The Mustard Seed Man

The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner roared down the runway before sailing serenely up into the blue skies over Los Angeles International Airport. The Qantas flight, heading for Melbourne, Australia, seemed like any other leaving LAX that day, except for the fact that this plane was partially powered by biojet fuel, making for a reduced carbon footprint.

That this — the world’s first United States-to-Australia biofuel flight — happened at all, is thanks to USC Dornsife alumnus Steve Fabijanski.

Fabijanski, who earned his Ph.D. in biology in 1981, is the CEO and president of Agrisoma Biosciences Inc., the company he founded in 2001 in Quebec, Canada, to provide a strategy for more sustainable commercial transportation.

As airlines worldwide pledge to become carbon neutral by 2021 and cut their carbon footprint in half by 2050, Fabijanski believes he has found a solution. It lies in amustard-like oilseed called carinata. Closely resembling kale in appearance, the plant, a combination of canola and mustard, has long been eaten as a vegetable in North Africa.

Fabijanski’s team used plant-breeding techniques to develop carinata into a non-GMO, seed-producing crop containing high levels of oil and protein. The chemical composition of the oil makes it particularly well-suited to being refined into jet fuel. Once processed, carinata is chemically identical to conventional, fossil fuel-derived jet fuel.

In fact, Fabijanski says, anyone examining a gallon of jet fuel and a gallon of carinata-derived biojet fuel would be hard pressed to tell them apart. However, Agrisoma’s biojet fuel produces 77 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels. That’s because carinata uses its capacity for photo-synthesis to capture significantly more of the greenhouse gas CO₂ from the atmosphere than is released by burning carinata biojet fuel.

While less than 5 percent of flights are currently powered by blending biofuel with traditional jet fuel, he is optimistic that eventually half of the more than 79 billion gallons of fuel used by the airline industry will be replaced by biofuel.

In September 2018, Fabijanski fueled a second international flight, this time a United Airlines transatlantic run from San Francisco to Zurich. In April this year, Agrisoma began working with Canada’s Department of National Defence, fueling sustainable flights for military transport and patrol and for search and rescue. More biofueled flights are planned for the near future.

A Multi-Pronged Approach

But Fabijanski’s approach to climate change is aimed at tackling not just one major contributor to greenhouse gases, but two — air travel and meat production. Animal agriculture, particularly the production of beef, accounts for up to 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Deforestation, which is driven primarily by agriculture, contributes another 18 percent.

“The reality is that to address climate change, we need to either stop what we’re doing now, or dramatically change how we’re doing it,” Fabijanski said.

His solution focuses squarely on the latter option. After all, he notes, we’re unlikely to stop eating meat and traveling by air. What’s remarkable is that his innovative strategy appears to have killed two birds with one stone.

Not only does Agrisoma’s biojet fuel help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he says, carinata crops also offer a new source of sustainably produced protein.

“The combination enables us to provide what we see as a solution that can address climate change from both angles — it’s not only the fuel we burn, but also where we get our food and how we eat.”

If that weren’t success enough, the plant also has the capacity to rejuvenate and enrich the soil.

This means that carinata is good for the environment, the world’s food supply and farmers.

Fabijanski says this multi-pronged approach to addressing climate change will have a significant impact that will increase over time as it results in more greenhouse gas savings and a positive effect on the food chain.

His company’s mantra, he stresses, is to grow carinata without taking food out of production.

“We want to add to the overall food supply through this animal feed product so we can produce energy and more food, but not increase the footprint of farming,” he said. “That’s one of the big challenges — how to feed and power the planet without taking away natural prairie and pasture.”

The answer? Fabijanski developed carinata to flourish in areas where typical food crops won’t grow or during seasons when food crops cannot be grown due to crop rotation.

“For us, it’s all about sustainable farming practices that then enhance the land and add back to it,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is cut down forests to feed people. The company we formed was built on the idea that we can do better with what’s available and we can do more with less.”

Two Major Challenges

Fabijanski says his company faces two major challenges to get airlines to adopt biojet fuel. First, availability: At the time of writing, there are only two airports with a regular supply, LAX and Oslo Airport in Norway.

Agrisoma is tackling that issue by expanding carinata farming to South America and the southeast U.S. The company is also evaluating the crop as an option for European producers.

“Our objective is to go from millions of gallons to billions of gallons of fuel, so obviously that requires us to scale up production,” Fabijanski said.

The second challenge is to ensure that policy and incentives are in place to ensure appropriate pricing. Renewables in general carry a higher expense than fossil-derived products, but with the right policy and incentives, more inclusion of renewables becomes possible.

California is leading the way, Fabijanski says, with the California Air Resources Board and California Low Fuel Standards. He hopes other jurisdictions follow the state’s example by allowing fuel companies to generate carbon credits based on the greenhouse gas performance of their products, thus enabling the alternative fuel industry to play a bigger role in greenhouse gas reductions.

Steve Fabijanski stands in a field of carinata. The chemical composition of oil from the plant’s seeds make it particularly well-suited to being refined into jet fuel. Carinata crops also offer a new source of sustainably produced protein.

“When you have really good greenhouse gas mitigation, that fuel’s worth more and its value then gets offset within the market,” Fabijanski says, explaining California’s system.

“So, it’s not a subsidy, it’s not a grant, it’s a market-based measure that enables renewable fuels to compete with petroleum-based fuels, based on their performance and environmental attributes.”

And, after all, fossil fuel companies have been receiving enormous subsidies for decades, with the global total in 2017 alone reaching more than $300 billion, according to the International Energy Agency.

Feeding the World

Born in 1960s Chicago to a machinist and a housewife, Fabijanski’s upbringing during a politically turbulent era not only helped forge his belief that it was possible to change things for the better, but also sharpened his determination to do so.

“I remember Civil Rights riots, Watergate, the Vietnam War — all these areas where, if you had enough people focused in the right direction, you could actually change things,” he said. “Part of that philosophy rubbed off on me.”

Fabijanski originally wanted to be a marine biologist, attending the University of Miami for his undergraduate degree. But his growing interest in genetics and protein chemistry and his desire to work with Maria Pellegrini, former professor and chair of biology and dean of research, brought him to graduate school at USC Dornsife.

There, Fabijanski said he found freedom to be creative and to think differently.

“Those were the best years of my life. Biology, at that point, was throwing out surprises that nobody could see six months before. It was a very exciting time to be part of that.”

Fabijanski’s first focus after earning his doctorate was how to use technology to increase crop yields in order to feed the world.

The solution — creating hybrid seeds, which provide better crop performance and overall yield — came to Fabijanski and a group of fellow scientists over beers in a Toronto bar. Originally sketched out on a cocktail napkin, this pioneering concept underpinned Fabijanski’s first company, Paladin Hybrids, one of the earliest to apply techniques of biotechnology to the production of hybrid seeds.

Fabijanski and his team believed that to invigorate self-pollinating plants, they could make them into male or female plants, then combine them to create hybrid seeds.

Fabijanski filed the patent for the idea — one of more than 100 he currently holds. It’s still the one that makes him happiest. It’s also the one, he notes, that’s underpinning the 22-million-acre-strong Canadian canola seed industry.

“To see an invention go to a patent, and then see that patent show up in regular commerce was a huge accomplishment, both from a patent and a development perspective,” he said. 

A Lofty Goal

When he’s not developing pioneering patents, Fabijanski is a keen amateur cyclist and music lover. He’s the proud owner of between 2,000 and 3,000 records from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, including Chicago blues and rare vinyl from L.A.’s hard-core punk scene, and he still cruises swap meets and record shops looking for unusual collectors’ items.

Fabijanski wakes every morning at sunrise to the squawking of Penelope, his wife’s 22-year-old African gray parrot, one of two she owns.

Penelope has adopted Fabijanski’s voice and her favorite phrases are ones — he pauses here, searching for a way to put it delicately — “you don’t say in church.

“Put it this way,” he adds, “she’d be really at home on a pirate ship.”

Fabijanski believes it’s his education as a scientist that has helped him feel at home navigating a startup environment.

“With scientific training, maybe 95 percent of what you do usually doesn’t work. But you live for the times when everything goes right and you do something really new and innovative. You fall down a lot, but it’s really more about knowing that you can get up and go do something and get it right the next time, that keeps me going,” Fabijanski says, then chuckles. “Maybe I’m just a masochist that way.”

Of all the many times he has got it right in his life, Fabijanski is most proud of his degree from USC Dornsife. It inspired him, he says, to try to change the world.

“You can tilt at windmills all day long and you’ll make a lot of noise and at the end you might feel good, but you may not change things,” Fabijanski warns. Instead, experience has taught him that the best way to effect change in sectors like energy, with its political capital, infrastructure and huge
investment in major companies and jobs, is from within. 

“You can actually work within a well-established industry to bring about some meaningful change so it becomes more sustainable,” Fabijanski says. “It’s a lofty goal, but I think we’ve made an impact in terms of demonstrating there are ways to create positive change that don’t require you to wear organic cotton T-shirts and Birkenstocks.” 

Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine’s Spring/Summer 2019 issue >>