14 DAY TRIAL // We're living in a time when depending too much on oil for energy needs could prove tricky.
That's why now the research on biofuel has been rerun.
Biofuel can be achieved from almost any organic product, from agriculture wastes to dung, including that of wild animals. Now researchers retake in account algae-based fuels, being helped by the recent advances in genomics and biotechnology.
Algae are a natural oil-producer, offering multiple paths to biofuel. They can easily be genetically engineered to achieve varieties that generate high amounts of oil that can be turned into biocrude and refined into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel; those with less carbon atoms can be processed and fermented to make ethanol. Algae can be grown on land outworn for other crops and using water unsuitable for agriculture purposes, they do not interfere with food production, and oil-per-acre production can be much higher than for industrial crops like soybeans. And their oil production can be boosted even more.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) decade-long algae-to-fuel project was stopped by a decrease in oil prices in 1996, but currently there is a crisis starting to emerge, as oil deposits are located in countries not so democracy-friendly.
NREL is expected to start up again with algae within the next year. GreenFuel is a company developing systems that employ algae bioreactor technology to convert CO2 from smokestack flue gases to not pollutant, renewable biofuels, like biodiesel, ethanol or methane, while also decreasing toxic emissions.
This technology could be also a hit in limiting CO2 emissions while reusing it in renewable fuels, an economically and without retooling method. Experiments revealed a roughly 80 % CO2 capture rates during daylight hours.
LiveFuels is another company funding and coordinating research on algae-to-biocrude. "We could replace certainly all of our diesel fuel with algal-derived oils, and possibly replace a lot more than that", said Kathe Andrews-Cramer, technical lead researcher for biofuels and bioenergy at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories.