Algae Factories In Our Future?

There have been some interesting meetings about using algae as a renewable fuel source, which motivated a quick review of what's been happening with alternative fuels.  As corn-based ethanol has rightly been fading as a meaningful solution for our hydrocarbon dependency, cellulosic ethanol once seemed extremely promising. 

One of the emerging leaders was Iogen Corporation in Canada (http://www.iogen.ca/).  Goldman Sachs was an early investor in the company.  Pilot plant results using wheat straw were very promising, and the energy balance for cellulosic ethanol looked a lot better than that of corn-based feedstock.  In 2011, Goldman Sachs was hired to look at strategic alternatives. 

The company formed Iogen Energy, which is 50/50 percent owned by Iogen and by Royal Dutch Shell plc.  Plans for a full scale commercial plant in Canada are taking longer than planned for "technical design and feasibility" issues. Abstracting from the technical process issues, the other big issue for plant economics will minimizing transportation costs for the low value per unit volume feedstock while also getting the fuel efficiently to a wholesale distribution point.  Things still look promising for this fuel, but it will be part of a portfolio of transportation fuels. 

Several industry experts have pointed out that naturally occurring algae won't be able to produce on a large enough scale without having uneconomically large areas devoted to production.  Renewable biofuels fron algae will almost certainly require synthesizing some specialized organisms which produce the fuel in a manner in which it can be easily "skimmed" or recovered without necessarily breaking apart the producer organisms themselves.  This has been described by Craig Venter as requiring the "invention of a new agriculture."  Since ExxonMobil has committed to researching algae-based biofuels, there is optimism for the future.

A large NSF research grant led by investigators from Penn State University aims at developing genetically engineered bacteria for production of liquid fuels will be completed in early 2012.  This has been a four year effort and hopefully, it will advance the renewable fuels effort forward.

While this area continues to show promise and leverages our scientific, engineering and production expertise as a nation, renewables as a class of fuels will be a part of a fuel portfolio that will be dominated by hydrocarbons for decades to come.