High Yield Bioenergy Crop Production for Fertilizer Runoff Capture, Soil Stabilization, and Soil Regeneration in Northern California

Government mandates and corporate sustainability commitments by the aviation industry are driving the market for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Though strides have been made in the aviation and biofuels industries towards achieving sustainability goals through SAF use, what remains is sourcing enough of bio-based materials (feedstock) to produce the amount of SAF needed to meet these goals. The feedstock challenge is compounded by the need to produce high levels of SAF from this feedstock in existing commercial biofuel production processes.To solve these two problems, Hexas has developed a sustainable SAF feedstock, XanoGrass™ that is easily sourced at low-costs and has consistent biochemical properties, as an excellent feedstock source for SAF production. Our Phase I and II efforts address the feedstock problem through defining optimal production locations, improving feedstock properties for use in multiple biomass-to-biofuel conversion processes, and enabling the production of vast amounts of XanoGrass™ feedstock for SAF production using the least water and land.Our Phase I SBIR grant work yielded the preliminary results expected for each of our technical objectives providing a solid foundation for our Phase II work. We developed a go/no-go decision matrix on which to build a software application, determined our minimal viable products as SAF and renewable diesel, with the help of community partners developed a pilot survey to assess the knowledge of, attitudes towards, and willingness of agricultural communities to produce second-generation bioenergy crops, and we were successful in establishing a pilot plot of XanoGrass™ at the wastewater treatment plant in Colusa, CA.Our Phase II goals are to (1) arrive at technology readiness level 6 with our XanoGrass™ feedstock for SAF production, (2) develop a software tool to support XanoGrass™ plantation installations, (3) survey agricultural communities knowledge of, attitudes towards, and willingness to produce second generation bioenergy crop, (4) produceeducational materials specifically for these communities about these crops, and (5) test the value of nanobubble conditioned wastewater on XanoGrass™ production yields and root development, including initiating work on recapturing irrigation resources to avoid depleting ground water resources.With XanoFiber™ as a feedstock, SAF producers will have a viable feedstock source to support production of 450-500 million tons of SAF by 2050 to avoid production of 1,800 megatons of CO2 annually by aircraft without using SAF. In addition, our work in Phase II work will result in (1) XanoFiber™ as a feedstock agnostic to biofuel production methods so that it can be converted into multiple biofuel options and (2) a winning combination of low water use production techniques, higher in ground carbon sequestration, and reuse of irrigation inputs to prevent groundwater depletion.