Biofuels

3 crops that have this Industry’s interest: Grasses, Trees, & Algae.

Biofuels are controversial in some quarters. There is an opinion that in order to produce them we must use land which should otherwise be left for food production or else left for ecosystems to flourish; thus allowing them to play their important role in climate / biodiversity regulation.

Biofuels also often involve the necessity of genetic engineering which too is controversial.

Biotechnology cut its teeth on medicines, but it’s likely to make its big money in bulk chemicals; and few chemicals are bulkier than fuels. This is why there is so much financial investment going into this field. Biofuels are now poised to become big business & are no longer being viewed as a cross between eccentric greenwash & a politically acceptable way of subsidising farmers.

To create a proper biofuel industry requires a complicated chain of processes. All parts of this chain are currently being researched and developed;

• New crops have to be created for fuel rather than food production
• Ways of converting these crops into feedstock have to be developed
• That feedstock then has to be turned into something people want and can afford to buy

There are some biofuels that are already competitive with 2006 oil prices e.g. ethanol from; sugarcane, maize, beet and wheat.

There are three different crops which have the biofuel community’s interest; grasses, trees & algae.

• Grasses & Trees are grown on dry land but need a lot of processing. Idea is to take the whole biomass of the plant, particularly the cellulose (plant cell’s wall) & turn it into fuel. Now, that fuel is often ethanol – “Cellulosic ethanol”.
• Algae is aquatic & therefore more fiddly to grow but promises a high quality product – oil; that doesn’t need much treatment to become biodiesel.

Turning sunlight into biofuel takes 3 steps, different methods may miss out some of these steps. Algae can make the leap from start to finish directly whereas vascular plants, trees & grasses, cannot.

It’s anybody’s guess as to which biofuel production method will prove the best. However, the sheer number of projects in this area is proof that some of the most radical thinking in renewable energy is in biofuels.

Some think the “Glucose economy” will replace the existing oil economy. Glucose, the most common monomer sugar, would be turned into fuels & maybe even bioplastic & other bio-equivalents of petrochemicals.

America’s Departments of Energy & Agriculture suggest that 1.3 billion tonnes of plant material could be collected from American soil without affecting food production (but what about ecosystem function?). Converted to ethanol, this adds up to the equivalent of 350 billion litres of petrol, or 65% of the country’s current consumption.

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