Advanced BioFuels USA

by Damian Carrington (The Guardian)  Producing biofuels in the sea removes at a stroke many of the serious problems with conventional biofuels
“It’s best to get it out of the water now or it’ll start getting grazed by the little beasties,” says Lars Brunner as he hauls 50kg of glistening, translucent kelp from the dark waters of the Sound of Kerrera into the boat. The long summer days mean the seaweed is rapidly storing up sugars, which snails and barnacles find delicious.
“You can eat it, but whether it tastes good is debatable,” says Brunner. He is also after the sugars, but for a different reason. His work at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Sams), with parallel projects in Ireland and Norway, is part of a growing worldwide effort aiming to turn the centuries-old seaweed industry into a major source of environmentally friendly biofuels.
The seaweed is farmed in a picture-perfect sea fjord that once hosted a fish farm, near Oban in Argyll, where craggy, green hills overlook the loch. “It’s a very good site,” says Brunner. “It has really nice currents; the seaweed needs the water to flow over the blades so they can capture the nutrients they need.”
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Seaweed is also used to produce vitamin supplements – the huge Chinese industry was founded to provide iodine to the country’s swelling population – as well as cosmetics, plastics and animal feed. These multiple uses could help solve seaweed’s biggest barrier to a biofuels breakthrough, says Kerrison. “The main challenge is making the costs low enough, although they are continuously going down because research is going on all over the world. But if you can extract an expensive product first, then do the biofuel, you get a double whammy that helps the economics.” Other advances being worked on include mechanising seaweed production and using the base of offshore wind turbines as growing sites.
There are other potential barriers, including the fact that most common microbes do not ferment the special sugars in seaweed very well. But in 2012, a Californian firm produced genetically modified bacterium that can produce about 1kg of ethanol from 3kg of dried seaweed. Other research in the area involves harvesting bacteria from the droppings of the sheep on the Scottish island of North Ronaldsay, which thrive on an almost exclusive diet of seaweed.
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Europe is spending millions of euros on nine pilot plants along its Atlantic coast, while the US department of energy, Norwegian oil giant Statoil and the Chilean government have invested in seaweed-biofuel projects.
In Vietnam, shrimp farmers are now growing seaweed resulting in higher incomes, cleaner water and a locally produced biofuel. In Israel, researchers are testing integrated systems where fish, oysters and seaweed are grown together to maximise the use of nutrients, an echo of the Chinese practice of growing tilapia fish in rice paddies. In India, red seaweed is being investigated.   READ MORE