Innovation Anthology #209:
Who needs oil from Saudi Arabia or Fort McMurray when you can grow triticale in the back forty?
Triticale is a cereal grain hybridized from wheat and rye half a century ago. It never took off as a substitute for wheat flour.
But in the 21st century, the Alberta Research Council is betting triticale will make a dandy substitute for petroleum.
The Council has just received $15 million dollars from the federal Agricultural Bioproducts Innovation Program to show us how.
ARC’s Richard Gibson explains: RICHARD GIBSON: The main one that the Triticale Initiative is looking at actually is chemical and material applications. If you had petroleum, oil, crude oil coming out of the ground and you put it into a refinery, specially what happens there, you’ve got crude oil turned into a whole range of products. And if we think about triticale as the crude oil for a biorefinery and put triticale in one end of the refinery and we get a whole range of products coming out the other side, anything from materials to chemicals and including energy as well.
According to Richard Gibson, triticale grows well in marginal areas, and is a good addition to a suite of industrial crops for biorefining, including hemp.
Thanks today to the Alberta Research Council.
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Alberta Research Council
Established as the first provincial research organization in Canada, the Alberta Research Council is 85 years old. The Alberta Research Council (ARC) develops and commercializes technologies to give customers a competitive advantage. A leader in innovation, ARC provides solutions globally to the energy, life sciences, agriculture, environment, forestry and manufacturing sectors.
ARC performs about five per cent of the roughly $1.5 billion in R&D done in Alberta each year, and generates revenues of approximately $84 million per year. ARC operates from five sites across the province in Edmonton, Calgary, Vegreville and Devon and employs more than 600 highly-skilled people.
In January 2010, under the new Alberta Innovation Framework, the Alberta Research Council was restructured and incorporated into the new provincial agency Alberta Innovates Technology Futures.
Program Date: 2009-03-10