Small business $$ avenue for off-radar energy crops?

Renewable energy is an answer to waning fossil resources. It’s also a growing business concern, and that may be key to helping bioenergy innovations come to market.

In late October, the U.S. House passed the Small Business and Investment Act, including an amendment by Peoria Republican Rep. Aaron Schock that requires quarterly progress reports on the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) newly overhauled Renewable Energy Capital Investment Program.

Schock cited Peoria-based Biofuels Manufacturers of Illinois’ (BMI) challenges in obtaining capital investment or loans for further development of pennycress, a winter oilseed crop with promising potential for biodiesel production.

BMI has signed a handful of growers to raise pennycress, and hopes to process the crop through a 45-million-gallon-per-year biodiesel operation.

Schock argued the SBA matching grants program, properly structured, could provide small businesses “equal opportunity to participate in the effort to make our country become more energy efficient while also establishing new renewable fuel sources.”

As a winter annual, pennycress is “a great cover crop” that wouldn’t replace existing food crops, according to BMI’s Peter Johnsen, former director of Peoria’s USDA National Center for Ag Utilization Research (NCAUR). BMI estimates pennycress could generate 115 gallons of biodiesel per acre.

But while the federal government has many dollars invested in switchgrass and other cellulosic biomass crops, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) “doesn’t see pennycress on its radar,” Johnsen said.

Johnsen, who testified before Schock’s Small Business subcommittee, cited a three-year, $33 million DOE study focusing on energy crops and other biomass sources.

“At the end of three years and $33 million, they’re just going to have more information,” he told Illinois Farm Bureau representatives. “At the end of our (first) three years, we’re going to have a commercial process and be productive.

“If you gave us the $33 million, we’d actually have a full-scale production facility, probably getting ready to build a second one. We need to try to have DOE understand that this crop exists.”