No-Kill Farming: The Rise of Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Biofuels through Continuous Harvest

Algae/Other Aquatic Organisms/Seaweed, BioChemicals/Renewable Chemicals, BioRefineries/Renewable Fuel Production, Business News/Analysis, Farming/Growing, Feedstock, Infrastructure, Not Agriculture, Precursors/Biointermediates, R & D Focus

November 3, 2011

Print This Article Share it With Friends

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Does continuous harvest, and direct production from CO2 and water, offer a transformative, no-kill way to improve the carbon and dollar economics of biofuels? Can the dairy model work?

…In beef and grain, the whole organism is harvested. In dairy and fruit, an output from the organism is harvested and the organism carries on. The organism carrying on – that’s continuous harvest.

Grasses have this quality. You plant the lawn, and then you mow it, and mow it, and mow it. Canes have the same quality too.

…The productivity advantage is that the organic pool is never depleted, and the ecosystem has to expend less energy on making new organisms.

…Naturally Scientific uses waste CO2 to bio-manufacture fermentable sugars and pure vegetable oil (PVO) from plant cell cultures to provide truly sustainable feedstock for bio-diesel, ethanol  and ‘drop-in’synthetic fuel producers.

…Another case in point is Algenol, the Florida-based developer of algae that continuously secrete ethanol.

…Another company that has continuous harvest is Solazyme. In this case, the company feeds sugar to its proprietary algal strains. As happens with human organisms when they eat too many Big Macs or sweets, the algae get fat. In this case, though – and wouldn’t this be a breakthrough for Jenny Craig – the lipids are secreted rather than conventionally harvested by capturing, concentrating and fractioning the algae. …There’s no reason why, for example, Solazyme’s process can’t utilize Naturally Scientific’s no-kill low-cost sugars. Proterro is working on a synthetic approach to low-cost sugar as well. LS9′s magic bug is also being readied to work with these new sugars.

…Over at Joule, its a wildly different approach, but no less interesting, and there’s nothing wild about the premise. The company has engineered a system in which modified cyanobacteria, using CO2, water and sunlight, fix the underlying molecules into a hydrocarbon.

…Recently at the Algal Biomass Summit in Minneapolis, a team of researchers from the University of Texas and the algal harvesting company OpenAlgae published a poster on “Non-Lethal Oil Recovery Suitable for Biocatalytic Algal Platforms”. The hypothesis: that a single pass of an emulsion of water, algae and oil, through an OpenAlgae oil recovery membrane, could harvest up to 95 percent of the available oils without inhibiting cell growth or viability. READ MORE

Comments are closed.

Advanced BioFuels USA