Microbes Grow Jet Fuel In The Dark

Solarzyme passes test with flying colors: their algae jet fuel grown in the dark won't freeze solid in flight

The South San Francisco company Solazyme announced this week that it has produced the world's first microbial-derived jet fuel to pass the eleven most challenging specifications needed to meet the Aviation Turbine Fuel standards.

Solazyme's algal-derived aviation fuel was analyzed by the Southwest Research Institute, one of the nations leading fuel analytical laboratories. The tested areas included the key measurements for density, thermal oxidative stability, flashpoint, freezing point, distillation and viscosity, the biggest hurdles needed to develop a commercial and military jet fuel.

Given Solarzyme's excellent cold temperature performance and the clean characteristics of the oil, former military fuels specialists note that new algae-based fuels could help the DOD comply with recently enacted mandates to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and utilize environmentally friendly fuels.

In the U.S. alone, 1.6 billion gallons of jet fuel are used every month resulting in significant greenhouse gas emissions. The EU will require all airlines landing there to meet new low carbon fuel standards by 2012 . The need for environmentally friendly and sustainable alternatives is growing rapidly. But it is not merely foreign legislative pressure to change. As peak oil nears, jet fuel already accounts for 36 percent of airline industry costs, up from 13 percent just six years ago and could account for 40 percent of their costs next year. While algae is currently almost as expensive as oil to produce, it has a significantly different estimated cost going forward, since it comprises cells that double exponentially over time. Oil reserves will be depleted over that time.

Solazyme is currently producing thousands of gallons of oil a month at scale and is the only advanced biofuels company that has produced fuels that have passed specification testing and are compatible with the existing transportation fuel infrastructure.

Solarzyme uses directed evolution to engineer an organism to perform a desired function, the same technique farmers have employed since the dawn of civilization to breed new strains of higher production grain and so on, but this is done at the gene sequence level.

Solarzyme's process needs no sunlight, unlike other algae farming startups such as the New Zealand startup which will be flying a Boeing test to San Francisco this month. This lack of a need for sunlight makes for an eficient and fast process, and the feedstock is very sustainable: agricultural waste, cellulosic material such as switchgrass and industrial byproducts. Algae doesn't require vast amounts of land. You can even grow algae on the roof of a sewage plant.

Unlike any other materials used in mass production processes that we enterprising human have harnessed to grow businesses, algae naturally just keeps on exponentially doubling.

Photo via Vindu Goel's mercurynews.blog

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Boeing Says Bugs Will Fly You To Europe By 2023

Bugs won't be piloting the plane, obviously, because bugs can't get pilot licenses. I hope I didn't give you that impression. But they will be fueling it. Microbes will be fueling aircraft, says Boeing and algae will be the dominant aircraft fuel by 2023.

Darrin Morgan, who handles Boeing's biofuels strategy says Boeing has now established feasibility, and commercial production will soon begin. Boeing conducted the first commercial aviation non-algae biodiesel test flight in February with Virgin Atlantic and GE Aviation, and they now plan the first algae-based biodiesel flight from Auckland to San Francisco this month.

Before you say that this is just green-washing, let me tell you that Europe won't even let our planes land after 2012 if they can't meet the kind of emissions standards that can be devised by lobbyist-free government, such as they are blessed with in all those other countries.

Oh, wait, I see that that harsh rule has been modified recently, after airline industry howls of protest. Now they must just pay a little more to pollute, but they can at least land. Thank goodness for lobbies. But meeting these low CO2 requirements as hardly hurt Boeing sales, and their fuel efficent Dreamliner has even caused runups in worldwide carbonfiber prices.

New Zealand has set a similar standard to the EU requirement: new regulations increasing biofuel use by 2012. The prime minister there has committed to getting New Zealand 90% renewably powered by 2020 - she has made it to seventy percent so far - and that means planes will have to meet those standards too, when they refuel in those nations. So as you can imagine, the New Zealand startup Aquaflow supplying the bugs fueling Boeing's test flight, announced in March that they are gearing up for major production.

Even tiny Island nations like New Zealand could supply behemoths like Boeing all the algae they need to get us to Europe. That's because, with the exponential doubling growth rate of microbes, algae does not need a lot of space to manufacture enough algae to power our planes.

If we keep siphoning it off, of course. Which, no doubt we will.

Photo: algae tanks at Arizona's Greenfuel Technologies

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Petrosun And The Algae Boom

Venture capital investment in algae has jumped from $32 billion last year to $180 billion this year

Algae investments are clearly not suffering from the economic downturn plaguing such formerly hot investments as bad mortgages. Although the algae biofuel industry is still relatively young, a few companies have established themselves as market leaders.

One of these, Arizona oil-company turned algae start-up Petrosun announced this week that they are signing Aquaculture Lease Agreements with qualified farm pond owners in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

The landowners will be offered a royalty income and base rent in return for the utilization of existing farm ponds or marginal acreage for the cultivation of algae and conversion to a biofuel feedstock.

PetroSun came to the algae business by way of a wakeup call. They were selected by DARPA to co-develop an algae derived alternative fuel system that would be utilized by the military."We agreed to the program, but made it known that the cost per gallon based on the restrictive requirements, may exceed $20 per gallon." said Gordon LeBlanc, Jr., but he discovered that this would pose no problem as the appropriations request acknowledged that a gallon of diesel cost $100 per gallon in hostile locations.

Petrosun's background in the oil and gas industry is the basis from which they developed their harvesting and extraction technology. But for an oil company, they are wedded to some pretty ecologically sound practice.

Concerned about the 600 gallons of water that it takes to drive a mile on ethanol, they designed the micro-algae ponds to limit fresh water impacts. They claim that their algae is capable of producing in excess of 30 times more oil per acre than corn and soybean crops.

Their farming system will utilize native microalgae strains, so as to not disrupt local ecosystems, and use either saltwater, brackish or wastewater in their pond system, thereby limiting the impact on the fresh water supply.

As far as LeBlanc is concerned, the age of oil is over. "Although the price of a gallon of gasoline and diesel are at an all-time high, that is only a fraction of the true cost to the American public. If the price to defend our energy requirements were factored into the equation, i.e. foreign governments, oilfields and transportation routes, the price at the pump would soar into the $10 to $14 per gallon range."

The reality that proven recoverable oil reserves are declining and demand is escalating challenged them to pursue algae-to-biofuels and other sustainable alternative forms of energy. As LeBlanc put it: "Independents and wildcatters built the oil and gas industry. PetroSun has accepted the role of an alternative energy wildcatter and is moving energy forward!"

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