UMaine Gets $10 Million to Research Turning Wood Products into Jet Fuel… and Fish Food

The Forest Products and Aquaculture Research Institutes at the University of Maine have received $10 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to further research into the effectiveness of converting low-value timber into jet fuel and fish food.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, the USDA Agricultural Research Service and Arbiom, a company based in North Carolina and France that produces sustainable protein ingredients for pet food.

It’s the latest initiative to find a sustainable way to use the state’s abundant forest resources.

The UMaine project is one of seven sustainable agriculture projects worth a combined $70 million announced in June by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Clayton Wheeler, director of the Forest Bioproducts Research Institute, said grant applications were submitted over the past three years as the project developed, and the university received the award March 1. The project’s first kick-off meeting was held in early June, he said.

The goal is to take “low-grade” wood leftover from Maine’s forests, such as branches and small-diameter trees, and break it down into components that can be used as jet fuel and fish feed.

Wheeler said that in forestry, the most valuable wood is used for lumber, with some used to make pulp and paper, but smaller diameter trees “are often removed to increase growth.”

He added that these trees are typically chipped for biomass or left on the forest floor.

“Instead of burning these materials in a biomass boiler to generate electricity or leaving them in the forest, we will process these less valuable materials into fuel and fish feed,” he said.

Wood contains lignins – organic compounds that can be converted into fuel – and sugars that can be fermented into proteins that provide fish food.

The aquaculture and aviation industries are seeing increasing demand for sustainable alternatives to feed and fuel.

“There are alternative aviation fuels, but they’re not necessarily all renewable or sustainable,” Wheeler said. “(Aviation) is the only transportation sector that can’t be met by renewable electricity. We’ll always need high-density liquid fuels for our airplanes.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the Alternative Feed Initiative to advocate for the reduction of the use of fish oil and fishmeal in aquaculture feed and to find more sustainable ways to feed fish that do not negatively impact the health benefits of fish farming.

Sampath Gunukula, a UMaine professor and one of the researchers on the project, said the research has two main goals: developing an efficient technology that will allow wood chips to be processed into fuel and fish feed; and conducting research on the effects of this new feed on Atlantic salmon.

Specifically, Gunukula said there are ways to convert wood chips into sugars for animal feed, but “converting wood chips into sugars is an expensive process and is currently incompatible or not commercially viable.” Instead, Gunukula said the project is trying to develop technology that can produce sugars from wood chips for about 40 cents per kilogram.

After the forest bioproducts institute separates the sugars from the wood chips, the sugars are sent to industrial partner Arbiom to be fermented into protein for USDA-produced fish feed. The process is more economical, Wheeler said, because the byproducts of sugar production are used in fuel production.

“One of the problems with fuel production is that there are byproducts in wood that can’t be efficiently converted into fuel and can be used for other purposes, and in this case, fish feed,” Wheeler said. “We’re basically combining the tools and skills at the university to increase the utilization of the state’s wood resources and also to help grow the aquaculture industry in the state.”

Gunukula said the project also aims to incorporate the project’s findings into course modules at UMaine and through UMaine Cooperative Extension.

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