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Solazyme may be the bio-engineering company with a head-start

Solazyme may be the bio-engineering company with a head-start. It announced that its algal-based biodiesel passed the American Society for Testing and Materials D-975 specification, a significant breakthrough for biofuels. “This means we are the first company in the world to make renewable diesel from a microbial process. Meeting the D-975 specification also means that we don’t have to go through any regulatory process to get the fuel approved to be sold as bio-diesel.” In other words, Solazyme’s fuel is ready to go straight into your tank if you own a diesel car, truck or SUV. Unlike ethanol or biodiesel, it is not subject to any blending law, which leads to fuels like E85 and B20. “You can put it in your diesel vehicle at 100% without watering it down.” The technology is versatile and can use almost anything for feedstock, including wood chips. Through this process, Solazyme can create other oil-based products — everything from plastics to jet fuel to cooking oil.

Petrobas, the national oil company of Brazil, which is the world’s largest producer of ethanol (from sugar cane) is in discussions with at an early stage with a Canadian company developing fuel from algae technologies.

“Air New Zealand and airliner manufacturer Boeing are secretly working with Blenheim-based biofuel developer Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation to create the world’s first environmentally friendly aviation fuel, made of wild algae.” Richard Branson and Virgin Airlines are mentioned as involved. An official of Boeing estimated that, “algae ponds totaling 34,000 square kilo-metres could produce enough fuel to reduce the net CO2 footprint for all of aviation to zero.”

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) noted that more than 100,000 tonnes of algae had been removed by over 1000 boats in the city of Qingdao, China, to be holding the Olympic boating events in their harbor.

Solazyme may be the bio-engineering company with a head-start

Latest Ethanol News

Algae Farms could produce Ethanol
It is becoming obvious that fuel from corn or soybeans will not solve the energy crisis. As the prices of crude oil products and food crops have jumped recently, entrepreneurs and researchers believe that algae could be burned to generate energy and be used to produce bio-fuels on huge commercial scales. A major attraction of algae as a fuel replacement is that it could produce much more fuel than corn or soybeans in just a fraction of the space and with no effect on the price of foodstuffs.

The potential of algae as a fuel source has been known for years. U.S. government studies in the 1970s and 1980s sought to determine if algae could be used to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. For the next decades, research focused on growing algae in desert ponds, a method that suffered the risks of high evaporation and unwanted algae species proliferating.

Algae is 30 percent to 70 percent oil. Oil can be extracted from algae ranging from large seaweed to tiny micro-algae. There are more than 3,000 strains of algae with some being better suited to the production of biofuels than others. Most of these organisms can double in number every 12 to 24 hours.

For example, in Japan, Professor Makoto Watanabe has selected the Botryococcus braunii algae: give the microscopic green strands enough light and plenty of carbon dioxide – and they excrete oil. The tiny globules of oil that form on the surface of the algae can be easily harvested and then refined using the same “cracking” technologies with which the oil industry now converts crude into everything from jet fuel to plastics.

But – in laboratory conditions at least – the powers of Botryococcus braunii are extraordinary. A hectare of corn, when converted into biofuel ethanol, may produce about 0.2 tonnes of oil equivalent. Rapeseed may generate around 1.2 tonnes. Micro-algae can theoretically produce between 50 and 140 tonnes using the same plot of land.

A prospective algae-breeding oil concern would either have to invest billions of dollars in expensive breeder tanks – or find an enormous expanse of well-irrigated land in a country where labour can be bought very cheaply. It is for this reason that Professor Watanabe believes the world’s first algae farms will be constructed in countries such as Indonesia or Vietnam.

Instead, may new research projects now choose to use photobioreactors — three-metre high glass tubes filled with algae — to grow the algae and to look for economical ways to convert them to fuel. The algae are fed on water, sunlight and CO2, and through photosynthesis are harvested. While some companies are interested in producing core algae, others are in making fuel.

Because photosynthesis of algae relies on carbon dioxide, some projects seek to involve power companies looking to cut CO2 emissions, in order to mop up waste gases from power plants and turn them into “green crude” for cars and planes. Other companies have converted algae into an ethanol additive or have invented devices to convert algae biodiesel as well as petroleum and other substances into hydrogen for fuel cells. And biodiesel from algae will break down in the environment, reducing longterm pollution.

It is possible to use the methane generated from in hog waste as a power source to help convert the algae to fuel. The nutrients in the waste could be used as a fertilizer to grow the algae, and the vegetative mass left over can be used as a feed additive for livestock or a high quality organic fertilizer.

Algae can be used in pharmaceuticals and even green plastics and packaging. Algae can also be used to produce Omega 3, a health supplement. The waste can be sold off as biproducts such as high-protein animal feed.

If companies can eventually grow algae on a commercial scale in giant vertical bio-reactors, the results will relieve the pressures on the fuel world but also on the human and animal food chains. Some experts estimate that once large-scale commercialisation has been achieved, algae has the potential to produce the feedstock for the biodiesel industry at 100 to 200 times the rate of the current best sources of vegetable oil feedstock.

With algae, production is continuous, even in salt water or waste water. With standing crops such as corn or soybean there is a harvest at once or twice a year. While an acre of soy beans can produce 150 gallons of oil a year, an acre of algae can produce 2,000 - 10,000 gallons and has the potential to produce 100,000 gallons a year. Theoretically, given increasing economies of scale, biodiesel producers can make ever-greater revenues and profits from algae-based fuel. This may no longer happen with food crop-based fuels because they have become too expensive. These high prices may be one reason why the US produces only 450 million gallons of biodiesel a year, while itt has the capacity to produce 2 billion gallons.

Some scientists caculate that algae could produce enough biodiesel in a 15,000-square-mile area to power all the vehicles in the United States. All of the corn produced in the country could only make a fraction of that.

But ultimately the conceptual possibility of being able to grow algae at rates that are so amazingly high, they sound like fantasies, is truly mind-boggling. A plant that can mature in a day and then double in mass in a matter of hours, that can grown in different kinds of bodies of water, that can cling to land and rock surfaces . All species contain oil lipids, some only in their cell membranes, but others comprising 30 - 40%, possibly even 50% or more of the cellular mass in lipid forms, and some even secrete oily substances that clump them together with their neighbors in addition to what is contained within the cells themselves.

When the uptake is 20,000, possibly even 100,000 gallons of oil from a hectare, it doesn’t require an unreasonable expanse of land for an average nation to achieve energy independence from fossil fuels, and since a great many algae species grow in salt water, they can be harvested in the ocean, which is great for small island nations even. None of this is cheap yet, but the huge potential returns may well justify the expense. At least, it is theoretically possible.

Algae Farms to produce Ethanol

WILL ALGAE REPLACE PETROLEUM?

With record oil price increases accelerating, competing demands among foods and fuel sources and the looming world food crisis, there is rapidly-growing interest in algaculture (farming of algae) for making vegetable oil, biodiesel, bioethanol, biogasoline, biomethanol, biobutanol and other biofuels. Successful results from small-scale production experiments show promise that using algae to produce fuels may be the best future method by which to produce enough automotive fuel to displace current world gasoline usage. Algae may eventually be the ultimate in renewable energy. Algae are among the fastest growing plants in nature, and about 50 percent of their weight is oil. All over the world, both governments and private companies are exploring the use of algae to produce energy.

Algae as a possible alternative fuel is not a new idea. The US Department of Energy studied it for about 18 years, from 1978 to 1996. But at the end of that period, it decided that algae oil could never compete economically with fossil fuels, when the price of a barrel of oil was about 20 US dollars.

Now, with oil pushing above 130 US dollars, the U.S. government is back into algae. The 2007 Energy Security and Independence Act includes promoting the use of algae for biofuels. The US Department of Energy now estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles (38,849 square kilometers), which is a few thousand square miles larger than Maryland or a third larger than Belgium. This is less than 1/7th the area of corn harvested in the United States in 2000.

Some recent estimates claim that all U.S. oil imports could be replaced by biocrude grown on 20 to 40 million acres of marginal lands that exist across the country. Only 0.3 percent of the land area of the U.S. could be needed to produce enough biodiesel to replace all transportation fuel the country currently uses.

Producing biodiesel from algae has been described as possibly the most efficient way to make biodiesel fuel. The advantage being that the land requirement for growing is very small. Independent studies show that algae is capable of producing 30 times more oil per acre than other traditional crops currently utilized for the production of biofuels. Some species of algae are well-suited to biodiesel production due to their high oil content, in excess of 50%, and extremely rapid growth rates. For example, it is estimated that 2.25 acres of soybean can create 2 drums (55 gallons) of biodiesel, while 2.25 acres of micro-algae can produce a jumbo railcar (23,000 gallons) of biodiesel.

Algae biofuel contains no sulfur, is non-toxic and highly biodegradable. Algae provides environmental benefits in terms of greenhouse gases and as a more efficient fuelstock than biodiesel from crops like soybeans. The amount of greenhouse gasses generated are small, since most of the carbon dioxide emitted during the burning process is simply recycling what was absorbed during plant growth. Algal oil is similar to soybean oil which now is used to produce biodiesel, but can be grown on marginal lands unsuitable for food crops and even in brackish water. Also, barren desert lands which receive high solar radiation could effectively grow the algae in great quantities. Furthermore, the algae could use farm wastes and excess carbon dioxide from factories and other sources to help the growth of the algae.

Algae oils have a variety of commercial and industrial uses, and are extracted through a wide variety of methods. Algae fuel, also called algal fuel or oilgae, is a biofuel from algae. Compared traditional-crop biofuels, algae are much higher-yield, up to 30 times more energy per acre. With an oil-per-acre production rate 250 times the amount of soybeans, algae offers the highest yield feedstock for biodiesel. Estimates of the cost to extract oil from microalgae vary, but now are around $1.80/kg (compared to $0.50/kg for palm oil). Microalgae have much faster growth-rates than terrestrial crops. The oil yield per unit area of algae is estimated to be 5,000 to 20,000 gallons per acre, per year, which is 7 to 30 times greater than the next best crop, Chinese tallow (about 700 gallons per acre per year).

The latest research into algae for the mass-production of algae oil is mainly focused on microalgae, defined as organisms capable of photosynthesis less than 2 mm in diameter, including diatoms and cyanobacteria; as opposed to macroalgae, such as seaweed. This emphasis on microalgae is due largely to its less-complex structure, fast growth rate, and high oil content for certain species. Commercial interest in large-scale algae-cultivation is pointed toward systems that link into existing infrastructures, such as coal power plants or sewage treatment facilities. This approach not only provides the raw materials for the system, such as CO2 and nutrients; but it changes those wastes into renewable resources.

It is small wonder, that many people look to biofuels from micro-algae as a realistic future solution to the near-total replacement of petroleum fuels.

WILL ALGAE REPLACE PETROLEUM?