Algae: the next biofuel?

During my research into the potential of biofuels, much of the literature focused on the substantial investment going into developing algal biofuel technology. The United States are at the forefront of much of this research, with the US Department of Energy currently investing $18 million in six new innovative projects.

A study by Lui et al. (2013), suggested that algal biofuel could significantly reduce CO2 emissions, with this fuel source producing fewer greenhouse gases than corn produced biofuel. There is also the benefit of saving space as algae produces 12x more biofuel per acre than crops.

Cultivation of Algae Biofuel
Source: Arizona State University

The issue at present is the cost of this energy source. Algae requires more CO2 for growth than is available in the atmosphere, therefore bottled CO2 is required renders the production process extremely expensive.

However, due to the huge investment in this area, there is a great deal of research taking place, aiming not only to make production more economically viable, but also to find different production methods. One new development is the discovery of a species containing an enzyme allowing it to exist in high concentrations of nitrous oxide. This opens up the possibility of feeding this algae  power plants emissions because their ability to metabolise nitrous oxide stops the emissions from being toxic and they can benefit from the high concentrations of CO2. This is still in early stages of development, but it is one demonstration of the innovate research occurring in this area.

Algal biofuel is certainly an exciting area of research and hopefully over the next few years we will witness some of these exciting discoveries becoming advanced enough to bring to market.