Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) A new technology that produces a doubling  of overall biomass in algae and 40 percent in camelina has appeared on the horizon, and I’d like to draw your attention to this work in The Plant Journal and this one in Nature Research. If you’ve been a fan of the New Mexico Consortium, Dick Sayre’s algae research, Los Alamos National Lab’s algae program or the Donald Danforth Plant Center in St. Louis, some of these advances will surprise but not shock you. A very interesting company called Pebble Labs, too.

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Today, I’d also like to draw your attention to some important ideas driving this advance in algae, as they have implications for an array of feedstocks because this is grounded in a story of sunshine and photosynthesis. Also, we’ll spend a little time looking at The Feedstock Problem that continues to bedevil the deployment of biobased technologies for energy products.

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(W)e’re not much different from our eukaryotic distant cousins, algae. Our little relatives also struggle when the sun gets intense, they start to shed it as heat. Bottom line, when there’s too much sunlight, algae start up a whole bunch of mechanisms to protect themselves that take away from biomass productivity. In the garden, when you get overwhelmed by heat, you seek out a water or a lemonade, rest under a shady tree, perhaps go inside or at the very least you slow down your work as you fight off the heat stress and sweat.

In algae research, and in crop research as a whole, for a long time there’s been an effort on to use more sunlight and use more energy from the sun to make biomass, or corn, or what have you. We’ve written of discussions over the years to improve the photosynthetic efficiency of Rubisco, so that plants can use more energy to fix more carbon dioxide and produce ultimately more crop.

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This new line of research we’re reporting on today goes another way — to better regulate the sunlight that is coming in and being used, so that the algae don’t get stressed, distracted or otherwise go into low-productivity mode. It’s not different than the idea of sunscreen, in some ways, which allows you to spend more time in the sunlight and receive more solar energy by slowing down the absorption of damaging ultraviolet light. Sometimes, what algae need to succeed is a sort of a hat.

And the research is showing that, given a hat, algae begin to produce more biomass because they work in their standard way for longer, same as you would farming in your garden or sunning at your beach.

Less stress, more success.

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Algae have been difficult to afford as a platform for energy production because the housing costs too much taken against the productivity gains versus terrestrial plants. Basically, you have to build a lake to host them, whereas Mother Earth provides the dirt for soil-based crops when you rent the land, and plants have their own systems for moving water two of three feet from underground to top of the plant. Algae can’t lift water like plants can, it’s their fundamental weakness.

So, there are energy costs to move water, there are capex costs to build the lake. No one has been able to build something large enough or cheap enough to overcome the advantages that plants have in capex and water-transport. Algae work faster, but they cost more to host than their productivity gain justifies.

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The Feedstock Problem

The feedstock problem remains in almost every important respect exactly as it was a generation ago.

Technology opens up new feedstocks, and yet the feedstock cost turns up too little advantage to the project owner to justify the technology shift or adoption risk.

Technology makes it possible to use waste to make a fuel — such as fats, greases, dairy waste, corn stover, waste CO2, brackish water, manure, rendering products, used plastics, carbon monoxide, forest slash or landfill. But a negative-cost feedstock generally will begin to acquire a cost rapidly once the conversion barrier is resolved, and the restaurant owner who used to pay to have the grease removed now receives a check for the goo. Waste feedstock prices almost always rise faster than energy prices, and so the project feasibility reduces over time of deployment. Projects get choked off by margin risk just as they have crushed the technology risk.

It’s the same old problem, and technology doesn’t really solve it.

At the end of the day, feedstocks are traded in commodity markets and the prices are highly sensitive to supply and demand forces, and the risk destroys confidence even before the rising costs do.

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Fuels are subject to shifts in the primary sector, the cost of raw materials. Manufacturing costs vary but the swings are much less violent than the shifts in the primary sector.

The petroleum problem

And, there’s the mothership of energy raw materials, petroleum. Currently costs $15 a barrel, or 4 cents a pound. That’s 80 percent less than the cost of waste greases from your kitchen sink. Last month, the May contract for WTI bottomed out at minus $42 a barrel, or negative $250 per ton. Landfill waste runs at negative $72 a ton, more or less.

When petroleum costs three times less than mixed garbage from landfill, you can see the problem of platform-switching, there’s almost no economic incentive for switchers, and there can be significant disincentives.

The benefits of a bioeconomy are not generally grounded in lower prices to the individual customer. Rather, they offer society-wide benefits such as cleaner air, more diverse sources of energy, energy security for biomass-based and petroleum-deplete nations, and can offer performance benefits such as tolerating high engine compression (in the case of ethanol) or being less likely to leak (in the case of FDCA plastics). The performance benefits sometimes generate higher consumer prices, not always.

Our economic model centers around price and fuel compatibility, since engines are built to a standard, the fuel just has to work, better fuels don’t always get better prices because engines don’t always change to realize those benefits.

Altruism and coercion

Consequently, we expect renewable fuels to compete with fossil fuels based on altruism and coercion. The former means getting people to choose a better fuel for society that costs more but brings no individual benefit to the consumer. The latter means establishing mandates to force renewable fuels into a market when otherwise there would be resistance from incumbents and some consumers.

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And, there is the problem of the incumbents, who see coercion as an attempt to award market share at their expense. Which it is.

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What’s the fix?

What’s needed is willpower, because the fix is obvious. When governing authorities reform markets to expand the price configuration to include energy value, performance value and carbon value, renewable fuels do very well, and society advances. Low Carbon Fuel Standards may not be perfect, but they are the best example of how to reform a market.

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Markets often need reform when there is a market failure that is intolerable. The SEC was invented to reform equity markets. The FDA was invented to reform drug markets. The Federal reserve was invented to reform banking markets. Prior to the founding of each, there were market failures that became intolerable — the misery spread too quickly and too intensely than markets could self-organize.to fix problems. The same thing that happened with COVID-19, by the way, which was a market failure in the high-value business of pandemic prevention, and only incidentally a health crisis.

It’s obvious to many that there is a market failure in carbon regulation, and mechanisms like the Paris Agreement have sprung up haphazardly and not-too-boldly to reform carbon markets. You see, there always has been a carbon market, since the dawn of time, it is just that in this market there has been almost no demand. The reform aims to stimulate demand for lower carbon technology until we have created a new normal in our economy at scale.

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However, the reforms have not effectively addressed liquid transportation. To the extent that transport has been addressed, reformers have aimed at electrifying the fleet and shifting from liquid energy carriers to particles. Aside from the fact that it’s a bad idea to replace one monopoly technology platform with another, there’s the pressing problems of heavy transport, and carbon reformers have been late on heavy all along, and are not working hard on catching up. Makes them poor reformers, by the way.   READ MORE

Light regulation of light-harvesting antenna size substantially enhances photosynthetic efficiency and biomass yield in
green algae (The Plant Journal)

UCSD researchers turning algae waste into products (Algae Industry Magazine)