Growing a Better Biodiesel

It’s been a good week for biofuels—one of the first ones in recent memory—as fresh off the heels of ExxonMobil’s announcement of an algae-based biofuel breakthrough, researchers in Chile have reported their own progress in extracting biodiesel from microalgae. Reuters reports:

Experts from the department of Chemical Engineering and Bioprocesses at Chile’s Catholic University said they had grown enough algae to fragment it and extract the oil which, after removing moisture and debris, can be converted into biofuel.

“What is new about our process is the intent to produce this fuel from microalgae, which are microorganisms,” researcher Carlos Saez told Reuters. […]

Saez said a main challenge going forward would be to produce a sufficient volume of microalgae. A wide variety of fresh and salt water algaes are found in Chile, a South American nation with a long Pacific coast. The scientists are trying to improve algae growing technology to ramp up production at a low cost using limited energy, Saez said.

This isn’t only exciting because it has the potential to provide a new source of valuable transportation fuel—it also represents an alternative to corn-based ethanol, the predominant source of biofuels in the American market, and an energy option that causes many more problems than it solves. To recap, corn-based ethanol: raises global food prices, starving the world’s poor; raises prices at the pump; hurts American refiners; has been shown to hurt honeybee populations; and has been shown to actually raise greenhouse gas emissions, not lower them.

Yet here in the U.S., a 2007 law—the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—mandates that increasing quantities of this problematic ethanol be blended in to our country’s fuel. Biofuels’ appeal is obvious: being able to grow transportation fuel could, under the right circumstances, be both beneficial to energy security and the environment. That’s not happening under the RFS, but it could happen if we focused more on advanced biofuels like, say, those sourced from algae than we did on ethanol distilled from corn.

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