An image of a bioreactor being developed by OriginOil scientists.

Today’s episode of QUEST features our 10-minute TV story about efforts to produce biofuels from algae. In 1996, when the U.S. Department of Energy concluded its 25-year research project into the potential of algae as biofuels, its report concluded that the most cost-effective way to grow algae was in open ponds. With climate change and geopolitics prompting new research into the algae-as-fuel question, some companies are pursuing the open pond route, while others are looking into closed systems such as bioreactors. In our TV story we profile OriginOil, a Los Angeles-based company developing a bioreactor that looks like a miniature Christmas tree, complete with bright, colored lights. And we interview the CEO of Aurora Biofuels, a company based in the Bay Area city of Alameda, which is re-imagining open ponds, as well as trying to create strains of algae that are ideal for fuel production. Before becoming the CEO of Aurora Biofuels, Bob Walsh worked at the oil company Shell for 25 years. Here’s an excerpt of QUEST’s March, 2009, interview with Walsh, most of which didn't make it into the TV segment.

QUEST: What excited you about algae?

BOB WALSH: I ran oil products businesses for many years and understand the cost-competitiveness and the commodity basis of it. And what excited me about algae was, A, it’s renewable. B, you're using a feed stock of carbon dioxide, which is basically free. And finally, what excited me about this company, Aurora Biofuels, was the aspect of solving it end to end, not just the biotech (end of things), but also the engineering aspects.

Q: What has algae been grown for in ponds in the past?

WALSH: Algae’s been grown in open ponds for decades. And typically it’s been done with nutraceuticals – spirulina, which many people use as a protein pill. That is grown in open ponds, but not very cost-effectively because they haven’t had to be very cost-effective. They can charge $10 per pound.

Q: What would be the difference that you would be looking for in terms of cost-effectiveness, compared to what’s been done already?

WALSH: Historically, algae were just grown in an open pond and captured carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and the sun. What we’re actually doing is injecting the CO2 we recover from a steel mill or power plant, to give the algae food. And we’ve engineered it to get better mixing, so it grows more quickly. And then finally, rather than drying the algae out, we actually do a wet extraction of the oil, which is much more cost-effective than drying it as they have historically done for proteins.

Q: So what price would you be aiming for, and what price can the algae be grown for now?

WALSH: Oil today has been around $50 per barrel. We believe we need to be competitive in the $50-60 range. And that’s what our final target is. I think oil will be $60-100 over the next 10 to 15 years.

Q: What would the algae biofuels facility of the future look like?

WALSH: You’ll situate it very close to a CO2 source – a steel mill or a power plant. It will encompass several thousand acres of barren land – because you want dry, barren land – and use salt water. And it would produce roughly 120 million gallons a year of useable fuel into the existing infrastructure.

Q: Can algae fuel actually make a contribution to our transportation needs?

WALSH: Algae can be a player. It’s going to take a lot of different solutions because of the different climates and things that you need for it. It’s also a trillion-gallon market. And so it’s not going to happen tomorrow. But certainly algae can be a 5- to 10-percent player in ten years, in the marketplace.

Watch the Algae Power television story online.

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UCSF biologist Jeff Tabor holds up an ecoli culture designed to display the shape of a squid.

Synthetic biology portends big changes in our lives by ushering in a dizzying array of applications in everything from medicine to biofuels, environmental remediation to agriculture. Though many of these applications haven’t yet come on line, researchers are hard at work to synthesize new drugs and devices made from genetic parts.

For example, there’s an enzyme that exists in plants which makes methyl halides, a molecule which can be catalytically converted into gasoline and other chemicals. Imagine if you could put this enzyme-making gene into yeast, then you could brew the yeast to churn out the methyl halides and after some optimization of the production pathway, you could scale up production to pump out this carbon neutral gasoline precursor for use in today’s automobiles. This is the idea behind an innovative biofuels project that has taken off in the lab of Chris Voigt at UCSF’s School of Pharmacy.

Voigt and his team surveyed the genetic database for the presence of the gene that encodes for the enzyme that makes methyl halides. Lo and behold, the gene exists in plants as diverse as ice plant, which dots the northern California coast, bok choy and pinot noir grapes. After building a library of about 100 enzymes from these diverse plants, the researchers had to determine which of these would function best in the yeast. They zeroed in on an enzyme from ice plant and then used the tool of DNA synthesis to translate the gene for the enzyme that makes methyl halides into something that would work in yeast.

The remarkable thing about this project is that the researchers never actually touched any of the plants. They simply “Googled” a genetic database to find all the genes out there in plants that produce the enzyme that makes methyl halides. As Professor Voigt says, “it’s incredible that synthetic biology is something that could really unlock the potential of using organisms in order to produce fuels.”

Watch the video made by the Voigt Lab demonstrating the combustible property of their synthetically derived methyl halides:

QUEST on KQED Public Media. Video courtesy of
Prof. Chris Voigt, UCSF School of Pharmacy

Watch the Decoding Synthetic Biology television story online.

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A sample of switchgrass at Sandia National
Laboratories

So when QUEST decided to move forward on producing a story about biofuels, I welcomed the opportunity to assist Series Producer Josh Rosen in its crafting. Being QUEST, we weren't content to merely renumerate the different kinds of biofuels and how cellulosic ethanol is more efficient than corn-based ethanol. Instead, our story focuses on the pioneering work being done by researchers affiliated with the Joint BioEnergy Initiative (JBEI), a multi-billion dollar research initiative based in Emeryville, as they look beyond ethanol to the next generation of biofuels. So not only is JBEI looking at various feedstocks like switchgrass, rice, poplar and innovative ways to “deconstruct” the cellulosic material, it also attempts to synthesize fuels that work more efficiently in America's automotive fleet, still overwhelmingly reliant on gasoline.

But even top researchers at JBEI like Jay Keasling and Blake Simmons caution that this next generation of biofuels won't be coming online for years. Moreover, new research suggests that the net production cycle of biofuels, from the clear-cutting of trees to grow the crops to their transport to markets far away, may yield as many or more emissions as the use of petroleum-based fuel. A recent Op-Ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by UC Berkeley Alex Farrell cites the reason for this as primarily one of production– the way we clear land for growing biofuels, as well as our emphasis on the use of food-based crops like corn and soybean, which aren't terribly efficient sources of ethanol to begin with.

Tad Patzek, also at UC Berkeley, has been an ardent critic of the carbon-neutral reputation of biofuels, garnering controversy for conducting studies that some other researchers have criticized for their calculations of emissions arising from biofuel production. (See Patzek's co-authored article on page 19 of the March 2007 edition of Energy Tribune). Earlier this year, a study by researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute suggests that biofuels are not created equal, as those made from U.S. corn, Malaysian palm oil and Brazilian soy yield more emissions than their petroleum-based counterparts, given the environmental damage they reap when grown for fuel. The study cites recycled cooking oil and biofuel made from grassy and woody cellulosic material as being more intelligent choices for cutting down on emissions.

And so the debate continues, struggling to keep pace with the technological progress made by scientists toiling away in their quest to find the holy grail of an efficient, cheap and environmentally-friendly biofuel.

Watch the "Biofuels: Beyond Ethanol" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Sheraz Sadiq is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.

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The biofuels we look at in this piece are primarily cellulose-based. Some of the researchers we talked with called the products they are designing, biopetrol because they are trying to mimic, synthetically, what petroleum does. The San Carlos start up, LS9, is making a biopetrol product. The hope of these researchers is to use plant matter, or biomass, to make a cellulosic biofuel that can be used in the existing petroleum infrastructure without needing to change pipelines, pumps at stations or gas tanks.

There are a number of California companies and research institutions working on developing advanced biofuels. The big, new academic center for research is the Joint Bio Energy Institute out of Emeryville.

As you will hear in this story, some are tinkering with microbes, others are trying to improve on current feedstocks.

Biofuels don’t have to come from traditional plants in the ground but can come from converting algae or trash into biodiesel. While that is not the focus of this story, we hope to take it up in the coming months.

You may listen to the "Designer Biofuels" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.