BUENOS AIRES – It is early afternoon and the sun is moving west along the Rio de la Plata in the general direction of the Paraná, the river that continues northeast towards Santa Fe province and the great soy fields of the Argentine. It continues north into Brazil and anchors the great sugarcane ethanol fields west of Sao Paulo.
SOH-ZHA, as it is pronounced here – the great soybean engine of the Argentine biofuels industry – is a common topic of conversation among agriculturalistas and even here in the capital, where President Cristina Kirchner has continued a series of unpopular soy export policies. The great ABCD of agriculture – Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus – are arrayed like a series of armies to the west, trading wheat, trading corn – above all, trading soh-zha.
But its the Rio de la Plata that has my attention this morning – 2009 has taught us that the excess of emissions in the skies and shortage of land on the ground may well be solved underwater, through microcrops: algaes. diatoms, cyanobacteria and microscopic flowering plants like lemna.
A lot of things are underwater that shouldn’t be. The financials of so many ethanol and biodiesel producers. The balance sheet of the United States, and several of its largest enterprises and banks. By 2100, perhaps even Grenada, according to climate professionals. But not everything we find underwater is evil. Our most ancient species are there – the long survivors – with their advanced methods for converting sunlight to simple sugars, and simple sugars to fats.
All the oil companies are studying microcrops – some more privately than others – and the effort is increasing in diversity. Five years ago, there were just a handful of companies led by Green Fuel, and most of them were exploring green microalgaes.
Since then, there’s been an explosion of companies- as many as 500, according to a Digest source -developing solutions on the green microalgae platform. Just a handful of companies working on lemna – prominent among them PetroAlgae. Just three companies – including BioLight Harvesting, Targeted Growth and Synthetic Genomics – and a cadre of academics working on cyanobacteria. No major work to date on diatoms.
But whoa, Nelly, did you say Synthetic Genomics? The company that sealed a $600 million research deal with ExxonMobil earlier this year – working on cyanabacteria?
Cyanabacteria – also known as blue-green algae though not hailing from the same biologicial neighborhood – may well be the hottest bioenergy platform in 2010.
Why no interest until now. A reputation for low lipid content, and a general lack of a deep dive into its properties and promise.
But there’s been a wake up call.
Maybe it was the DARPA project manager who said at a recent meeting, according to a participant, “bioreactors won’t work, and species mutate. Nature has done it for 300 million years – radiation from the sun will take your perfect bug and mutate it pretty quick.”
Maybe it was the aftermath of the recent Southern California fire season, in which ash, drifting down from the north into the Imperial Valley, managed to crash a material number of algae pilot project ponds.
Maybe it was the realization that developing or discovering microalgae that would secrete their lipds will not work in open ponds – too attractive to predators, too much effect on the pH of the system.
But maybe it wasn’t a negative at all – maybe it was, as Inventure Chemical CEO Mark Tegue discovered, while analyzing samples for clients that were marked by reputable labs for 7 percent lipid content and turned out to have 25 percent, that cyanobacteria’s lipid content has not been low, but hidden. “I’m proud of our process,” said Tegue, “but I’m not saying we’re the best. I’m saying there is a lot more there than people realize.”
What are cyanobacteria? Like microalgae, they are microscopic organisms that, according to Tegue, “are like the weed in the algae system, they grow like crazy. But in the early days they were overlooked because the green algae had so much lipid potential. The problem is that the high lipid algaes struggle to survive in the contaminated environment of open ponds. Already, producers are looking towards “Prozac algaes” – no highs, no lows – that can survive in an industrial setting. Meanwhile, even in an Air Force program collecting algae around the world – the researchers may have thrown away the cyanobacteria in order to concentrate on the green algaes.
This “Rodney Dangerfield” of microcrops – the one that “can’t get no respect”, has interesting properties. According to Tegue, there are found strains that “autofloccuate and drop out of solution – wild cyanobacteria, not lab rats, with up to 25 percent oil.”
The list of companies looking at cyanobacteria is small, but impressive. In addition to Inventure Chemical, there are:
Tom Todaro’s Targeted Growth, which recently partnered with 14 airlines in an aviation biofuels venture through its sister company AltAir and utilizing a camelina platform. TG recently pulled down a $2 million ARRA grant, in partnership with Inventure and Washington State University, to develop microcrop opportunities.
Last July, Targeted Growth announced they have developed a way to increase the lipid content of cyanobacteria by approximately 400 percent. This discovery will increase the oil yield per acre, decrease the cost of algae production and help algae-based biofuels become price-competitive with petroleum. Targeted Growth will focus on the development and optimization of strains of cyanobacteria, a blue-green algae, to yield high levels of lipid and other products, while reducing needed inputs and ultimately driving down costs. WSU will develop advanced phototrophic (light) and heterotrophic (nutrient) bioreactors and harvesting technology to enable cost-efficient, year-round growth of the algal strains developed by TGI. After the algal biomass is harvested, it will be sent to Seattle-based Inventure for conversion into fuel and other valuable products such as renewable chemicals.
Steve Kay’s Biolight Harvesting. The legendary dean of microbiology at UCSD has been investigating cyanobacteria, backed by CMEA Ventures and CEO Michael Melnick, in a pilot project out in California’s Imperial Valley.
J. Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics. The controversial and colorful genomics pioneer landed a $600 million partnership with ExxonMobil – not expected to deliver fuels in the near-terms, but intriguingly focused on the potential of cyanobacteria.
According to Utah State, algae-based research related to carbon recycling restarted in 2000 when Ohio University researchers developed a technique to control the emissions of CO 2 from fossil-?red power plants by growing organisms on reactor-enclosed bio-films: A thermophilic mesophilic organism was examined with respect to its ability to recycle CO 2 from scrubbed stack gases and cyanobacteria was grown on ?xed surfaces to facilitate algal stability and improve light distribution43. Growth-rates of 50 g/m2/day were reported, but the lipid content was lower than the rates reported by eukaryote algae grown in aqueous solutions.
Prof.R.Malcolm Brown of University of Texas at Austin has solved the cellulosic ethanol hold-up by genetically-engineering cyanobacteria to excrete pure cellulose, without the need for enzymes or pre-treatments.
The Baltic EcoEnergy Cluster has previously commenced a project to produce biogas with high methane and hydrogen content from algae and cyanobacteria. The algae will be harvested from the Gulf of Gdansk and the Vistula submersion.
The project is expected to be complete in 2013.
Science Daily provides a major update on the biofuels capabilities of cyanobacteria, and their superior photosynthesis capabilites that can convert up to 10 percent of the sun’s energy into biomass, compared to the one percent recorded by conventional energy crops such as corn or sugarcane, or the five percent achieved by algae.
Jim Lane
Editor, Biofuels Digest
