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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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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Sweden Exceeds Kyoto: Economy Booms

They cut carbon 9% and had 44% growth. You just don't want to know how they did it...

Between 1990 and 2006 Sweden cut its carbon emissions by 9%, largely exceeding the target set by the Kyoto Protocol,while enjoying economic growth of 44% in fixed prices.

Sweden achieved this by instituting a lot of sensible ideas such as having district heating in every city (like we have in New York City) where hot water is piped to buildings within a neighborhood.

Previously, these had been coal-fired but now the water is heated using waste from forestry. Sweden switched to direct electric heating in the 80's and in recent years increasingly utilizes heat pumps which take two-thirds less electricity to heat.

But their most bizarre secret?
Pig parts.
And sewage.
And confiscated liquor. Well, biogas.

Biogas can be made any combination of a number of a stomach-churning assortment of garbage ingredients, and in Sweden, it is.

Blood, innards and other unusable slaughterhouse waste, human sewage, animal waste, and even confiscated liquor goes into a tasty brew heated to 70 degrees celsius for anaerobic bacteria to feast on for a month. Although certifiably cradle to cradle sustainable and plain old waste-not-want-not frugal, this solution is revolting.
Amazingly though, the final product is squeaky clean. It is virtually odorless, creates a nutrient-rich residue that can be used as soil or construction materials, and slashes vehicle carbon emissions an astounding 95%.

SvenskBiogas produces, distributes and sells biogas for transportation in eastern Sweden. Each year the company takes 50,000 tons of this mess and turns it into virtually carbon neutral biogas. “Before, this just went to a landfill and would lay there and rot and create methane seepage,” says Svenk's marketing boss, Peter Undén.“So it’s a good thing to use this energy in a positive way.” In the fifth largest city Linköping, every bus and garbage truck, some of the taxis and the train pictured above all run on biogas. The city of Gotenborg has a network of pipelines pumping its purified biogas to specialized filling stations, where it is pressurized for delivery to vehicles.

We too could be generating huge amounts of fuel from sewage by producing biogas, and in California we have cows operating power stations on the side. It can be easily produced by fermenting any of these ingredients and we have them all. Any of the new vehicles being developed to run on natural gas, as for the T. boone Pickens plan, can run on biogas as well. And thats good news, because we will have peak natural gas some day, sorry T. Boone...

But peak poop, I don't think so.

From the UK Guardian
the International Herald Tribune
and meta efficient

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Convert Your Car To Flex-Fuel

Like many of us, I've long suspected that converting a car to flex-fuel is probably not too dificult. Otherwise why else was all of Detroit jumping on flex-fuel to meet legislative requirements, rather than retooling to swap out the 100 year old internal combustion engine entirely for a nice clean simple electric motor.

So, cynic that I am, I was not surprised to see Domestic Fuel has an interesting piece about a device that will allow any fuel-injected vehicle to run on ethanol or gasoline without pushing a button or flipping a switch.

The system is very simple for the average user. It’s a simple plug and play device which you attach to your fuel injector connectors and ground to your battery and start using ethanol - anywhere from E100 to regular gasoline. The technology was developed in Brazil where there is a big need for ethanol capable vehicles with all that sugar ethanol they've made since way back.

Fuel Flex International - typical car-guys eyebulger website alert - constructs various options - lucky that you can ask their tech guys about which does what - in the US and retails them from around $300 - $450.

The demand for flex-fuel conversion kits will grow as higher ethanol blends become more available nationwide, because even if car makers start selling only flex-fuel vehicles in the US there will continue to be a large segment of used vehicles for sale that are not flex-fuel capable.

There is also the issue of EPA certification, which currently has only been granted to another company, the curiously named yet unrelated Flex Fuel US but they are working on getting that approval. Our current EPA is not falling over itself to grant such boons as I noted yesterday. Hopefully a new and improved EPA that will give a damn about such matters as gas prices and climate change will result from our electing a more responsible administration.

From Domestic Fuel

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