them subsidies, not unlike those that corn farmers currently receive, to get the industry off the ground and make it more appealing to sell tobacco for biofuel use.  Suddenly, we have a tobacco biofuel industry that keeps farmers working and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

There would also be a public health benefit.  Tobacco prices would rise, forcing cigarette manufacturers to lose profits or raise the price of cigarettes.  Either way, it would most likely lead to a deterioration of the industry and lead to less smoking-related illnesses.  This would reduce medical costs by millions.

Finally, since tobacco is grown in the US, it would help insulate the country from external price shocks barring another Civil War.  There are still concerns about fertilizer use and weather disruptions.  And of course questions of scale arise.  Even if 85% of corn was used to produce ethanol, it would only meet 10% of US energy needs.  Tobacco is cultivated on fewer acres than corn.  It clearly wouldn't meet all our energy demands.  But still, adding tobacco to the biofuel mix will help spur new innovation in the field.  The added benefit of reducing smoking puts tobacco in a unique category of energy sources that will have benefit both the environment and public health.

Photo credit:  William Rafti of the William Rafti Institute