Sweet sorghum is a highly productive, short rotation agricultural crop with low water requirement, able to simultaneously produce large quantities of biomass, fermentable sugars and high nutritional content grain. It offers significant advantages as a bioenergy crop, capable of production of renewable transport fuels and renewable electricity while also producing high value animal feed and food products for human consumption. In Queensland, there is significant potential to utilise existing sugarcane and grain sorghum industry infrastructure for cultivation, harvesting and processing of sweet sorghum, which could minimise required development effort, leading to rapid uptake of sweet sorghum as a new rural industry. This project aims to assess and establish opportunities to develop a sweet sorghum industry in Australia through evaluating the viability of a sweet sorghum cropping and production system for commercial co-production of renewable energy and food. The project includes crop trials to assess agronomic performance and product quality; factory trials of processing sweet sorghum in existing sugar mills; optimisation of juice fermentation at pilot scales; and process modelling and life cycle analysis of the system. Establishment of this new industry delivers significant economic benefits to Australia, particularly the rural and regional communities around which the industry will be based. Development of renewable electricity and biofuels products assists in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. The establishment of a viable crop that requires significantly less water than sugarcane provides climate change adaptation opportunities for established farming businesses in traditional sugarcane areas and underpins the viability and sustainability of rural and regional communities.

Bioenergy, Bioproducts & Energy

Queensland University of Technology

The primary objective of the project is to assess and demonstrate the commercial feasibility and sustainability of sweet sorghum as a feedstock for renewable energy and food production in Australia, by: 1) Undertaking crop trials in South-East Queensland of the major commercially available sweet sorghum varieties to assess variety performance and to optimise crop productivity; 2) Assessing the yield, productivity, product quality and significant agronomic indicators for each of the commercially available varieties; 3) Evaluating the opportunities for utilising existing sugarcane infrastructure for harvesting, transportation and processing of the crop, including utilisation of transport and processing infrastructure in the non-crushing season; 4) Optimising the fermentation process for ethanol production from sweet sorghum juice including the co-fermentation of the sweet sorghum juice with sugarcane juice or molasses at both the laboratory and pilot scale; 5) Developing a process model including mass and energy balances for a proposed sweet sorghum fermentation facility for the production of ethanol ; and 6) Undertaking a life cycle assessment (LCA) of the proposed cropping, harvesting and processing system.

Develop new opportunities

An environmentally sustainable Australia

Natural resource management

BBE-Feedstocks for bioenergy and bioproducts

Ian O'Hara, phone +61 7 3138 1551

Roslyn Prinsley, phone (02) 6271 4120

Michael McArdle