How Energy Is Produced - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 141

Third-Generation Biofuels
When I was a university student, I would head out with my friends to one of the beach
resorts along the Adriatic on summer weekends. I shied away from the discos because
the volume cramped my style. I remember one full-moon night in particular, when my
companion and I sat on the beach looking at the outline of our friends' bodies illuminated
by sea sparkle (known colloquially as 'mare in amore' or 'sea in love' in Italy).
Unfortunately,Igotalittle carriedawayexplaininghowtheluminescent effectiscausedby
blooms of a unicellular organism and failed to take advantage of the romantic possibilities
Noctiluca scintillans presented. I noticed two things that evening: unicellular organisms
have a remarkable ability to rapidly reproduce, and there are times when it is better to look
with the eyes of a poet than those of a scientist.
Algae like Noctiluca scintillans have the capacity to not only 'bloom', but also to
produce and store oil in their cells. These twin characteristics make them the best hope
for a third generation of biofuels. If cultivated in ponds under suitable conditions, algal
microorganisms may yield up to 60,000 litres of biofuel per hectare, compared with 6,000
litres from a hectare of oil palm or 450 litres from soy (Demirbas 2010 ; Singh and Gu
2010 ) . So far, third-generation biofuels are in the early stages of research and development,
far from commercial production. But with the price of fossil oil and concerns about
conventional biofuels on the increase, that sort of yield is already drawing considerable
interest, both from scientists and investors (IEA Bioenergy 2009 ).
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy approved $44 million for research on
algae-based biofuel. The interest from the private sector is even greater. In 2012 Sapphire
Energy, a renewable energy company based in California, raised more than $150 million in
private investment, bringing its total to more than $300 million. And the oil giant Exxon
Mobil has invested $600 million in Synthetic Genomics, a company founded by Craig
Venter, the American biologist-turned-businessman who led the race to map the human
genome (Bullis 2012 ; Fairley 2011 ; Savage 2011 ) . Venter summed up the advantages of
investing in algae-based biofuels: “If we were trying to make liquid transportation fuels to
replace all transportation fuels in the U.S., and you try and do that from corn, it would take
a facility three times the size of the continental U.S. If you try to do it from algae, it's a
facilityroughlythesizeofthestateofMaryland.Oneisdoable,andtheother'sjustabsurd”
(Biello 2012a ).
Not content with his project to produce oil from algae, Venter is exploring an even
more prodigious source of biofuel: bacteria that consume carbon dioxide and produce
methane. Such organisms exist - deep in the ocean, surrounding thermal vents - but no
one has yet succeeded in cultivating them in a laboratory, let alone in a power plant.
However, with genetic engineering this may one day be possible. The great attraction of