The Right Biofuel

Filled up your tank lately? Whatever you call it, petrol or gas, it's getting more expensive. Hard pressed consumers are demanding cheaper fuel and in our economic system, the free market, it's the suppliers job to meet that demand. So what do suppliers do? Well they do what any forward thinking industry would do. They look for alternative sources of fuel. Unfortunately, in their haste to meet consumer demand they stopped at the most expedient solution. Biofuel.

What made Biofuel an expedient solution was the fact that there was already an available source for the raw materials needed to manufacture it. Theoretically Biofuel can be made from any organic (carbon based) source. This includes plant and animal matter, and the most readily available supply of plant and animal matter is our food supply.

Faced with the ever increasing cost of fossil fuels and their contribution to Global Warming Environmentalists and Industry seemed to agree that Biofuels were the way of the future.



Today the worlds food supply is being siphoned into our fuel tanks at an alarming rate. In early July 2008 a confidential World Bank report published in a British newspaper claimed that Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75 percent.

As always though the human cost is not the only cost. As the hype around Biofuels grew and governments started setting Biofuel targets, palm plantations sprouted out of the virgin forests of South-east Asia. These forests form the habitat for numerous species, including the orang-utan, the only great apes found outside Africa. Evidence suggests that fewer than 30,000 orang-utans exist in the world today. According to The World Wildlife Fund "The most serious threat to orang-utans is the destruction of their rainforest habitat... The main causes of this habitat loss are commercial logging, clearance for agriculture, and conversion to plantations."



Efforts are being made however, to move away from palm oil, and other destructive sources of Biofuel to more sustainable sources. Biofuel from algae has been recently touted as an eco-friendly way to produce Biofuel from non-food sources, such as switchgrass, corn stovers, wood chips and sugar cane. Algae are photosynthetic and consume carbon to grow. Nearly 50% of algae is vegetable oil. However, many of the carbon sources used to grow algae, such as sugars, still rely on agricultural land and/or destruction of forests.

The Solution?

A New Zealand company Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation are pioneering the production of Biofuel from wild algae harvested from open-air environments, such as the settling ponds of standard Effluent Management (EM) Systems. According to the company the "process can be used in many industries that produce a waste stream, including the transport, dairy, meat and paper industries." Amongst the benefits of using this approach is the fact that there is no competition with other carbon sources, such as our food supply. The process involves cleaning nutrient rich waste water from urban and industrial sources using existing infrastructures, and discharging clean water.

Companies around the world are attempting to harness the power of algae for the production of energy. While some approaches involve the consumption of sugars and other food sources, the more imaginative ones utilize algae to clean waste from our homes and factories while producing a sustainable form of energy.