Energy

Biofuels are projected to capture a third (or 70 billion barrels) of the total growth in fuel supplies during this coming decade. This poses a daunting challenge for the world's agriculture industry because of limited land and water resources.

Daunting, but at the same time inescapable, given dwindling petroleum supplies, a mounting world demand for energy, and increasingly urgent concerns regarding global warming and the environment.

To meet this challenge, Kaiima uses CGM™ and other advanced and proprietary genomic-based breeding technologies to develop high-yielding energy crops for bio-diesel, bio-ethanol, and biomass energy.

For bio-diesel we are breeding castor varieties that can yield up to 10 tons of seeds (or 5 tons of oil) per hectare per year compared to the global average of between 1-1.5 tons of seeds. With these high yields, fuel from the castor we develop can be economically competitive with the price of petroleum and can be made available on very large scales. Our varieties are suitable for mechanized farming and harvesting on marginal and under-utilized land. We emphasize compactness as well as drought and salt tolerance.

Rapeseed oil is also an important feedstock for bio-diesel. We are collaborating with the prominent rapeseed program at the Anhui Academy of Agriculture in China to increase the yield of their market-leading rapeseed by several tens of percents using our CGM™ platform. Following very encouraging results in recent tests, we expect to begin the commercialization of this crop in the near future.

In our research labs, we have also started programs to develop high-yielding varieties of sugarcane for ethanol and eucalyptus for biomass