Aviation Industry sees Green Light

This is an update on stories earlier last year. The take home message is that the aviation industry is unexpectedly a possible earlier adopter of algae based fuels. They simply have the flexibility to make a swift conversion and the ability to finance supply.

Once others wake up to this fact it is certain that many other potential suppliers will get their act together. It is easy to envisage hauling truckloads of fuel to the airlines. It is much harder to believe that the local Exxon petrol station will welcome your appearance for half a truck load.

With the industry actively looking for a real answer to their fuel exposure, it is going to be solved fast. Recall that they were nearly bankrupted by $140 oil and the industry was thrown backwards by years on their business models.

These guys are totally motivated to exit the oil industry just as soon as possible, the devil take the hindmost.

If I were operating any form of biofuel business today, I would down tools and focus on this niche right now.

The airlines want long term contracts for supply at fixed prices which is exactly what a biofuel producer can produce.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/flying-on-vegetables/

January 7 2009
Flying on Vegetables
By Matthew L. Wald

Crude oil from algae manufactured by Sapphire Energy for Continental Airlines. Converting the airline industry to biofuels may be easier than converting the car market.

The scheduled flight on Wednesday of a Continental Airlines 737 fueled in part by biofuels made from jatropha and algae was experimental (see my report on the state of biofuels in the airline industry from Wednesday’s paper here). But if the fuel can be certified by international standards agencies, it could become as common as, say, ethanol added to gasoline.

It might be even more so, because the goal is a “drop-in” substitute that can be used at any percentage, in any jet or any airport fueling system.

In theory, people in the industry say, replacing petroleum in airplanes could be easier than replacing it in cars, even though jet fuel has to meet specifications that are of little concern on the highway, like weight (hauling fuel is a major use of fuel, after all), or how well it flows at 40 degrees below zero, which is a temperature big planes face for hours as they cruise in the stratosphere.

Because fuel quality has such importance to safety, some energy experts thought aviation would be the last to switch. “For 40 years we had the philosophy we’d be the ones using the last drop of oil,’’ said Carl E. Burleson, director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Environment and Energy.

But compared to the market for gasoline or diesel, the market for jet fuel is simpler, industry experts say.

The number of fueling stations and customers are both much smaller than for motor vehicle fuel, making marketing easier. The number of engine manufacturers is smaller, too, so there are fewer parties to convince when switching to something new. And unlike the specifications for gasoline, which vary from state to state and country to country, there is a single standard for jet fuel, regardless of where it is sold.

As with substitute motor fuels, though, substitute jet fuel has mixed environmental implications. European carriers have tested fuel made from palm oil, but recent studies have persuaded some environmentalists that clearing tropical jungle to make space for palm plantations is a mistake, releasing more greenhouse gases than the new fuel will save. And the only petroleum substitute in common use now is made from coal, a switch that can save money and petroleum but makes greenhouse gas problems worse.

The precise carbon effect of using algae, jatropha or other substitutes will be studied closely and probably litigated, because airlines say they want to use such fuels to meet European regulations taking effect in the next few years, which will force them to cut carbon output or buy carbon allowances.

Solazyme brews Jet Fuel

This item can be described as more good news coming out of the ongoing efforts to harness algae. We are seeing second, third and forth generational ideas paying of quickly.

Replacing jet fuel with an equivalent biological was unhoped for because I have made the natural assumption that like oil, a substantial processing phase would need to be engineered once a biological oil source was built out. Instead we have clearly got another brew master’s operation that can use plant material as feed stock without a lot of fuss.

I hope this means that it can be built out in farm sized units to avoid excessive haulage costs. Just as obviously, if they can produce jet fuel or even an unrefined precursor at this scale, it should also be possible to produce from the same system a gasoline and diesel equivalent.

This sounds a lot easier than the many other protocols that we have discussed so far. Pyrolysis was always a nonstarter for the liquid fuel cycle and so was playing with natural algae. Ethanol was possible if algae or cattails produced the feedstock. The idea that we can side step all these issues and natural complexities and brew up jet fuel from plant waste is almost too good to be true. It is certainly a good objective to achieve and let us hope that this company is not been premature.

The company has focused its research on marine algae and has announced and tested biodiesel produced through their work. My sense is that they are pushing the research envelop to perfect the necessary production protocols. Actual commercialization should be the next step.

It would be a remarkable development if it becomes possible to shift transportation fuel production completely into agriculture at the same time consuming agricultural waste.

The use of agricultural waste as a feed stock for producing biochar is important for manufacturing high quality soils, but is not necessary once such soils are produced. Conversion to fuel nicely consumes this surplus.


Microbes Grow Jet Fuel in the Dark
September 10, 2008

The South San Francisco company Solarzyme announced this week that it has produced the world's first microbial-derived jet fuel to pass the eleven most challenging specifications needed to meet the Aviation Turbine Fuel standards.

Solarzyme's algal-derived aviation fuel was analyzed by the Southwest Research Institute, one of the nations leading fuel analytical laboratories. The tested areas included the key measurements for density, thermal oxidative stability, flashpoint, freezing point, distillation and viscosity, the biggest hurdles needed to develop a commercial and military jet fuel.

Given Solarzyme's excellent cold-temperature performance and the clean characteristics of the oil, former military fuels specialists note that new algae-based fuels could help the DOD comply with recently enacted mandates to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and utilize environmentally friendly fuels.

In the U.S. alone, 1.6 billion gallons of jet fuel are used every month resulting in significant greenhouse gas emissions. The need for environmentally friendly and sustainable alternatives is growing rapidly. The EU is requiring that every nation landing there must adhere to their emission standards by 2012.

But it's not merely foreign legislative pressure that's driving change. As peak oil nears, jet fuel already accounts for 36 percent of airline industry costs -- up from 13 percent just six years ago -- and could account for 40 percent of industry costs next year.

While algae-based fuel is currently almost as expensive as oil to produce, it has a significantly different estimated cost going forward, since it is made up of cells that double exponentially over time (2,4,8,16,32, 64...). Oil supplies will be increasingly scarce and expensive to extract over that time period.

Solarzyme is currently producing thousands of gallons of oil a month at scale and is the only advanced biofuels company that has produced fuels that have passed specification testing and are compatible with the existing transportation fuel infrastructure. Solarzyme uses directed evolution to engineer an organism to perform a desired function, the same technique farmers have employed since the dawn of civilization to breed new strains of higher production grain and so on, but this is done at the gene sequence level.

Solarzyme's process needs no sunlight, unlike other algae farming startups such as the New Zealand startup that will be flying a Boeing test to San Francisco this month. This lack of a need for sunlight makes for an efficient and fast process, and the feedstock is very sustainable: agricultural waste, cellulosic material such as switchgrass and industrial byproducts. Algae doesn't require vast amounts of land. You can even grow algae on the roof of a sewage plant.

Unlike the materials utilized in any other mass production process that we enterprising humans have ever used to make things with, by its very nature, algae just keeps on growing.