In all the Wrong Places

B4T Editorial Staff

The Next Big Thing

This new strain of “oilman” isn’t looking for your standard sweet crude, not the kind that’s millions of years old and buried sixteen strata deep. As a fuel source, it’s peaked, played out, out of date as Madonna. The next big thing in oil is the kind that will never peak. Furthermore it won’t need drilling and since it will come from a renewable source, you can farm it just like a crop.

It’s called biofuel. Until a few years ago, only nerds in lab coats used the term. Now it’s buzzy enough that there’s an energy food named for it. (We kid you not. Go to BioFUEL the world's most powerful caffeine infused popcorn. Just don’t drive or use heavy machinery afterwards.)

Now that’s cute, but you can’t run your rig on popcorn. More specifically, biofuel is a term for any fuel made from a living source (i.e., the plant kingdom). Petro-oil is a cousin—several dozen times removed—of olive oil, coconut oil, linseed oil and so on. Properly refined, any of these will drive an engine.

Déjà Vue All Over Again

You can even get oil out of such an unlikely source as pond scum, or rather microalgae. And there’s where our story begins. For some of us, the current oil crisis has an air of, as the inimitable Yogi Berra once said, “déjà vu all over again.” Thirty-eight years ago, in 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Companies, or OPEC, created the first oil crisis when it embargoed sales to the U.S. for six months as a political protest, discovering almost accidentally the power of a bargaining block. The era of cheap oil was abruptly over.

Jimmy Carter, who inherited this new economic reality on his election in 1976, launched several programs to create synthetic fuels but his projects lost support as prices declined. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, kept some in place, but they received minimal funding and were eventually abandoned.

Now we’ve been again reminded that oil is a finite commodity, and so we’re busily looking for an alternative fuel, except now the stakes are higher: money’s tighter, the air is dirtier and all of a sudden people on the other side of the world, who used to be perfectly happy getting around on pedal-power, now want their own cars, just like teenagers.

Gas or Tortillas, Which Will It Be?

So in, say, twenty years we need to make oil, lots of it. It took the planet millions of years, but this is America, right? The country that sent a man to the moon should be able whip up a recipe for biofuel over a long weekend. That’s why various scientists from various disciplines have spent the last several years hoping to find the perfect juju nut: easy to grow, easy to shell and doesn’t stain the climate.

So far it hasn’t happened.

A little history of what has. The first serious bio-candidate, corn-based ethanol, which got the lion’s share of early money and attention, actually lived up to its hype and performed about as well as gasoline. Trouble is, it costs as much or more to make. No savings there, not until oil goes well over $100 a barrel. Moreover, ethanol drives up corn prices, which is a serious worry for Central and South America. Yes, it’s big in Brazil, but Brazil has so much land that farmers there can grow corn for fuel and food at the same time.

Turning from corn, scientists have sought the future of biofuel in an increasingly odd assortment of candidates such as rapeseed, palm, kudzu, Jatropha (a leafy Indonesian shrub), restaurant grease (yuk), and until recently, the most favored candidate, dear old pond algae. So far, none of them has worked out. The last several years have been a series of great expectations followed by bitter disappointments.

Funny Business in Roswell

And no expectation has been greater, no disappointment more bitter, than the recent fall from esteem of microalgae, or algae for short. Investigations into the fuel potential of algae date back to WWII, when German scientists experimented with it to drive military vehicles. 

The appeal of algae as a prospective fuel is irresistible. Using sunlight, CO2 and little else, many varieties of fast-growing algae can be cultivated in ponds or translucent reactors. What’s more, when scientists withhold nutrients, algae quickly builds up oil in its cells, each one becoming a plump little pod of oil, ready for harvest. What could be easier?

In the oil-crisis years of the 1970s, the Department of Energy created an “Aquatic Species Program,” which collected 3,000 likely strains of algae. To demonstrate that the algae could be “farmed” on a regular basis, ponds were built in Roswell, New Mexico. From the first, things didn’t go as planned; wild algae soon took over the ponds. The frustrations continued to mount and persistently low oil prices diminished interest in the program. It was finally closed, long before the scientists could discover that harvesting algae oil was the most frustrating part of all.

How to Make Oil and Influence People

Twenty-one years later, in 2001, MIT chemical engineer Isaac Berzin launched Greenfuel Technologies, convinced he could overcome the hurdles that had daunted the federal program.

Berzin’s pitch was seductively simple: algae double their mass in a matter of hours. They thrive in dirty water and per acre produce 30 times as much oil as a field of sunflowers. Most important, they devour carbon dioxide. Grow algae like a crop and you can pull a key greenhouse gas out of the sky while you’re making biodiesel.

Berzin’s dream drew $70 million in private investment and a position in Time’s 2008 issue of “The World’s100 Most Influential People.” Yet in 2009, Greenfuel’s pilot plant in Arizona was closed and soon after the company went belly-up. Why? For one thing, algae requires huge amounts of water. A positive report on algae’s full potential, published in April of this year by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) said that algae could eventually produce 17% of the nation’s imported oil, but would require land roughly the size of South Carolina.(!) Moreover, oil extraction can only be done by grinding up the algae, a complex and costly process that one critic has compared to slaughtering a dairy cow to get its milk.

Some dreams die hard. There are still a couple of dozen companies working like beavers to make algae work out. Good luck, guys. Phone in every few years, okay?

Of Moss and Men

In the meantime, a handful of start-ups have been studying an algae deliberately excluded from previous projects. Why? It had no promise. “Blue green algae,” as it was known at the time, produced oil like the rest but didn’t retain it. Instead, it sweated out its oil, a micro-drop at a time. Turns out it isn’t even an algae; it’s a bacteria, “cyanobacteria” to be exact. (Got to admit, it’s probably an easy mistake to make. After all, one moss looks pretty much like another, except maybe to another moss.)

And therein lies another tale and yet another dream, which we’ll take up in the third part of our series. Stay tuned!

This story was drawn from articles in IsNetWorld, EP: Environmental Protection Management, The New York Times, Wired Science and Science News.

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