Biofuel // Current

Turning Algae into Biofuel

Green! Exxon is jumping on the bandwagon

Jenime
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Why growing virgin vegetable oil to burn is crazy

Excerpt: "I spoke to the Green party this morning, and discovered that Mercer had... more

lookatmypix
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Fuel-Thirsty U.S. Navy Pledges 50% Cut in Oil Use by 2020, and More

The United States Navy is taking a big leap forward in "greening" its 50,000-strong,... more

fordlyn
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more GREENWASHING...'Can Palm Oil Be Sustainable?'

I AM IN DISBELIEF THAT A COMPANY that is supposed to be based on healthy, CRUELTY-FREE... more

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Why Algae Can't Fuel Airplanes Today ...

Today's Cranky Flier blog offers an interesting distillation (pun intended) of why... more

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Government admits palm kernel animal feed contributes to rainforest destruction |

Tauranga, New Zealand — John Key’s Government today admitted that production of... more

julesrs007
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74 Years Ago, Henry Ford Predicted Hemp Cars Powered by Biofuels

Today’s auto industry is not what Henry Ford envisioned, especially considering he... more

sharprichard
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Green Visionary Henry Ford and his Predictions about Ethanol and Hemp based fuels

Henry Ford believed in using Hemp products to make cars. He was green 50 years before... more

sharprichard
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Why can’t we grow hemp in America?

You can eat it, wear it, use it but not grow it in America. Why? Hemp is the fastest... more

sharprichard
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The Bad Side of "green" fuel.

How the demand for "green" biofuel is destroying rainforests.

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Most of us know about Hemp's benefits but here is a quick overview from a blogger.

"The hemp plant was one of humankind's first cultivated plants and there is quite a... more

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Is Algae The Next Miracle Fuel?

The fluorescent green mantle of biofuel savior has come to rest upon algae—slimily, sure, but for good reason. Algae grows in fresh water or salt water or sewage, rather than competing with food crops for land or resources. And algae actually sucks out the pollution from coal-fired power plants, with a theoretical yield of oil per acre that's hundreds of times greater than, say, corn.

But after all the hype—and there's been plenty of it—the fact remains that nobody has yet proven they can cheaply and reliably transform the stuff from a thick, green slurry to a finished fuel capable of making a dent in America's 870 million–gallon-per-day petroleum habit.

"I get a lot of people telling me that they've got thousands of gallons, but when I actually ask for a sample I can get maybe two," says Jennifer Holmgren, director of the UOP renewable energy and chemicals division, which is working to refine jet fuel from feedstocks that include algae.

"Google some of the numbers, and you've got people claiming that right now they're producing 35,000 gallons per acre per year, and they'll be producing 100,000 gallons—and that's just impossible," says Solix Biofuels lead scientist Bryan Wilson, a veritable grandfather with two successful years in the fledgling algae industry. "There's probably not more than a few barrels floating around right now."

Two years ago, there were less than a handful of companies chasing the next wave of so-called "pond scum" power. Today, there are dozens, many backed by big energy industry players such as Chevron and Shell. Last year, DARPA granted UOP $6.7 million to study how "second-generation" feedstocks, or nonfood crops, could turn into JP-8 jet fuel for U.S. Air Force and NATO fighters. Just this month, Airbus and JetBlue announced goals to replace 30 percent of jet fuel with second-gen biofuels by 2030. Air New Zealand and Dutch airline KLM have similar plans in the works.

All that's missing, for now, is all that oil they need to refine.

"It's frustrating for the outside world, but we've been learning how to do agriculture for about 5000 years, and we've been learning how to make oil from algae now for only a couple of years. So there's a lot of learning, and the curve is pretty steep," Wilson says. "This is probably going to be the first summer that you're getting anything more than just test tubes of oil produced."

This is algae's second coming. The first attempt, run by the U.S. government in the wake of the last oil crisis, was killed in 1996 by the Clinton administration while oil hovered around $20 per barrel. But even now, with record-high petroleum prices, algae stands in no position to compete, and hurdles remain at every stage of production.

Just choosing which kind of algae to start with is a herculean task. There are well over 100,000 species, each adapted to grow in different environments at different rates, and each capable of producing different amounts of oil—or none at all. The government collected more than 3000 different strains from all over the world in the 1980s, 300 of which were deemed promising. Today, many algal strains have been engineered into genetically modified superplants—the secret formulas of biofuel startups—but there is, as yet, no proven winner. Not to mention, there remains the small matter of how to make the algae flourish, how to cheaply dry several million gallons of subsequent slush, and how to get the oil out of minuscule cell walls and into the metaphorical barrel.

"It's not as easy as running a combine through a field of canola to get the seeds and crush them," says Michael Weaver, CEO of the Washington biofuels company Bionavitas. "For anybody who thinks that we can go from ‘Hey, let's look at algae,' to full-on fuel production in the period of the past three to five years, it's just never going to happen that way."

A number of pilot plants scheduled to come online in the next several months will likely give .....The fluorescent green mantle of biofuel savior has come to rest upon algae—slimily,... more