With oil more expensive and climate change looking a whole lot scarier, algae-based fuels are back — helped by recent advances in genomics and biotechnology.
Algae, a natural oil-producer, offers multiple paths to biofuel. Varieties that produce high levels of oil can be processed into biocrude and refined into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel; those with more carbohydrates can be processed and fermented to make ethanol.
Because it can be grown on land that's useless for other crops, using water unsuitable for agriculture, algae doesn't conflict with food production, and oil-per-acre yields can be much higher than food crops like soybeans. New genomic and proteomic technologies also offer the hope of tweaking the genes that increase oil output to make algal fuels economical.
An article in MIT Technology Review today looks at algae, and at several startups that are taking up where the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) left off. The NREL's decade-long algae-to-fuel project was killed by low oil prices in 1996 — although they too expect to start up again with algae within the next year.
I'll be talking today with two of those companies, one of which is now working with the NREL: GreenFuel Technologies Corporation and LiveFuels.
GreenFuel is developing systems that use algae bioreactor technology to convert CO2 from smokestack flue gases to clean, renewable biofuels, such as biodiesel, ethanol or methane, while also reducing NOx. The premise is that reusing CO2 in renewable fuels instead of emitting it directly from factory and power plant smokestacks will decrease total emissions — economically and without retooling. Their tests reportedly show CO2 capture rates of about 80 percent during daylight hours.
LiveFuels is funding and coordinating research at its lab, at the NREL, and at the DOE's Sandia National Laboratories, home to the DOE Combustion Research Facility. The initial focus of that research is algae-to-biocrude. As Kathe Andrews-Cramer, technical lead researcher for biofuels and bioenergy at Sandia, told MIT Technology News: "We could replace certainly all of our diesel fuel with algal-derived oils, and possibly replace a lot more than that."
