We do have some good examples, not only just in the agriculture area, but in the oil and gas area as well.
We had a specific project called Prairie Gold that looked at taking two specialty crops called camelina and carinata—these are relatives of canola—and developing the genomics base for those two crops to help two companies move developed crops with a product specification for industrial oils and biojet fuel. For instance, in the carinata project, we were working with Agrisoma and helped fund the development and production of biojet fuel for them as part of that. This was a $4.5 million project working with the University of Saskatchewan and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. So we helped them produce this biojet fuel and they flew a jet in Ottawa at the NRC facility on 100% biojet fuel. This was considered one of the top 25 science news stories in North America that year.
The other company that we're working with there is Linnaeus Plant Sciences. They were looking at taking the camelina oil and using it as a base for high quality, high value specialty biolubricants. With the meal from both of those projects, we were looking at trying to get them into feed studies. Dr. Yarrow referred to the difficulties we have in doing that. Interestingly enough, in the camelina project we had also partnered with Genome Atlantic. We were sharing the genomic information with that group and we were looking at trying to create a meal and oil that would help feed the aquaculture industry as well. So there were industry participants on that side.
These are the types of projects I find the most successful. They're driven by an industry need or a consumer pull, and if we have those, they are probably our best short-term projects. But the long-term projects I referred to before regarding apomixis and other pie-in-the-sky type projects would maybe not be as suitable for private-public partnerships. However, if industry wants to do them, then the public sector has to listen.