Cool Biofuel

I've written before about the importance of choosing the right biofuel. This post can be seen as a follow-up to that previous post.

Originally, biofuels were heralded as a green replacement for fossil fuels, reducing the impact of climate change and reducing our reliance on imported oil. Simply put, fossil fuels release “new” carbon into the atmosphere when they're used (or at least carbon that hasn't been part of our atmospheric carbon-cycle for many millions of years), whereas biofuels are fabricated from carbon which is already part of the carbon-cycle.

Ironically, it soon became apparent that many of the techniques for producing biofuels had wide-reaching environmental consequences. Bioethanol, fermented from sugars and starches, used valuable food crops and farm land; and biodiesel made form palm oil also lead to the destruction of millions of hectares of rainforest.

Despite these negative side effects consumers and industry seemed enamored with biofuels, perhaps spurred on by the work of pioneering companies (such as the Aquaflo Group that develops processes to produce biofuel from purely sustainable sources that did not impact the environment) even the military got in on the act. In April 2010 the U.S. Navy test flew an F/A-18 Super Hornet powered by a biofuel blend as part of their stated intention to increase their use of alternative energy to at least 50% of their energy requirements by no later than 2020.

This is a noble objective, if not entirely motivated by self interest (fossil fuels are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive). However, if the biofuel project is to be successful in the long-term increasingly more novel production methods are needed. In particular the shift away from using agricultural sources in biofuel production is essential as those sources come under increasing strain from climate change and population growth.

One very interesting development appeared recently from a Colorado based company called OPXBIO. They are pioneering a process to produce diesel from carbon dioxide and hydrogen directly! The process being developed by OPXBIO in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Johnson Matthey works by mixing carbon dioxide gas and hydrogen gas in water with a microorganism. The microorganism consumes the gases and produces  diesel fuel, which can be used directly as biodiesel, or enhanced using a catalyst to power standard diesel engines, or even jet aircraft.

The process was made possible by OPXBIO's proprietary EDGE (Efficiency Directed Genome Engineering) technology. EDGE uses a massively parallel, full genome search technology to identify microbial genomes with the potential to produce fuel. The EDGE system takes the genome of an existing organism, such as yeast, makes tiny changes to it and then measures the new organisms potential for fuel production. However, because genomes are so large this is a laborious process, as the number of possible changes that can be made to a genome are huge. OPXBIO claim that their system can create optimized microbes within months rather than years. If this claim is true then we may be seeing the birth of a new breed of biofuels that have little-or-no environmental impact and can be manufactured from readily available materials.