The first shipment of grain from biofuel crop, carinata, is about to be processed for aircraft fuel in France less than a year after British energy giant, BP, signed up to source the oilseed from Nufarm's contract growers in Argentina.
Early Australian trials of the summer oilseed cover crop, developed by Nufarm's Nuseed division, could be grown in next summer.
However, demand for seed to expand production in the Americas is so strong initial local plantings will be modest.
Nuseed expected the canola-like carinata plant could make a promising cover crop in, at least, part of the northern NSW and southern Queensland cropping zone, complementing summer sorghum and cotton plantings.
Up to 5 million hectares of eastern Australia's northern zone cropping country was normally left fallow over summer.
West Australian prospects for carinata are also being explored as BP converts its former Kwinana oil refinery (closed in 2021) to make sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by 2025.
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The Kwinana site, now used as an oil import facility, would also provide opportunities to supply low emissions marine fuel alternatives to replace environmentally unfriendly bunker diesel.
A green hydrogen plant is on the drawing board, too.
On the east coast a $500m SAF plant in Queensland is also proposed to convert tallow, cooking oil and oilseed crops to avgas by 2025, if construction plans go to schedule for developer, the privately-owned Oceania Biofuels.
The construction timeline for the 350 million litre a year SAF and renewable diesel plant is due to begin at Gladstone this month.
Nufarm managing director, Greg Hunt, told last week's annual general meeting the flow on benefits of new hybrid plant breeding technology and increased grower uptake suggested the 2023 carinata area in Argentina and the US would total more than 80,000 hectares.
About 35,000ha was grown under contract in South America last year.
Nufarm has a long term offtake and market development deal which will see BP and its affiliates buy carinata crushed by European oilseed processor, Saipol.
Saipol recently said it was expanding processing operations in France to accommodate the new crop, which also has stockfeed meal market options.
Nufarm is soon to confirm a processing partner in the US to enable low emissions carinata-based fuel sales in California.
BP has estimated renewable fuels could cut carbon emissions by up to 90 per cent compared with fossil fuels, and it was therefore looking to develop worldwide SAF operations similar to that planned for WA.
Refining vice president at BP, Sven Boss-Walker, last month described the first shipment of carinata, after three years of South American Nuseed crop trials and seed increase plantings, as an "exciting milestone".
"We look forward to using our global reach to sell carinata oil into growing markets and accelerate market adoption," he said.
Decarbonising transportation, notably heavy vehicle and aviation fleets, was a significant challenge, but he said the energy multinational was excited by the potential of lower carbon feedstocks helping to transform the fuel sector.
Mr Hunt told the AGM Nufarm's bioenergy platform, which now included the genetic rights behind industrial sugar cane developed by GranBio, would help meet rapidly rising global demand for renewable feedstocks and low carbon energy.
Nuseed has a long term licence with Brazilian-based GranBio to accelerate plant development and farming areas growing the energy cane for the ethanol market.
Aside from the low emission fuel benefits, Mr Hunt noted energy cane and carinata also provided atmospheric carbon-digesting advantages to the environment.
He said carinata promised to improve cropping soils, protecting them from soil erosion, moisture loss and restoring soil carbon and soil structure via its extensive root system below the ground and surface biomass when the crop was harvested.
Its large canopy would also help reduce weed pressure.
Nufarm has pointed to Rabobank estimates of at least 170m hectares of farmland in Europe and the Americas which could benefit from cover cropping within existing farming rotations.
Planting just 1.5pc of that estimated cropland to carinata, in between primary food crop rotations, had the potential to produce about 3.7 billion litres of SAF annually from 2030.
It could also potentially remove 8m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the environment each year.
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Andrew Marshall
Andrew Marshall is the group agribusiness writer for ACM's state agricultural weeklies and websites. He is a former editor at The Land and has worked in various Rural Press group roles in Canberra, North Richmond (NSW) and Toowoomba (Qld).
Andrew Marshall is the group agribusiness writer for ACM's state agricultural weeklies and websites. He is a former editor at The Land and has worked in various Rural Press group roles in Canberra, North Richmond (NSW) and Toowoomba (Qld).
