A research team from the Joint BioEnergy Institute and biotech firm LS9 have modified E. coli bacteria to produce biodiesel from plant sugars. The biodiesel can be transported in diesel pipelines and burned in standard diesel engines. It releases far fewer greenhouse gases than conventional fossil diesel.

E. coli was previously known to synthesize fatty acids, key ingredients in forming biofuels efficiently. But the bacterium normally manufactures only as many fatty acids as it needs to survive. The research team was able to manipulate an E. coli strain to create more fatty acids than the bacterium itself would need. When the E. coli interacted with sugar cane, it fermented the plant’s sugars and generated a surplus of fatty acids - producing biofuel straight from the biomass.

The project’s next step will be adapting the process for fibres other than sugar cane, expanding its potential feedstocks to grass or crop waste.

While other mathods of producing biodiesel require expensive chemical processes to convert biomass into fuel, the researchers believe that the use of bacteria has the potential to produce biodiesel at competitive prices within two years.

Another team of researchers, from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, have developed a different way of tusing bacteria to make biofuel in a reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight.

The team has genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the isobutanol. Isobutanol holds great potential as a gasoline alternative.

The researchers genetically engineered a strain cyanobacterium (blue-green algae) that intakes carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces isobutyraldehyde gas. The low boiling point and high vapor pressure of the gas allows it to easily be stripped from the system. Inexpensive chemical catalysis are used to convert isobutyraldehyde gas to liqisobutanol,

Ideally, the new system would be installed next to an existing fossil fuel burning power plant. It would potentially consume the greenhouse gases emitted from the power plants and recycled them as liquid fuel.

(Based on sources including the journal Nature)

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American garbage-disposal giant, Waste Management, has partnered with InEnTec, an Oregon-based company, to begin commercializing
a plasma-gasification process which converts garbage into energy.

Plasma gasification technology has been in development and pilot testing for decades. Major pilot plants, capable of processing 1,000 tonnes or more of garbage daily, are under development in Florida, Louisiana and California.

In theory, the process is simple. Torches pass an electric current through a gas (often ordinary air) in a chamber to create a superheated plasma with a temperature above 7,000 degrees Celsius. The plasma’s tremendous heat dissociates the molecular bonds of any garbage placed inside the chamber, converting organic compounds into syngas (a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) and trapping everything else in an inert vitreous solid, called slag. The syngas can be used as fuel in a turbine to generate electricity. It can also be used to create ethanol, methanol and biodiesel. The slag can be processed into materials suitable for use in construction.

In practice, gasification has been unable to compete economically with traditional municipal waste processing. But the cost has been coming down, while energy prices have been going up.

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Researchers at the Lane Ag Center in Oklahoma have published a paper which recommends using waste watermelons as feedstock for biofuels.

About 20% of watermelons are not sent to market because of blemishes or unusual shapes.

The researchers concluded that watermelon juice would have to be concentrated 2.5 to 3 times if it was to be used as the sole biofuel feedstock, but watermelon juice could easily be used to dilute other feedstocks and provide a nitrogen supplement to them.

Watermelons are only one of a range of unusual feedstocks, including various vegetable oils, whey and even beer, now being used to produce bioenergy.

One company using farm waste to produce bioenergy is Gills Onions.

Gills Onions has farms throughout California which send their product to a packaging plant where they are skinned, sliced and diced. About 40% on the onion material is wasted.

Gills Onions is now using this waste product as the feedstock for generating electricity. The company invested $9 million to set up the system based on two fuel cells powered by methane from the onion waste but received more than $3 million in government incentives and is saving $700,000 a year in electricity costs and $400,000 a year in waste disposal costs.

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Researchers at the University of Nevada report that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel.

Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent oil by weight which is about as much as traditional biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm and soybean oil. All of the oil can be converted to biodiesel (which smells like coffee). The residual solids can be converted to ethanol or used as compost.

The scientists estimate that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply.

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Scientists from Montana State University have discovered that a fungus found in a Patagonian rainforest could provide an alternative source of biofuel.

The fungus, Gliocladium roseum, grows in the ulmo tree (Eucryphia cordifolia), a species native to the Patagonia region of Argentina and Chile. The researchers have found that it possesses the metabolic machinery to produce a wide variety of hydrocarbons virtually identical to the compounds in diesel obtained from crude oil.

According to the lead researcher, Professor Gary Strobel, "Many fungi make ethanol, but none to date produce this kind of mixture of diesel hydrocarbons."

The fungus produces the diesel directly from cellulose-rich products. "Cellulose is the most abundant organic substance on the planet and it mostly exists as waste material — straw, chaff, leaves, cuttings, etc.," says Professor Strobel who added that "The main value of this discovery may not be the organism itself, but the genes responsible for the production of these gases."

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US company, Solazyme, has announced that it will be capable of mass producing millions of gallons of biodiesel derived from algae within 3 years. Solazyme is the first company to produce algae diesel that meets US standards but until now has not announced a timeline for mass production. According to Solazyme CEO, Jonathan Wolfson “The technology is moving a lot quicker than some people would expect." The key to Solazyme’s ability to bring its product to market quickly is its process of growing algae in the dark in large tanks by feeding it with biomass. The algae then eat the biomass and turn it into natural oils which work with the existing fuel infrastructure. “We produce oils on the fuel side that can go straight into the refining structure,” Wolfson said.

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As the world recognises the inevitability of peak oil and the necessity to reduce carbon emissions, the possibilty of  replacing fossil fuels with fuels produced from biomass - and the downside of doing so - is becoming an increasingly important issue.

Already ethanol is starting to play a part as a transport fuel in the Americas - with Brazil and the United States accounting for about 80% of world fuel ethanol consumption. Similarly, biodiesel is becoming a significant fuel in Europe.

But there are major questions about the value of using these "first generation" biofuels which are derived from feed stocks and crops like sugar cane and palm oil. Many argue that the real bioenergy revolution  will come with "second generation" biofuels produced from cellulosic feedstock like fast growing trees and grasses and agricultural waste. But how close are we to being able to achieve this? And what will be the costs?

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development has produced an "Issue Brief" on bioenergy and biofuels.which discusses these issues in detail.

Click here to download the full report.

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Grain prices have soared in the past few years. Measured in US dollars, the price of corn, wheat and rice trebled and the price of soybeans doubled in the past three years. many press articles have blamed these price increases on the use of grains to make biofuels. But many other factors are much more important.

Rice Terraces Bali (by Atelier Teee ex Flickr)

• Plant-based fuel production accounts for just 3% of world demand from grain and has increased by about 50% in the three years That is, the increase in biofuel production accounts for only 1% of the demand for grains.
• The prices of barley and rice, which are not used to make fuel, went up just as much as corn which is - while the price of sugar, which is the major source of bioethanol, fell.
• These price increases have happened following a very long period of falling food prices. In the previous 30 years, food prices have fallen by 75%. Even at present levels, food prices are still only half what they were a generation ago.
• Prices are quoted in $US. The value of the $US dollar has dropped dramatically over the last five years. In Euro terms, prices of corn, wheat and rice have little more than doubled, rather than trebled.
• The price of grains has tracked the price of oil. At the time of the 1973 oil crisis, grain prices trebled even though there was no significant biofuel production.
• 36% of the world’s grain is used to feed livestock for meat production. The demand for meat increased enormously with the Chinese and Indian economies. In China, average meat consumption has increased from an average of 20 kilograms per capita in 1980 to over 50 kilograms per capita now. Another indication of the importance of the use of grain for livestock feed is the increase in the price of diary products which in some places have doubled.
• Severe droughts struck several important grain-growing regions, including Australia, the western and south-eastern United States and Southern Africa, reducing gain production.

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Farmers in North Queensland are growing 20,000 Brazilian copaifera langsdorfii trees. The tree has a sap that can be tapped (like a rubber tree) for a natural diesel fuel that requires only simple filtering before being used as a fuel. One hectare (2.5 acres) of the trees would produce about 60 barrels of diesel. The trees take about 15 to 20 years to mature and live for about 90 years.

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Diesel fuel can be made from many forms of biomass.

How it works:

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