To Fix Carbon, Food, Energy: Fix RuBisCO (The Mother of All Biofuels Challenges)
by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) …It was the biochemist Dr. Ganesh Kishore, now the CEO of the Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund and formerly Chief Biotechnology Officer of Dupont, who raised the issue at a recent Burrill & Company Limited Partners meeting, when he said that biofuels research, while impressive and laudable, is overly focused on midstream processing technologies and not on the key factor: the appallingly low rate at which plants convert sunlight to energy.
…For example, corn checks in with a 1-2 percent efficiency rate. Raise photosynthetic efficiencies to 10-12 percent, said Kishore: that’s the opportunity. It’s of the most interesting points raised this year in biofuels circles, for with such a fix, so many of the concerns about biofuels – cost parity, food vs fuel, the cost of transporting biomass – begin to melt away.
…It’s role: it is the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in the fixation of atmospheric carbon (for most plants, and also for cyanobacteria) – in short, it is a gateway to plant growth and carbon sequestration.
…The problem underlying biofuels – advanced or otherwise – upon which critics train their daggers, is alarmingly simple: it is the absence of sustainable, affordable biofuels feedstocks at scale.
…There is more at stake than biofuels. For the world produces more food per capita today than in 1960, and the world hunger crisis that NGOs and the UN talk about is not a crisis of food distribution, but income distribution. 50 percent of the world’s population lives in rural areas, and there is no solving the world’s income distribution problems without solving the problem of rural income. Biofuels provide the best-known mechanism for improving rural income in the long-term.
What else is the product of improved rural incomes? Well, for one, smaller families — for it is a well-established demographic fact that more affluent families have fewer children. With fewer mouths to feed, less pressure of population growth, and pressure on scarce water and food resources. Not to mention the reduced pressure on carbon emissions from smaller populations. READ MORE Includes links to academic research.
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- IEA World Energy Report Calls for Switch to Low Carbon Energy: Growing Biofuels Production Will Play a Role in Reducing GHG Emissions
- Scientists Say Growing Grain for Food Is More Energy Efficient
- “You Have a Friend in Bioenergy”: Sustainability, Advanced Biofuels, Rural Incomes and the Developing World
- Liquid Biofuels:Background Brief for the World Bank Group Energy Sector Strategy
