A yellow, flowery plant seen on Nevada roadsides has the potential to be used as jet fuel in the military.
Research for the plant known as gumweed is being led by the University of Nevada's College of Agriculture.
Glenn Miller, a professor in the College of Agriculture is leading the effort.
"It competes very favorably with something like soy beans for bio-diesel because we can grow ours in marginal land on much less water than they have in other areas so it has some potential in the desert areas of the American West," says Miller.
Miller says first they harvest the gumweed, then they mill it down into small sizes to create a tar like liquid from the plant which can be converted into fuel. He says there is the potential for 60 to 70 gallons of fuel conversion from a single acre of gumweed.
Miller and his team are trying to develop gumweed as a crop that can be grown commercially. He says benefits are the plant's low water requirements and that it doesn't compete with food or animal feed.
In their research, Miller and his team are also trying to avoid releasing carbon dioxide from the fuel into the atmosphere.
"If we can grow this, capture the carbon dioxide out of the air, turn that into fuel and burn that, it's kind of a cycle that will allow us to reduce the amount of CO2 we put into the atmosphere," says Miller.
