Morbidly Obese Algae

A California group has discovered a metabolic trigger in algae cells that "would substantially increase lipid production and lead to high yield." They're calling this, in other words, "fat" or "obese" algae (link).

In California, Sustainable Green Technologies announced that SGT scientists have uncovered a “lipid trigger” in green algae. Under certain conditions, many microalgae had appeared to “flip a switch” that increased production and storage of oils instead of starch. SGT said that it is able to activate the switch and to create “obese algae.

“We found the waste from our biohydrogen system sparked tremendous growth of our green algae, and more importantly, massively increased lipid production and storage within our algae,” said SGT CSO Dr. Elmar Schmid. SGT’s CSO. In other words, our algae became obese within one week! We now have a highly efficient, cost-effective way of producing large amounts of algae oils for biodiesel fuel production. On top of that, we can produce clean biohydrogen from the resulting biodiesel refinery waste!” exclaims Dr. Schmid.

SGT’s biohydrogen-producing microbes can convert a variety of feedstock into biohydrogen energy including glycerol waste, sugars derived from sugar cane and sugar beet, brewery waste. SGT said it had also applied for a DOE grant for its biohydrogen and algae system.

- Brewskie

BP Burns the Jatropha Mirage

I may be eventually proven wrong, but I've never had any faith that jatropha would prove itself as a viable biofuel crop. Kids can grow on a marginal diet; that doesn't mean they thrive (link).

BP has indeed given up on jatropha, the shrub once touted as the great hope for biofuels, and walked away from its jatropha joint venture for less than $1 million.

Speculation abounded this summer that BP was ready to jettison its participation in the project with British partner partner D1 Oils. The original plan called for the investment of $160 million to turn the jatropha tree into feedstock to make transportation fuel. Now, BP will turn its alternative-fuel efforts toward ethanol in Brazil and the U.S., as well as biobutanol.

The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper end to BP’s jatropha adventure underscores a couple of key points. First, the inedible but hardy plant that just a few years ago seemed like it could revolutionize biofuels has turned into a bust. The initial attraction was that it grows on marginal land, so it wouldn’t compete with food crops. But marginal land means marginal yields. And jatropha turned out to be a water hog as well, further darkening its environmental credentials.

Second, for all the ink spilt over jatropha—and Big Oil’s interest in biofuels in general—the value of some of those investments really is miniscule. D1 Oils will buy out BP’s half of the venture for 500,000 pounds—less than the price of a nice apartment in London—even though the joint venture is apparently worth more than 7 million pounds.

And this wasn’t a piddling venture, as far as jatropha experiments go: Reuters notes that BP and D1 Oils planted more than 200,000 hectares of the stuff—25% of the worldwide jatropha planting.

Twenty-five percent? That's a lot.

- Brewskie

EU Biodiesel Production Increased 35% in 2008

Mind you, I find some of the current biofuel-derived sources controversial; I'm much more optimistic of future-generation biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol or algae biofuel. Never the less, Ghawar Guzzler reports the news; no bias, no bull (link to article).

In Belgium, the European Biodiesel Board (EBB) said that European biodiesel production increased 35 percent in 2008 over 2007, despite reductions in production in Germany and Austria. The group said that production increased to 7.76 million tonnes, or 65 percent of global market share, but added that half of the biodiesel pants in Europe have been idled by poor demand.

- Brewskie

Dow Chemical to Demonstrate Algae Biofuel Plant

As reported earlier, ExxonMobil announced it was pumping big money into algae biofuels, and now, Dow Chemical is announcing it will partner with Algenol to demonstrate an Algae Biofuel plant:

Florida startup Algenol Biofuels says that it can efficiently produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands--a novel approach that has captured the interest and backing of Dow Chemical, the chemical giant based in Midland, MI.

The companies recently announced plans to build and operate a demonstration plant on 24 acres of property at Dow's sprawling Freeport, TX, manufacturing site. The plant will consist of 3,100 horizontal bioreactors, each about 5 feet wide and 50 feet long and capable of holding 4,000 liters.

The bioreactors are essentially troughs covered by a dome of semitransparent film and filled with salt water that has been pumped in from the ocean. The photosynthetic algae growing inside are exposed to sunlight and fed a
stream of carbon dioxide from Dow's chemical production units. The goal is to
produce 100,000 gallons of ethanol annually.

[...]

Blue-green algae do produce small amounts of ethanol naturally, but only under anaerobic conditions when the cyanobacteria are starved or in the dark. Paul Woods, cofounder and chief executive of Algenol, says that his company has modified its algae so that it can produce ethanol under sunlight through photosynthesis, first by turning carbon dioxide and water into sugars, then by boosting and controlling the enzymes that synthesize those sugars into ethanol.

Another big difference for Algenol is that it doesn't have to harvest its algae to extract the ethanol, eliminating a step that has proved costly and complex for other algae-to-biofuel startups. John Coleman, chief scientific officer at Algenol and a professor of cell and system biology at the University of Toronto, says that the ethanol produced within the algae will seep out of each cell and evaporate into the headspace of the bioreactor.

[...]

Dow is particularly interested in Algenol's process because ethanol replaces fossil fuels in the production of ethylene, which is a basic chemical feedstock for making many types of plastics. Oils from algae are less useful, says Steve Tuttle, business director of biosciences at Dow. "Biodiesel doesn't necessarily fit in with what we'd want to use as a downstream product," he says.

Tuttle says that Dow, on top of leasing land and supplying a source of industrial carbon dioxide, will also assist with process engineering and help develop advanced plastic films for covering the bioreactors. Other partners in the project include the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Algenol has applied for a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy that would help fund the demonstration project.

Woods is convinced that the process can be scaled up, and at a favorable cost of production. "It's our expectation to produce ethanol for $1.25 a gallon," he says, adding that the resulting ethanol gives back 5.5 times more energy than what it takes to produce it, making the renewable fuel competitive with cellulosic ethanol production. Woods notes that Algenol's approach offers another bonus: "Every gallon of ethanol made creates one gallon of fresh water out of salt water."

- Brewskie

Gulf Alternative Energy's Cellulosic Ethanol Process Yields 400% Improvement

Gulf Alternative Energy announced a cellulosic ethanol pre-processing technology that converts cellulosic biomass into a dry powder (which is later to be converted to ethanol). They claim the technology's speed yields a 400% improvement over other comparable methods.

In Texas, Gulf Alternative Energy announced lab test results from Microbac Laboratories for its biomass pre-processing technology that converts cellulosic biomass into a fine, dry powder for processing into ethanol. According to the company, lab results showed that sugars were produced from Gulf Sorghum in 16 hours compared to 64 hours for unprocessed control samples. This is a 400% increase in processing speed under controlled lab conditions.


“Independent lab results now confirm what we expected from Gulf’s cellulosic feedstock pre-processing technology – it makes a big difference in processing efficiency,” said John Shearer, President of GAEC.

- Brewskie

Exxon Mobil Gets Into the Algae Game

Exxon Mobil is dead set to prove algae-derived biofuel critics dead wrong (link):

On Tuesday, Exxon plans to announce an investment of $600 million in producing liquid transportation fuels from algae — organisms in water that range from pond scum to seaweed. The biofuel effort involves a partnership with Synthetic Genomics, a biotechnology company founded by the genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter.

The agreement could plug a major gap in the strategy of Exxon, the world’s largest and richest publicly traded oil company, which has been criticized by environmental groups for dismissing concerns about global warming in the past and its reluctance to develop renewable fuels.

[...]

Algae also has another benefit, which could eventually help cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Like any plant, it needs carbon dioxide to grow. But Exxon and Synthetic Genomics hope to genetically engineer new strains of algae that can absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide — like that emitted by power plants, for example.

Exxon’s investment includes $300 million for in-house studies and “potentially more” than $300 million to Synthetic Genomics “if research and development milestones are successfully met,” Exxon said.

- Brewskie

Milking Diatoms For What They're Worth

Research into algae bio fuels counties at a fantastic pace. It seems evident some company, or someone will nail this. Here's a twist by Indian and Canadian scientists (link):

Richard Gordon, T. V. Ramachandra, Durga Madhab Mahapatra, and Karthick Band note that some geologists believe that much of the world's crude oil originated in diatoms, which produce an oily substance in their bodies. Barely one-third of a strand of hair in diameter, diatoms flourish in enormous numbers in oceans and other water sources. They die, drift to the seafloor, and deposit their shells and oil into the sediments. Estimates suggest that live diatoms could make 10−200 times as much oil per acre of cultivated area compared to oil seeds, Gordon says.

"We propose ways of harvesting oil from diatoms, using biochemical engineering and also a new solar panel approach that utilizes genetically modifiable aspects of diatom biology, offering the prospect of "milking" diatoms for sustainable energy by altering them to actively secrete oil products," the scientists say. "Secretion by and milking of diatoms may provide a way around the puzzle of how to make algae that both grow quickly and have a very high oil content."

- Brewskie

Israeli Hotshot Claims Cheap Cellulosic Privy

A Tel Aviv, Israel, startup claims it has nailed a cheap cellulosic ethanol production process:

A startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel, called HCL-Cleantech has reinvented a century-old process called the Bergius process as a much cheaper method to produce ethanol from biomass. The process uses concentrated hydrochloric acid (HCL) to breakdown biomass into sugars but has been too expensive for commercial use. The company, however, says that it has developed a way to recycle 42 percent of the HCL, pumping it back into the system and significantly reducing the cost of making ethanol.

"The only really innovative aspect of what we do is the recovery of the acid, which costs 10 percent of what it used to cost," says CEO Eran Baniel. But that tweak attracted interest from a number of companies in the United States, and recently HCL-Cleantech received $5.5 million in venture capital from clean-energy investors Khosla Ventures and Burrill and Company to build a pilot plant in the United States.

To produce ethanol from cellulosic sources like wood chips and corn stover, the feedstock first must be stripped into three parts: lignin, sugar-rich cellulose, and hemicellulose. These last two parts must then be converted into sugars, which can then be fermented into ethanol by organisms such as yeast. Conventional ethanol technology uses dilute acid solutions in a pretreatment phase to separate lignin from cellulose and hemicellulose. Expensive enzymes then break down cellulose and hemicellulose into simple sugars.

As a cheaper alternative, HCL-Cleantech uses a much stronger, concentrated HCL solution that combines the first two stages of ethanol production, simultaneously stripping away cellulosic sources and breaking them down into fermentable sugars. Baniel says that the acid hydrolysis is able to squeeze up to 97 percent of sugars out of cellulosic sources like wood. Using HCL also reduces the amount of unwanted by-products that normally occur with more dilute acid solutions. What's more, the concentrated acid reaction can occur at low temperatures, which reduces the energy required to run the system.

However, recycling HCL has proved a tricky challenge. Researchers have found that as HCL breaks down cellulosic sources like wood into sugars, it forms strong bonds with water that are difficult to break. Industries that recycle HCL, such as citric acid manufacturers, use expensive high-temperature and -pressure methods to evaporate water, isolating HCL.

Instead, the scientists who developed the technology for HCL-Cleantech came up with a cheaper route to separate and recycle HCL. They devised a proprietary solvent that attracts hydrochloric acid. They mixed this solvent with the HCL-water solution, and found that the solvent broke the HCL-water bond and extracted HCL from the water solution. The scientists then developed a method to get the solvent to release HCL as a gas, pumping it back into the system to break down more cellulose.

[...]

The company anticipates that its pilot plant will be ready in the latter part of 2010. In the meantime, Baniel says that the company will test multiple steps of its process at various industrial plants in Israel to see whether the technology can run efficiently at large scales.

Mascoma of NH also claims privy to a cheap cellulosic ethanol production process.

- Brewskie

EU Snubs Algae Biomass; US Cocksure

The European Algae Biomass Association released a pessimistic outlook for algae biomass, where as the US seemed uberly optimistic (link):

In Italy, the European Algae Biomass Association officially launched yesterday with a decidedly pessimistic outlook for commercial-scale algae bioenergy production. New EABA Executive Director Raffaello Garofalo said that it will take 10 to 15 years for algae to reach industrial-scale production, and that, at present, making biodiesel from algae costs 10 to 30 times the cost of making biodiesel from traditional feedstocks.

Garofalo told Reuters that the new association has 54 members and that he saw a price of $500-$550 emerging for the algal fuel market, in the long-term, after other fractinos of algae biomass were sold for animal feed or to the nutraceutical markets. Garofalo referred to pilot projects in Portugal and Italy but cautioned against expectations of quick breakthroughs in the path towards algae commercialization.

This outlook contrasts with a more upbeat assessment from the United States, where Sapphire Energy has projected that it will reach 1 Mgy in production in 2011 and 100 Mgy by 2018, while Solazyme has projected reaching 100 Mgy by 2012 or 2013. Biofields has projected production in Mexico of 250 Mgy by 2013 based on the Algenol process, and PetroAlgae has indicated it expects reach commercial-scale production volumes (below 100 Mgy) in 2011 based on its licensing activity to date. Aurora Biofuels has projected the development of “$1.30 at the gate” fuel by 2013.

My opinion of this? I think the European Algae Biomass Association should pay closer attention to the news.

- Brewskie

Blazin' Cellulosic Ethanol and Palm Oil Breakthroughs

Both are a little old, but I'm in the midst of getting caught up on everything, and thought they were worth mentioning.

Here's TR on a cellulosic ethanol breakthrough:

Mascoma, a cellulosic biofuels company based in Lebanon, NH, reports significant advances in its goal of simplifying the cellulosic ethanol process by skipping the use of costly enzymes, which could potentially reduce cellulosic ethanol's production costs by 20 to 30 percent.

Mascoma's strategy, called consolidated bioprocessing, aims to combine the multiple steps of ethanol production into one, using genetically engineered superbugs that perform the multiple steps involved in making cellulosic ethanol. The company reports a series of advances that it says brings it "substantially closer to commercialization." Mascoma announced the results recently at the 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals, in San Francisco.

Existing technology to produce ethanol from cellulosic sources involves a multistep process: plant material such as paper pulp and switchgrass are first pretreated, to separate cellulose from the rest of the plant matter. Cellulose is then mixed with enzymes that break it down into sugars. Yeast then takes over to ferment the sugars into ethanol.

As a less costly alternative, Mascoma researchers are engineering microbes to combine the last two steps of the process: breaking down cellulose, and converting sugars into ethanol. They say that if they can get microorganisms to make ethanol at sufficiently high rates, they can reduce the amount of expensive enzymes needed to break down cellulose, which can normally take up half of ethanol's production costs.

The company is exploring three potential organisms for ethanol production: two types of bacteria, and one yeast strain. C. thermocellum and T. saccharolyticum are thermophilic bacteria, able to withstand high temperatures such as those experienced in reactors. Researchers have been interested in both bacterial strains for years due to their natural ability to both convert cellulose into sugar and ferment sugar into ethanol.

[...]

The company has begun to test all three engineered microbes at a pilot plant in Rome, NY, and it plans to have a commercial scale-up by 2010.

The sprawled growth of palm oil is controversial. Still, here's a recent bit worth mentioning:

A Malaysian conglomerate said Tuesday it has sequenced the genome for the oil palm, a development that will allow it to produce new varieties that will double yields of the edible oil.

Sime Darby, the world's largest listed palm oil producer, said it had achieved the breakthrough in a project with biotech firm Synamatix which had analysed 93.8 percent of the plant's genome. "With this breakthrough, Sime
Darby is ready to lead and change the future of the oil palm industry," Sime Darby Plantations managing director Azhar Abdul Hamid told a press conference.

"In 2008, Sime Darby had an oil yield of about 5.0 metric tons per hectare for Malaysia and with this we will be able to double oil yield to 10 to 12 metric tons of palm oil," he added. Azhar said that within 10 years, 15 percent of its palm oil estates would be replanted with the improved varieties and that all estates would have the new variety within 30 years.

[...]

Prime Minister Najib Razak said the development would lead to price stability and support the alternative fuel industry, which has faltered due to uncertain supply as the price of the commodity has plunged last year.

"It will be possible for us to raise yields so high, food supply needs will never be an issue again and we will be able to feed the need for alternative fuels as well with increased palm oil production," he said.

- Brewskie

"Pond Scum" to Power Venice

It's known as "Serenissima," "Queen of the Adriatic," "City of Water" and as I call it, "the City of Slime;" but now Venice has an energetic plan to power its town, and deal with its plaguing algae problem. Read below, or be lazy... and check out the link:

Italy recently announced a 200 million euro eco-friendly project to harvest the prolific seaweed that lines Venice’s canals and transform it into emissions-free energy. The idea is to set up a power plant fuelled by algae, the first facility of its kind in Italy. The plant, to be built in collaboration with renewable energy services company Enalg, will be operative in two years and will produce 40 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to half of the energy required by the entire city centre of Venice.

The algae will be cultivated in laboratories and put in plastic cylinders where water, carbon dioxide, and sunshine can trigger photosynthesis. The resulting biomass will be treated further to produce a fuel to turn turbines. The carbon dioxide produced in the process will be fed back to the algae, resulting in zero emissions from the plant. “Venice could represent the beginning of a global revolution of energy and renewable resources. Our goals are to achieve the energetic self-sufficiency for the seaport and to reduce CO2 emissions, including those one produced by the docked ships”, says the president of the seaport of Venice Authority, Paolo Costa.

- Brewskie

Major Breakthrough for Algae Growth to Benefit Biofuels

Bionavitas recently announced a new technology, Light Immersion Technology (LIT), that ignites Algae into rampant growth. Algae is the warlord biofuel and it's easy to grow; a major hurdle is getting it to grow in meaningful quantities, because as it grows, it becomes denser and blocks out needed sunlight to aid scalable growth.

Bionvavitas' new Light Immersion Technology is geared to solving just this. Read below:

Algae, shown to have the potential for solving the reliance on fossil fuels for energy production, are widely recognized as an important source for biodiesel production. Harnessing the power of the sun or an artificial light source by immersing it in the culture, Light Immersion Technology effectively produces an order of magnitude more algae biomass than existing growth methods, thereby increasing yields and reducing the cost to make algae-based biofuels price competitive with petroleum products.

Algae are the ultimate feedstock for biofuel production, promising yields that are hundreds of times greater than those of traditional land-based oil crops such as soy beans or rapeseed (canola oil). The dramatic yields depend upon the efficient use of solar energy not possible using previously existing technologies. Before Bionavitas made its Light Immersion Technology available to the public, nearly every large scale approach to algae growth has been challenged by a simple fact of nature: as algae grow, they become so dense they block the light needed for continued growth.

This “self-shading” phenomenon results in a layer that limits the amount of algae per acre that can be grown and harvested. The Light Immersion Technology developed by Bionavitas fundamentally changes this equation by enabling the algae growth layer in open ponds to be up to a meter deep. This represents a 10 to 12 time increase in yield over previous methods that produced only 3-5 centimeters of growth.

Bringing light to algae...

At the core of Light Immersion Technology is an innovative approach at bringing light to the algae culture in both open ponds and closed bioreactors through a system of light rods which extend deep into the algae culture. By distributing light below the surface “shade” layer and releasing the light in controlled locations, algae cultures can grow denser. In external canal systems, the rods distribute light from the sun into the culture. This abundant and free energy source is ideal for generating large amounts of algae for use as biofuels.

In closed bioreactors, the rods evenly distribute more readily absorbed red and blue spectrum light from high efficiency LEDs. While the LEDs increase the cost of production, algae grown in these systems are used for higher value markets such as nutraceuticals.

- Brewskie

The Better Biofuel Bug

A look at Zymetis' little pet:

A tiny microbe found in the Chesapeake Bay is the focus of intense study for a biotech startup in College Park, MD. Zymetis has genetically modified a rare, cellulose-eating bacterium to break down and convert cellulose into sugars necessary to make ethanol, and it recently completed its first commercial-scale trial. Earlier this year, the company ran the modified microbe through a series of tests in large fermenters and found that it was able to convert one ton of cellulosic plant fiber into sugar in 72 hours. The trial, researchers say, illustrates the organism's potential in helping to produce ethanol cheaply and efficiently at industrial scales. Zymetis is now raising the first round of venture capital to bring the technology to commercial applications.

Scott Laughlin, CEO of Zymetis, says that for the past two years the company's scientists have worked to retool and pump up the tiny organism. The microbe's main advantage is its ability to naturally combine two major steps in the ethanol process, which the company says could considerably slash the high costs of producing ethanol from cellulosic biomass like switchgrass, wood chips, and paper pulp. The company is running the organism through a series of trials to study how the system could be applied at an industrial scale.

Ethanol production from cellulosic sources is an expensive multistage process. The cellulosic feedstock is first pretreated with heat and chemicals to break down the material's tough cell walls. Expensive manufactured enzymes are then added to the mix to convert purified cellulose into glucose, which is then treated with yeast that turns the sugars into ethanol. As a result, scientists and several startup companies are developing improved microbes that could accomplish several of these steps, thus making the resulting biofuels more competitive with fossil fuels.

Toward that goal, Laughlin says that the company has developed an ethanol-producing system that revolves around a microbe that quickly and efficiently combines the first two steps of the conventional ethanol process. "It has the ability to break down whole plant material, and it excretes enzymes that break down cellulose, [which works] very well in solution," says Laughlin.

The microbe that the company is banking on is Saccharophagus degradans, a bacterium found in the marshes of the Chesapeake Bay that eats away at dead plant material and solid waste, breaking them down into glucose. In 2003, Steve Hutcheson, a professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, combed through the organism's genome and discovered that it possessed a combination of enzymes that broke down the tough cell walls in dead plants and converted remaining cellulose into sugars--two valuable properties in producing cellulosic ethanol. In 2006, Hutcheson founded Zymetis in order to pump up the microbe's performance to a commercial scale.

Since then, the company has been working with strains of S. degradans, identifying sets of enzymes responsible for breaking down a variety of material, from newspapers to dead plants to solid waste. Hutcheson and his colleagues switched on certain genes to increase the activity of these enzymes, and turned off other genes that controlled inhibitory behaviors of the microbe, such as those that tell it to stop feeding. As a result, the genetically modified organism pumps out significantly more enzymes than it normally would.

Laughlin and his colleagues recently ran the organism through a trial and found that the organism chewed through one ton of cellulosic plant fiber, converting the pulp into sugar within 72 hours--a process that normally takes years in the wild. "Right now, we're working on a 24-to-72-hour timescale," says Laughlin. "It's more an economic question to make it faster, but at what cost? So we're working on a whole host of protocols of processing across different timescales to figure out an optimum run."

The company is pairing the microbe with a yeast strain that converts sugar into ethanol as the microbe breaks down cellulose. Zymetis's goal is to develop manufacturing units able to produce around 10 million gallons of ethanol
a year--a relatively modest output. But Laughlin says that thinking smaller could lead to more efficient, local production of ethanol, and he envisions partnering with paper mills and solid-waste facilities to produce ethanol on-site.

- Brewskie

South Korea Solves the "Seaweed for Biofuels" Puzzle

(Hat tip: Peak Energy)

NewScientist on plucking seaweed for fuel:

Now a group at the Korea Institute of Technology in South Korea has developed a way to use marine algae, or seaweed, to produce bioethanol and avoid taking up land altogether.

The group says seaweed has a number of advantages over land-based biomass. It grows much faster, allowing up to six harvests per year; unlike trees and plants, it does not contain lignin and so requires no pre-treatment before it can be turned into fuel; and it absorbs up to seven times as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as wood.

The group's patent suggests treating all sizes of algae - from large help to single-celled spirulina - with an enzyme to break them into simple sugars, which can then be fermented into ethanol.

The resulting seaweed biofuel is cheaper and simpler to produce than crop or wood-based fuels, and will have no effect on the price of food, says the group.

If you're nerdy enough, you can read the patent application here.

- Brewskie