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Pond Scum Has Potential in Push For New Bio-Fuels

Posted on: Monday, 26 May 2008, 03:00 CDT

By Chambers, Heather

A slippery, slimy organism with a natural ability to grow rapidly is gaining respect among researchers who hope to one day harness its potential in mass amounts for the creation of bio-fuels.

Algae, which have the ability to grow in both fresh water and saltwater, could one day provide fuel for the world's cars, diesel trucks and military jets. While other sources of alternative energy rely on food sources such as corn, researchers have envisioned growing algae in open ponds in the desert.

By starving the algae of their nutrients, scientists have discovered ways of harnessing their algal oils. The oils are then converted into vegetable oil to produce fuel.

Researchers at UC San Diego, who are studying ways to genetically modify the algae, say the organism could one day solve the world's reliance on fossil fuels.

"The only real solution we can see that answers economics, geopolitical issues and the environment is this algae platform," said Steve Kay, dean of UCSD's Division of Biological Sciences. "And it's an area of research and biological science that has been almost entirely ignored."

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the principal research lab for the U.S. Department of Energy, began studying algae-derived bio-fuels 30 years ago. It halted the project in 1996 largely because the price of algal oil couldn't compete with the petroleum prices.

But today's rising oil costs, coupled with an uproar about the use of food supplies for energy use, have re-emphasized the need for alternative solutions.

Thousands Of Gallons Per Acre

While ethanol crops such as corn can produce anywhere between 28 and 700 gallons per acre, scientists with UCSD say algae have the ability to yield a few thousand gallons an acre.

"And that's just the starting point," Kay said.

But challenges exist with the production of bio-fuel on a larger scale, and scientists say there are debates about acceptable prices.

"One of the real problems right now is that there is no national or international center for science and engineering of photosynthetic microbes," said Steven Briggs, a biological sciences professor at UCSD."It's been a backwater of science and now, suddenly, it looks like it's the key to our most pressing social challenge."

Venture capital dollars, which amounted to almost $4 billion in green technologies last year, have created greater opportunities for bio-fuel startups in recent years. The $4 billion represented a 38 percent increase from the $2.9 billion invested in 2006, according to Cleantech Group LLC, formerly called the Cleantech Venture Network, which tracks venture capital investments in environmentally friendly technologies.

But access to money for academic research is limited, Briggs says.

A Trillion-Dollar Industry

"This (bio-fuels) is the only trillion-dollar industry in the world; it makes pharmaceuticals look like peanuts," Briggs said."But we don't have the funding to drive the research yet, so we're hoping we can get a few hits, a few discoveries, maybe a successful technology that will stimulate interest at the government level."

UOP LLC, a division of Honeywell Co., received $6.7 million in funding last year through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop military jet fuel from vegetable and algal oil.

The company has coordinated with Arizona State University, among other laboratories, to complete the project by the end of the year.

And a handful of alternative energy companies have experimented with algae bio-fuel, including Aquaflow of New Zealand, Seattle- based Imperium Renewables, PetroSun in Scottsdale, Ariz., Sapphire Energy of La Jolla and South San Francisco-based Solazyme.

San Diego's abundant biotechnology clusters and its access to a qualified work force could position it as a strong center for bio- fuels research, the UCSD researchers say.

"Within a 4-mile radius there's 29,000 people engaged in biomedical research," Kay said. "Even just capturing a tenth of that talent toward this problem is going to make a huge difference."

Source: San Diego Business Journal

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