Bioenergy News Update

Bioenergy has progressed far beyond ethanol from maize. A lot of money is being invested to develop the most economical ways of extracting useful energy from biological organisms, from micro-organisms to macro-organisms.

Procter and Gamble is teaming with microbe specialists LS9 to develop important chemicals from biomass, which P&G will use in production of proprietary products. Such high-value chemicals are likely to become profitable before LS9 microbe-produced biofuels.

LS9 has engineered a proprietary microbe to produce UltraClean™ diesel in a one-step process. They have discovered a way to exploit the pathway that microbes use to make energy-rich fatty acids for the synthesis of cell membranes and energy storage compounds, and divert them for their own purposes. Inside the fermentor, the microbes and feedstock sit in water, so the oil-like fuel compounds rise to the surface and can be easily collected, much more efficiently than the energy rich distillation process necessary to produce ethanol.

Schirmer says they are currently using sugar cane as a cost-effective option and estimates an 80 percent reduction in carbon footprint compared to petroleum-based fuels.

"It is a bridge feedstock. Once second generation feedstocks come online we will be able to convert production over to them quickly and achieve even greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions," says Schirmer. _Bioenergy

In addition to microbial approaches, chemists are becoming much more sophisticated in the transformation of biomass to high energy fuels.

The petrochemical industry makes a wide variety of products from fossil resources such as fuels, plastics and commodity chemicals. Biomass could theoretically be used to make the same or similar products, however the high oxygen content of biomass-derived raw materials prevents their direct use as fuels or chemicals.

Robert Bergman, Jonathan Ellman and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a selective one-pot, formic acid-mediated deoxygenation technique for converting polyhdroxy compounds, such as biomass-derived carbohydrates, to alkenes in high yields.

An efficient 1,2-deoxygenation method, involving an unexpected mechanism, was found for simple diols and for biomass-derived polyols _Bioenergy

Such approaches to deoxygenation of biomass have the potential to replace geo-petroleum in the production of hycrocarbon chemicals -- and eventually in the mass production of fuels.

Both the microbial approaches and the pure chemical approaches will need to find high value chemical product niches as soon as possible, in order to help attract investors and to help finance ongoing research into scaling processes for high volume production of liquid fuels.

Meanwhile back in the tropics, jatropha curcas plantations are being planted in the Philippines, South Asia, across Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Latin America. Jatropha has the potential to be far more ecologically friendly than palm oil as a plantation crop. Jatropha grows on more marginal soils, with less water and less cultivation than palm. Jatropha can also be inter-cropped with a large variety of other plant species -- including food crops. Since jatropha oil is inedible, biodiesel produced from it should not be seen as a food vs. fuel struggle.