Companies and governments all over the world are racing to find cleaner, greener fuels to end our society’s addiction to oil and cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. But in the rush and tumult of new developments and optimistic predictions, it’s hard to separate the hype from real hope. So a recent series of articles from Nature News feels like a public service, as the articles investigate the scientific and economic state of affairs for four different kinds of biofuels.
The first article focused on the weedy plant jatropha, which was initially hailed as a biofuel wonder plant because it can survive in poor soil and harsh conditions, and because of its extremely oily seeds. But recently, investments in jatropha projects have fallen off dramatically. Environmental scientist Robert Bailis says that “over the past three years, the investment got way ahead of the plant science.” … Early investors are now realizing the plant’s limitations. Jatropha can live in very dry conditions, but doesn’t necessarily yield a lot of seeds. The plant takes three years or more to reach maturity, requiring care along the way. And jatropha seedlings are often not well-suited to the climate in which they are planted [Nature News].
Now, companies are regrouping and going back to basic science; they’re crossbreeding plants to create strains that mature faster or have higher oil yields, and are seeking out the habitats most suited for jatropha plantations. The plant may well have a role to play in the future energy mix, but it’s no botanical cure-all.
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Watermelons could do more than grace the tables at picnics across the land: They could also serve as a source of biofuel. Researchers fermented watermelon juice to produce ethanol, according to a study published in Biotechnology for Biofuels, and while the melons aren’t likely to become a primary biofuel crop, the process could help out farmers.
Nearly one-fifth of the watermelon crop grown in the United States is left in the fields after harvest because of defects on the melons’ rinds. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the melon on the inside, but our only method of judgment is the outside,” said [lead author] Wayne Fish [Greenwire]. Although farmers often till the abandoned melons into the soil, the value of the nutrients provided by this practice is much less than the overall cost to farmers of losing so much of their crop.
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A startup biotechnology company unveiled its grand plans for a new energy source yesterday–although it didn’t share a few crucial details. The company, Joule Biotechnologies, says it has genetically engineered an organism that can efficiently produce unprecedented amounts of liquid fuel. However, chief executive Bill Sims will not reveal what that marvelous organism is. “If I tell you what the organism is, I’m inviting everyone else to take part in a transformational, evolutionary, game-changing technology” [Boston Globe], he says.
The company’s announcement comes soon after both ExxonMobil and Dow Chemical announced their investments in algae-derived biofuel production, and Joule’s technology has some similarities with those two projects. Like both those algae projects, Joule says it won’t be harvesting a plant and squeezing the oil out of it; instead the organism will secrete the fuel. But Sims says his organisms aren’t algae. In addition, Sims said the organisms do not need fresh water but can be grown in both brackish water or graywater, which is nonindustrial waste water from sources like baths and washing machines [Reuters].
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Earlier this week, the oil giant ExxonMobil announced a significant shift in direction: Rather than drilling ever downward in an attempt to find more oil, the company will invest heavily in green, growing things that can manufacture biofuel. Exxon plans to put $600 million into the production of algae-based biofuels, and will partner with the genetics company Synthetic Genomics run by genomics pioneer Craig Venter. The announcement came just a week after another industrial giant, Dow Chemical, declared its own investment in algae technology.
The biofuel industry is currently facing a shift from first-generation biofuels to so-called advanced biofuels as evidence mounts that corn-based ethanol and soybean biodiesel are not as ecologically, socially or economically sustainable as many first thought…. Algae have been touted as a better organic material for producing biofuel by many researchers and entrepreneurs. It does not take up any arable land and can be grown in controlled conditions; at a basic level algae only needs water, sunlight, carbon dioxide and some nutrients to grow [CNN].
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At a Texas industrial site, the vats of chemicals may soon stand adjacent to long tubes filled with algae. Industrial giant Dow Chemical today announced a new partnership with startup company Algenol Biofuels to build a pilot plant, which will use algae to convert carbon dioxide emissions into ethanol. That ethanol could be used either as a biofuel or, eventually, as an ingredient for Dow’s plastics.
Pond scum is one of the hottest trends in green technology, and a few dozen companies are racing to bring algae-based biofuels to the market. But one prominent algae company, GreenFuel, went out of business just a few months ago, leading some commentators to believe that we are a longer way off from commercialization than claimed by breathless algae start-up press releases [Greentech Media]. If Dow and Algenol can bring their plans to fruition, it will be the most compelling argument yet that the renewable energy source does have the potential that its supporters say.
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The oil-rich and weedy plant jatropha has been hailed as the most promising source of biofuel on the planet, and one airline has already begun testing a jatropha-derived fuel in its jumbo jets. But a new analysis suggests that the plant may not be a miracle crop destined to solve all our energy problems: Current jatropha plantations are not realising the oil yields that drove the “Jatropha euphoria” [EcoWorldly].
It was previously thought that the hardy jatropha plant would require less water than other biofuel crops like sugarcane and corn and could grow in marginal soil, so growers wouldn’t have to take fertile land out of agricultural use. But the new study rebuts that assumption. “The claim that jatropha doesn’t compete for water and land with food crops is complete nonsense,” says study coauthor Arjen Hoekstra. The researcher says it’s true that the plant can grow with little water and can survive through periods of drought, but to flourish, it needs good growing conditions just like any other plant. “If there isn’t sufficient water, you get a low amount of oil production,” Hoekstra says [Technology Review].
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The fast growing plant switchgrass has been heralded as the next generation of biofuel stock: Unlike fertilizer-dependent corn, researchers say it’s highly efficient to grow the grass and process it into ethanol. But a new study suggests that there’s an even better use for switchgrass and other plants. Rather than turning them into ethanol to fill the gas tanks of cars, plants should be burned in power plants to generate “bioelectricity,” which can power electric cars.
Using a sophisticated computer analysis, researchers found that a small sport utility vehicle could do 9,000 highway miles (14,484 km) on the energy produced from an acre of switchgrass converted into ethanol. But converting that biomass into electricity allowed a battery-powered SUV to get 14,000 miles (22,531 km) on the highway…. “One of the driving factors that lead to this result is that the electric motor is much more efficient than the internal combustion engine,” said the lead author of the study, Elliott Campbell [Reuters].
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In another step forward for biofuels, a commercial jet took to the skies yesterday over New Zealand to test a new jet fuel blend that uses oil from the oily jatropha plant. Air New Zealand announced that a Boeing 747 plane flew for about two hours yesterday, running on a 50/50 blend of conventional jet fuel and biofuel. Jatropha—a weedy bush from Africa that produces seeds rich in oil—was selected because it is not a food crop and can be grown on land unsuitable for food production. The roughly three tons of liquid jatropha biofuel came from plants grown in India, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania, the airline says [Scientific American].
Air New Zealand is the second airline to test-fly a jet plane powered by biofuel. The first was Virgin Atlantic Airways, which in February flew a Boeing 747-400 from London to Amsterdam with one of its four tanks filled with jet fuel containing a 20 percent blend of biofuel made of coconut and babbasu oil [Greentech Media]. Meanwhile, other airlines are developing jet fuels derived from algae or oilseed plants: Continental Airlines and Japan Airlines both have test flights scheduled for January.
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Genetically engineered bacteria can now produce long-chain alcohols that could be used as biofuel, scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [subscription required]. Remarkably, the researchers synthetically modified the bacteria’s metabolism to churn out a type of energy-rich alcohol not normally found in nature. “Previous metabolic engineering work typically produces compounds that already exist in nature,” says coauthor James Liao… “Our work here aims to produce compounds that are not synthesized in nature” [Science News].
In addition to ordinary genetic engineering, which involves taking genes from different species (in this case, genes from yeast and a cheese-making bacteria), the new study also required a third, custom-made artificial gene. The three genes were inserted into the genome of E. coli bacteria. The researchers designed the genes to extend E. coli’s metabolic pathway so that toward the end, the precursor compounds that would normally get converted into amino acids instead turn into long-chain alcohols [Technology Review]. These long-chain alcohols string together six carbon atoms, packing in more potential energy per molecule. Ethanol has only two carbon atoms, and no other naturally-occurring alcohol contains more than five.
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If life gives you saltwater, grow salt-loving plants. That’s the cheerful prescription two ecologists have offered to cope with the salinization of coastal fresh water supplies that would likely occur if global warming causes sea levels to rise, bringing saltwater sloshing further inland. The scientists say that convincing farmers to grow edible salt-tolerant plants would prepare them for changing conditions, and would also allow them to utilize previously barren coastal deserts and degraded agricultural land.
Governments should begin to invest in “saltwater agriculture,” says coauthor Jelte Rozema. “We have limited amounts of freshwater – most of it is used for drinking water. Gradually it will be profitable to think of brackish water and sea water as a resource.” … The scientists suggest the best way forward is to domesticate wild plants, crossbreeding them to produce higher yields [BBC News]. Researchers points to edible plants like sea kale and samphire (sometimes called sea asparagus) as likely candidates for domestication, as both grow happily amid the sea spray. In the Netherlands, researchers have experimented with growing sea kale as a crop in coastal areas, and their results have been a hit at one island restaurant. “It has a stronger flavor than most vegetables but brings out very nice accents in food,” [restaurateur Jef] Schuur said. “Growing sea kale here shows that there are a lot more opportunities for local produce on low-lying islands affected by salt” [Bloomberg].
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A newly discovered tree fungus could be on its way to the gas station. The fungus, Gliocladium roseum, is able to turn plant matter into gaseous hydrocarbons that are almost chemically identical to diesel fuel. “This is the only organism that has ever been shown to produce such an important combination of fuel substances,” said researcher Gary Strobel from Montana State University. “The fungus can even make these diesel compounds from cellulose, which would make it a better source of biofuel than anything we use at the moment” [LiveScience].
The fungus grows inside trees in the rainforests of Patagonia, in the southern part of Argentina and Chile. After discovering the new fungus wedged between cells in a stem from an Ulmo tree (Eucryphia cordifolia), Strobel and colleagues cultured the organism, collected the gaseous compounds it produced, and ran the compounds through a mass spectrometer to identify them. When he saw the printout, Strobel says, “every hair on my body stood up.” The list included octane, 1-octene, heptane, 2-methyl, and hexadecane–all common components of diesel fuels [ScienceNOW]. The gaseous compound, dubbed “myco-diesel,” is thought to be used by G. roseum to poison other fungi.
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A green technology company that turns pond scum into biofuel has announced plans to build the first commercial-scale algae farm, a $92 million complex of greenhouses that are expected to eventually cover 247 acres. The company, GreenFuel Technologies, wants to recycle carbon dioxide from factories and power plants, and will use that gas plus sunshine to nourish its algae fields. The process provides two environmental benefits in one, as it simultaneously absorbs carbon dioxide emissions and provides a renewable source of fuel.
As prices for vegetable oils used to make biofuels has remained high, algae advocates have looked upon the slime as a possible savior. After all, algae are oily and could potentially produce more oil per acre than palm or other oil-yielding crops. Companies haven’t yet succeeded in producing algae affordably and at significant volumes in spite of years of research and development, but a number of venture-backed companies cropped up to take on the challenge [Greentech Media]. While the companies Sapphire Energy and Solazyme have also garnered attention and funding, GreenFuel Technologies seems to have beat the competition to the punch on commercializing its technology.
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Look, up in the sky: It’s a biofuel-powered jet! It’s a hydrogen-powered plane! In fact, you can expect to see both of these alternative energy aircraft in the sky in coming years. The aviation industry is rushing to innovate as fuel prices continue to take their toll and as the public questions the impact air travel has on climate change.
In North Dakota, an engineering team working with DARPA has created a soybean and canola oil biofuel for jets that they say is indistinguishable from conventional jet fuel, with a similar density and freezing point. The research team is currently in the process of producing 25 gallons (95 liters) of the bio–jet fuel for ground testing in a jet engine as early as next month. “The thing that needs to happen is a purchase order to come through from the Air Force so we can get [the] investment to build that first plant,” [engineer Chad] Wocken says. “We could get a plant operational in two to five years if there were a commitment to buy the fuel” [Scientific American].
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A “sustainable chemical” company called Genomatica has developed a way to use sugar and genetically engineered bacteria to produce a common industrial chemical that’s usually produced using petroleum, and which is found in everything from Spandex to car bumpers. By using sugar from sugar cane as a feedstock, industrial chemical companies can get a cheaper alternative to petroleum-derived chemicals, while investing in processes that are less polluting and nontoxic, said Genomatica CEO Chris Gann [CNET].
Genomatica produces the chemical, 1,4-butanediol (BDO), by feeding pure glucose derived from sugarcane to E. coli bacteria, which has been engineered to produce BDO. “We have engineered the organism such that it has to secrete that product in order for it to grow,” says [company president] Christophe Schilling…. “The interests of the organism are aligned with our interests: It grows faster when it produces more” [Scientific American].
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A green technology company has created a jet fuel from algae and announced yesterday that the new product meets vigorous aviation standards. The California-based company, Solazyme, said it’s near to creating cost-competitive fuels: “The end goal is to be at or less than the cost of fossil fuel and my best guess is we’ll be at that point within 24 to 36 months,” Jonathan Wolfson, the company’s chief executive, said [Reuters]. The company’s technology uses genetically modified algae, which convert the cellulose from materials like wood chips, switchgrass, or sawdust into oil.
Solazyme had its new fuel tested by an independent company to ensure that its product has the same density, thickness, and freezing point as conventional jet fuels. “This is not like conventional biodiesel, where you can take french fry grease from McDonald’s and turn it into oil in your garage,” said [company president] Harrison Dillon…. “Planes will fall out of the sky if you don’t have a high-quality fuel that meets strict standards. … What Solazyme has done is demonstrate the first-ever manufacture of high-quality jet fuel from algae” [San Francisco Chronicle].
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