7th
Biofuels From Simple Organisms
I’ve been interested in energy production for a long time, so I occasionally collect tidbits of information related to the topic of generating power. A bunch of folks have been working on getting algae to produce biodiesel fuels for quite some time, so it’s not too surprising to find out a naturally-occurring fungus can also produce hydrocarbons that could be used as fuel as well. It sounds promising, but the problem with these organisms is that they still need to produce fuel in a sustainable and economic way — if people are actualy going to use bioorganisms to produce fuels.
So how much fuel does the world use? For 2005, the CIA World Factbook reports that the world usage of oil was 80,290,000 BBLs per day — which converts to roughly 12.8 billion liters/day or 3.4 billion gallons/day). However, that’s total use, and I doubt algae or fungus will ever be commercially used to produce that much oil-like stuff unless pumping oil out of the ground become prohibitively expensive. (Randomly, if you’re interested in tar sands, an article on Canadian tar sands suggests that 2.5 trillion barrels of bitumen should last the world about 80 years at the current rate of consumption. So “pumping” oil might just become “extracting” oil from sand. There seems to be plenty of oil just sitting around.)
But back to biodiesel production… It seems plausible that algae or fungus or some kind of genetically modified organism could produce hydrocarbon fuels. But the incubators for these bugs would compete with mechanical drilling and tar sand extraction (as well as coal mining, too). One benefit for these bugs would be that the growing tanks for these organisms could be pretty well isolated from the environment, so there wouldn’t be messy cleanup operations or pollution. Presumably, the bugs could also be grown where they were needed, so fuel production would not be limited to the Middle East — and giant ships transporting oil might become obsolete. Also, the concept of “Peak Oil” might become irrelevant to energy production and economists.
Interestingly, though, these bugs are ultimately solar powered in a way. They rely on photosynthesis for carbon dioxide in the air to be fixed into hydrocarbons or sugars. Algae uses sunlight directly, and these fungi feed off of cellulose that was most likely created via plants. So the efficiency of photosynthesis limits the fuel production potential of these organisms. The theoretical potential for algae has been investigated, and about 15,000 square miles of algae ponds (about 9.5 million acres) would be “enough” to generate biodiesel for US transportation use (140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel per year). That’s significantly less than the 450 million acres the US uses for crop farming, but that number is also a theoretical maximum which may be somewhat unrealistic since no algae ponds have actually been created to produce any commercial amount of biodiesel yet. Still, algae- or fungus-produced biodiesel isn’t so far-fetched if the costs of growing these bugs and extracting the fuel from them isn’t too high. (A big IF?)
Perhaps the real breakthrough will be isolating the biocatalysts from these organisms to generate fuels in a way that is not dependent on actually growing these bugs. But since there are already living systems that might work, algae ponds or fungus farms might be good places to start.
