Peak Oil: Meet $2 a Gallon Algal Biodiesel

We always take such announcements with a grain of salt. But sometime between the year 2020 and 2030, it is likely that algal biofuels will be competitive with synthetic fuels from natural gas and coal.

AFS BioOil announced that initial tests conducted by the company since startup of the system confirm that production costs of biodiesel will be in the range of $2 per gallon when produced in a commercial system of 1 millon gallons/yr and greater.

...AFS BioOil has recently partnered with a renewable electricity company that has the technology to convert waste heat into electricity at a cost of 6 cents/kWh and potential of reducing the cost to 4 cents/kWh in the future. Both companies are planning an integrated project of 5 MWe of renewable electricity and 1-3 millon gallons/yr of biodiesel. This will pave the way for future deployment of combined systems producing renewable low-cost electricity and biodiesel. The companies are at a design stage and will release the actual scope of the project in Q3. _GCC

Some analysts are projecting a 43% annual growth rate for algal biofuels over the next few years.

Elsewhere on the biofuels front -- just to remind us that this is not your grandfather's era of biofuels -- Amyris officially enhances its collaboration with French oil giant Total to produce fuels and chemicals precursor farnesene, from plant based sugars. The stock price for Amyris subsequently jumped.

The long term prospects for algal and microbe produced chemicals and biofuels is excellent, although in the shorter to intermediate term, competition from natural gas-based chemicals and fuels will be fierce.

Uninformed persons, along with the fringe doomer elements in the peak oil movement, remain largely ignorant of the multi-pronged efforts to produce a wide range of substitute fuels and chemicals, replacing crude oil as a feedstock.

Besides the fact that the global affordable hydrocarbon resource is much larger than previously imagined, biomass production and potential biofuels output, is subject to rapid growth as more of the Earth's surface -- including the oceans and deserts -- become viable for production of biomass.  This biomass resource will not be needed for a matter of decades, but by then the technology for optimal production, densification, and refinement, should be ready.

It is largely a matter of economics, although politics plays a significant role -- given the many highly placed lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgiasts who occupy important roles in many western governments.

Important Advances in Fuels & Chemicals from Bacteria, Biomass,

Exciting E. Coli Biorefinery from JBEI

GCC

E. coli bacteria normally cannot grow on switchgrass, but JBEI researchers engineered strains of the bacteria to express several enzymes that enable them to digest cellulose and hemicellulose and use one or the other for growth. These cellulolytic and hemicellulolytic strains of E. coli, which can be combined as co-cultures on a sample of switchgrass, were further engineered with three metabolic pathways that enabled the E. coli to produce the fuel substitute or precursor molecules.

The JEBI team chose to implement pathways that produce alcohols, linear hydrocarbons, or branched-chain hydrocarbons to test the integration of the biomass-consumption pathways with the “extensive” biosynthesis capabilities of E. coli. The team chose:

Biodiesel. Biodiesel can be made by E. coli in vivo in the form of fatty-acid ethyl esters (FAEE). They encoded a six-gene FAEE production pathway on a single plasmid and introduced the construct into a strain of E. coli. Using a co-culture of two strains grown in minimal medium containing 5.5% w∕vol IL-treated switchgrass, they produced 71 ± 43 mg∕L of FAEE. This corresponds to 80% of the estimated yield obtainable with this pathway from the amount of sugars anticipated to be released from 5.5% switchgrass by the Cel and Xyn10B enzymes.

Butanol. Butanol has been proposed as a gasoline replacement because it is fully compatible with existing internal combustion engines. Based in part on previous work, they constructed a heterologous butanol pathway encoded on a single plasmid. A co-culture yielded 28 ± 5 mg∕L butanol from defined rich medium containing 3.3% w∕vol IL-treated switchgrass. A control strain produced 8 ± 2 mg∕L butanol from pretreated switchgrass.

Pinene. The monoterpene pinene is an immediate chemical precursor to a potential jet fuel. The pinene synthesis pathway was encoded on a single plasmid. A co-culture yielded 1.7 ± 0.6 mg∕L pinene from pretreated switchgrass.

The pre-treatment of the switchgrass with ionic liquids was essential to this demonstration, according to Gregory Bokinsky, a post-doctoral researcher with JBEI’s synthetic biology group and lead author of the PNAS paper.

If properly optimized, I suspect you could use ionic liquid pre-treatment on any plant biomass and make it readily digestible by microbes. For us it was the combination of biomass from the ionic liquid pretreatment with the engineered E. coli that enabled our success.

—Gregory Bokinsky

The JBEI researchers also attribute the success of this work to the “unparalleled genetic and metabolic tractability” of E. coli, which over the years has been engineered to produce a wide range of chemical products. However, the researchers believe that the techniques used in this demonstration should also be readily adapted to other microbes. _GCC

Another significant advance from the JBEI is a beefing up of the starch content in switchgrass, which will make conventional fermentation of alcohols from switchgrass much easier.

The team of JBEI researchers, working with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), has demonstrated that introducing a maize (corn) gene into switchgrass, a highly touted potential feedstock for advanced biofuels, more than doubles (250 percent) the amount of starch in the plant’s cell walls and makes it much easier to extract polysaccharides and convert them into fermentable sugars. _BrianWestenhaus

Amyris is raising the stakes in the biomass-to-chemicals market with a significant acceleration of its Biofene (farnesene) product, via expansion of its partnership with oil giant Total. Farnesene is an important precursor for the production of multiple high value chemicals, including fuels.

Amyris has developed advanced microbial engineering and screening technologies that modify the way microorganisms process sugars. Amyris is using this industrial synthetic biology platform to design microbes, primarily yeast, and use them as living factories in established fermentation processes to convert plant-sourced sugars into renewable chemical and transportation fuel products.

...Amyris is scaling its Biofene production in Brazil, Europe and the United States through various production arrangements; the company signed its sixth production agreement in October...

Farnesene is a 15-carbon isoprenoid hydrocarbon molecule that forms the basis for a wide range of products varying from specialty chemical applications to transportation fuels such as diesel. When used as a fuel precursor, farnesene can be hydrogenated to farnesane, which has a high cetane number (58). Amyris modifies farnesene to become renewable diesel. _GCC

Amyris Scale-Up of Farnesene from Cane Fermentation Proceeding

25Feb2011 More: This is a good example of a high-value chemical use for the following technology, providing early profits to finance development of more high volume products such as biofuels:

Amyris Inc. made an agreement with Swiss company Givaudan to develop an ingredient for perfumes.

Givaudan is based in Vernier, Switzerland. It will use Amyris’ product “Biofene” (farnesene) for perfume products that could be created as early as 2012. _bizjournals

Amyris' farnesene can be channeled into dozens of different product lines.

“The ability to modify microbes [means] we can be the Microsoft of fuels and chemicals, where we are in effect writing the software that goes into the fermentation tank,” he says. “That, to me, was game changing.” Melo directed the company to work on diesel, the world’s most widely used transportation fuel and one that is often in short supply. Producing the right type of molecule proved surprisingly easy. Within six weeks, the scientists had switched a single enzyme in their artemisinin producing bugs and begun producing farnesene, the oil they had identified as a potential precursor to diesel.

“They look like very different projects—one is a medicine and one is a fuel—but the metabolic route is similar,” Collier says. “That was the big advance of Amyris.” Farnesene is a pleasantsmelling oil that accounts in part for the odor of apple skins. By performing one additional chemical step, hydrogenation, Amyris can turn the yeast-produced farnesene into farnesane, a highly combustible fuel with properties similar to those of diesel. _TechnologyReview

Through different finishing steps, we can turn farnesene into a renewable diesel, a surfactant used in soaps and shampoos, a cream used in lotions, a number of lubricants, or a variety of other useful chemicals. _Amyris

Amyris
Amyris Biotech is an Emeryville, California, synthetic biology company founded by Berkeley's Jay Keasling. The company was founded with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to produce synthetic artemisinin -- a powerful drug used to treat malaria and other deadly diseases.

Amyris scientists discovered that they could also ferment farnesene -- a synthetic diesel precursor -- with minimal changes to the yeast fermentation platform. Farnesene has many uses in multiple industries, besides being easily converted to a synthetic diesel.

Amyris has close ties to the Brazilian sugar cane industry, and is proceeding on schedule to scale-up its farnesene fermentation process in order to reach commercial scales and economies of production. The latest news from Amyris is that it has achieved multiple successful fermentation runs of its farnesene-producing yeast, in fermentors of both 100,000 and 200,000 litre sizes.

Amyris, Inc., a renewable hydrocarbons company, announced that it has completed multiple runs of its fermentation process using its engineered yeast to produce Biofene, Amyris renewable farnesene, in 100,000 and 200,000 liter capacity fermentors. These runs were completed through contract manufacturing operations in North America and Europe. The results of these fermentation runs, including yields, were consistent with previous runs at smaller scale.

...Amyris expects to commence commercial production of Biofene in the second quarter of 2011 and ramp production through manufacturing arrangements with entities including Biomin and Tate & Lyle. In addition, Amyris and Grupo São Martinho, a leading sugar and ethanol producer in Brazil, have commenced site preparation on their joint venture production facility at Usina São Martinho. All of these facilities will utilize fermentors with capacities ranging between 100,000 and 600,000 liters. _GCC

More on the Amyris project:

Nine years ago, Amyris’s technology was still a bench project in Keasling’s Berkeley laboratory. Researchers had been looking at ways to coax microörganisms to produce commercially useful products. By adding DNA from plants and bacteria, Keasling’s lab eventually designed new bacteria and yeast cells that could make large quantities of sopentenyl pyrophosphate. With its five carbon atoms, the chemical is a sort of Lego block of the natural world; from it, plants and animals build isoprenoids, members of a large class of molecules that includes the anticancer drug taxol, vitamin E, and scents such as those of grapefruit and the pheromones of female cockroaches.

Keasling knew the invention was valuable, and in 2001 he filed the first patent application of his career. “We wanted to apply the tools to a real problem,” he says. The chance came in 2004, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation decided to donate $42.6 million to a project that would manufacture the antimalaria drug artemisinin with the aid of Keasling’s made-to-order microbes.

Artemisinin is currently derived from the sweet wormwood plant, grown mostly in Africa and Asia. Supply of the drug is unsteady, and prices swing wildly; they reached $1,100 a kilogram in 2006. By using genetically modified yeast to produce it from sugar, Keasling’s approach promised to solve the supply problem and dramatically cut the price. With its chance of saving thousands—perhaps millions—of people who might otherwise die of malaria, the project has become a symbol of synthetic biology’s potential to change the world for the better. The Gates money paid for the rapid expansion of Amyris, which Keasling and three of his postdocs founded to carry out the malaria project. By late 2005, says Amyris’s chief technical officer, Neil Renninger, some at the company were spending “nights and weekends” thinking about what other problems their technology could solve.

Amyris estimates that the isoprenoid family includes some 50,000 different types of molecules, so it was far from clear where to focus next. “When we began pitching the VCs, we said there are some drugs we think are interesting, and nutraceuticals, and even fuels—what do you think?” recalls Renninger. But it was hard to find a project as meaningful to Amyris’s scientists as malaria. “This was really a culture of people that want to save lives and not make a lot of money,” he says. “So when you throw making grapefruit flavor in front of them—well, it’s not too interesting.” _TechnologyReview

Our intention is to create a new “fene economy,” in which farnesene serves as the base chemical building block for a wide range of renewable products to replace existing products that are derived from petroleum, plant or animal sources and that may be of lower quality or higher price. We have entered into an agreement and non-binding letters of intent with Brazilian sugar and ethanol producers which provide us with access to approximately 12 million tons of sugarcane crush capacity annually. As of the first quarter of 2010, this capacity represented approximately 10% of the total crush capacity of these sugar and ethanol producers. We believe that if we are successful in converting these arrangements into operating bolt-on production facilities and if we continue to execute successfully on our research and development and commercialization programs, we will have the development capability and production and distribution relationships necessary to achieve approximately 600 million liters of farnesene production and high value product sales annually. However, achieving this volume of production and sales will require us to achieve a substantially higher level of production process efficiencies than we have to date. _Source

The only news being reported here, is that Amyris continues to progress in its scaleup of farnesene fermentation production. The larger picture clearly demonstrates that there are many paths to biofuels -- beyond ethanol from maize or cane.

Sooner or later, cellulosic sugars will become more affordable than sugars from food crops. When that happens, entire food and agricultural enterprises may well be overturned. Try to keep an eye on this development if you are invested in food or agriculture -- or biofuels.

Before you blame biofuels for high costs of food, it might be better to keep in mind the multitude of other factors which go into the pricing of food, besides one sliver of demand for a few crops. Crop poduction is flexible -- weather permitting -- but oil prices and capricious government policies in both emerging and advanced countries can important factors. Of course, a more proximate cause of food shortages in third world countries is the actual governments of those same third world countries, and their generally corrupt and counter-productive policies.

Another High Value Chemical from Biomass: Farnesene

Tate and Lyle PLC is partnering with Amyris Inc., to produce farnesene from biomass sugars, to serve as a platform for production of high value chemicals and fuels. Amyris has developed a scale-up plan for production of bio-diesel from biomass sugars, with fairly ambitious near-term goals:

Amyris applies industrial synthetic biology to genetically modify yeast to produce defined molecules via fermentation for use as renewable chemicals and transportation fuels. The company is focusing on Brazilian sugarcane as its primary feedstock. According to UNICA, the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association, sugarcane is the lowest cost feedstock to produce renewable products at scale and using it enables us to leverage the established Brazilian infrastructure.

Common to both the Amyris process and the sugarcane-to-ethanol process is the use of fermentation. Amyris plans to establish production capacity taking as input the same sugar source that is routinely processed by existing sugar and ethanol mills and directing it to customized fermentors, where it will be combined with genetically engineered yeast. _GCC

As noted above, early pilot production will be based upon sugar feedstock from cane. As better methods are developed for producing sugars from bagasse and other cellulosic biomass, the sugar feedstock will necessarily shift to the most economical one -- depending upon availability at particular locations. Likewise, as yeasts are made better able, genetically, to handle a variety of sugars, the most economical sugar feedstock is apt to shift.