CHICAGO, May 2 (UPI) -- As oil prices rise and food-based ethanol appears increasingly unsustainable, companies are scrambling to find new energy crops for the next generation of biofuels.

The development of feedstocks to replace corn is crucial for wide-scale biofuels production, said Steve Koonin, chief scientist for BP, a global petroleum company.

"If you used all the corn in the world and converted it with 100 percent efficiency to biofuels … you might be able to (replace) 15 percent of transport fuels," Koonin said at the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing, held this week in Chicago. "(But) if you want carbon beyond petroleum, you're either going to dig it out of the ground as coal or get it from biomass, and that, I think, is a powerful argument for biofuels."

So how can these two conflicting needs -- fuel and food -- be reconciled? With crops specifically designed for fuel production, according to Koonin and others.

These "dedicated energy" crops are just emerging on the marketplace, with many still in development stages. This week the chief executive officer of California-based energy company Ceres Inc. announced the release of the first line of commercially available energy crops under the trade name Blade.