Next-generation biofuels are finally ready to deliver — or fail to deliver — on their massive hype. Pilot plants turning everything from forest waste to left over auto-making chemicals are either up and running or will be soon. So by year-end we’ll have a pretty good sense of which, if any, processes and feed-stocks are ready to start encroaching on petroleum’s turf. The biggest hopes so far have been pinned on algae, otherwise known as pond scum, which doesn’t require farmland and produces a lot of oil per unit of input, but is also hard to raise in industrial quantities. So the following is especially good news:
Algae to solve the Pentagon’s jet fuel problem
The brains trust of the Pentagon says it is just months away from producing a jet fuel from algae for the same cost as its fossil-fuel equivalent.The claim, which comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) that helped to develop the internet and satellite navigation systems, has taken industry insiders by surprise. A cheap, low-carbon fuel would not only help the US military, the nation’s single largest consumer of energy, to wean itself off its oil addiction, but would also hold the promise of low-carbon driving and flying for all.
Darpa’s research projects have already extracted oil from algal ponds at a cost of $2 per gallon. It is now on track to begin large-scale refining of that oil into jet fuel, at a cost of less than $3 a gallon, according to Barbara McQuiston, special assistant for energy at Darpa. That could turn a promising technology into a ¬market-ready one. Researchers have cracked the problem of turning pond scum and seaweed into fuel, but finding a cost-effective method of mass production could be a game-changer. “Everyone is well aware that a lot of things were started in the military,” McQuiston said.
The work is part of a broader Pentagon effort to reduce the military’s thirst for oil, which runs at between 60 and 75 million barrels of oil a year. Much of that is used to keep the US Air Force in flight. Commercial airlines – such as Continental and Virgin Atlantic – have also been looking at the viability of an algae-based jet fuel, as has the Chinese government.
“Darpa has achieved the base goal to date,” she said. “Oil from algae is projected at $2 per gallon, headed towards $1 per gallon.”
McQuiston said a larger-scale refining operation, producing 50 million gallons a year, would come on line in 2011 and she was hopeful the costs would drop still further – ensuring that the algae-based fuel would be competitive with fossil fuels. She said the projects, run by private firms SAIC and General Atomics, expected to yield 1,000 gallons of oil per acre from the algal farm.
McQuiston’s projections took several industry insiders by surprise. “It’s a little farther out in time,” said Mary Rosenthal, director of the Algal Biomass Association. “I am not saying it is going to happen in the next three months, but it could happen in the next two years.”
But the possibilities have set off a scramble to discover the cheapest way of mass-producing an algae-based fuel. Even Exxon – which once notoriously dismissed biofuels as moonshine – invested $600m in research last July.
Unlike corn-based ethanol, algal farms do not threaten food supplies. Some strains are being grown on household waste and in brackish water. Algae draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when growing; when the derived fuel is burned, the same CO2 is released, making the fuel theoretically zero-carbon, although processing and transporting the fuel requires some energy.
The industry received a further boost earlier this month, when the Environmental Protection Agency declared that algae-based diesel reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50% compared with conventional diesel. The Obama administration had earlier awarded $80m in research grants to a new generation of algae and biomass fuels.
Some thoughts:
• This is big. Algae is the holy grail of biofuel and if this process scales the possibilities are endless. Attaching an algae bioreactor to a coal burning power plant, for instance, turns the smokestack CO2 into fuel. Meanwhile, burning algae-derived oil in a power plant and capturing the CO2 to make more algae looks almost like perpetual motion machine. Very cool.
• But don’t sell your Exxon stock just yet. Until industrial-scale production is a reality it’s still just a story. A nice story, but one of many in the biofuel sector.
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I’ve been reading about alternative energy sources for years, many of which seem viable as a replacement for traditional fossil fuels. The biggest hurdle by far is overcoming the unbreachable political influence of Big Oil–if anything really does happen they will decide when, where, how and to what extent, and the determining factors are profit and control–it’s the way the world works.