Green and Lean: Secreting Bacteria Eliminate Cost Barriers for Renewable Biofuel Production

(Physorg.com) A Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University research team has developed a process that removes a key obstacle to producing low-cost, renewable biofuels from bacteria. The team has reprogrammed photosynthetic microbes to secrete high-energy fats, making byproduct recovery and conversion to biofuels easier and potentially more commercially viable.
"The real costs involved in any biofuel production are harvesting the goodies and turning them into fuel," said Roy Curtiss, of the Institute's Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology and professor in the School of Life Sciences. "This whole system that we have developed is a means to a green recovery of materials not requiring energy dependent physical or chemical processes."
Curtiss is part of a large, multidisciplinary ASU team that has been focusing on optimizing photosynthetic microbes, called cyanobacteria, as a renewable sourceof biofuels. These microbes are easy to genetically manipulate and have a potentially higher yield than any plant crops currently being used for the production of transportation fuels.
But, until now, harvesting the fats from the microbes has required many costly additional processing steps that contribute up to 70 to 80 percent of the total cost of their renewable biofuel production, making them uncompetitive compared with petroleum production costs. READ MORE and MORE (Algae Industry Magazine) Abstract