Biofuels from Bacteria: Sandia Labs Helps HelioBioSys Understand New Clean Energy Source
by Jules Bernstein (Sandia National Laboratory) … A Bay Area company has patented a group of three single-celled, algae-like organisms that, when grown together, can produce high quantities of sugar just right for making biofuels. Sandia is helping HelioBioSys Inc. learn whether farming them on a large scale would be successful.
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HelioBioSys is working with organisms called cyanobacteria. … But unlike algae, these marine cyanobacteria excrete sugars directly into the water where they grow. A lot of it.
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Filtering sugar from water is a much simpler and therefore less expensive process than extracting lipids from large quantities of algae mass. Sugar is easy, compared to biomass, to convert into a wide variety of chemicals and fuels.
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“In other words,” Ryan (Sandia biochemist Ryan Davis) says, “we’re trying to deconstruct the magic sauce in this cyanobacteria consortium and learn what conditions are optimal for large-scale growth.”
HelioBioSys founders Rocco Mancinelli and David Smernoff say they chose to grow a community of three cyanobacteria rather than focus on a single organism (which is common in algae cultivation) because communal systems more closely resemble nature. They say cyanobacteria in communities are stronger and more likely to survive changes in the environment, contamination, and predation. Sandia is helping them test this idea.
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Ryan says, “Giant bowls of sugar water generally don’t last long in nature.” However, this is where Sandia’s expertise in algae cultivation could be helpful, he says. “We can understand where we can prevent bacterial overload, and stop the sugars from being consumed by things we don’t want to grow.”
Unlike true algae, cyanobacteria have the remarkable ability to “fix” nitrogen from the atmosphere, which helps support their growth. This means cyanobacteria can literally pull their own fertilizer out of the air, eliminating the need for costly additional fertilizers.
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After proving the technology outdoors, HelioBioSys hopes to license or sell the technology. READ MORE
Farming cyanobacteria — a new source of biofuel? (Algae Industry Magazine)
