What is More Cost Effective, Algae or Bacteria Fuel?

One of the primary costs of deriving fuel from algae is the space required to grow the algae. Productivity of algae is calculated per acre. Algae requires sunlight and the amount of algae that can be grown on an acre is limited. Synthetic Bacteria on the other hand can produce oil without sunlight, so in comparison to algae the productivity per acre can be very high. One could theoretically grow bacteria in giant silos many stories tall. However, in order for synthetic bacteria to produce oil without sunlight they must consume sugar for energy. According to a recent article in Popular Mechanics, current technology still requires sugars to come from an easy to use source of sucrose such as sugar cane or corn.  This means that synthetic bacteria fuel will compete for food stocks much the same way ethanol does,  driving up the price of both.  Technologies to easily derive sugars from nonfood stock cellulosic material, such as corn's remaining stalks, leaves and cobs, do not yet exist. Furthermore, even when they are developed, it estimated that it would take one acre to produce 2,000 gallons of fuel.  Algae by comparison is expected to yield over 30,000 gallons per acre.  On the other hand, cellulosic materials may be cheaper and easier to grow and harvest than algae.

There are, however, fuel producing bacteria that derive their energy from the sun using photosynthesis.  Such bacteria would not have the advantage over algae of growing in the dark but there may be other advantages over algae.  According to Bruce Rittman of the ASU BioDesign Institute,

Algae and bacteria both accumulate a lot of lipids, but they do so for different reasons. When bacteria accumulate a lot of lipids, they do it when they are growing fast. That is ideal. Algae do the opposite, and produce high lipids when under stress, and are not growing very well.

In other words, bacteria can produce lipids (oil) faster. Furthermore, bacteria excrete their oil which floats to the top of their bioreactor whereas algae requires costly extraction methods.   It would be nice to see a method that use both algae and bacteria.  The algae to grow and produce oil along with cellulosic material that can be metabolized by bacteria to release the oil in the algae and create even more oil.

LS9 Makes Oil from Bugs at $125 a Barrel

LS9 has been called the leading company in developing fuel from synthetic bacteria.  Recently, the President of LS9, Robert Walsh, appeared for an interview on CNN and gave us some numbers.  Here is the money quote:

Right now, later this summer, we'll be making barrels a week of that. And 2010, we'll be making millions of gallons. And in 2011, hundreds of millions of gallons as we continue to scale up this process.

I think the other thing that's important is that right now this costs me $125 to make this a barrel. Our goal is to get to $50 a barrel so we can help everyone out.

If true, those are quite frankly some world changing statements. The next question of course is does the bacteria consume feed stocks to make petroleum?  According to Robert Walsh, they do not.

[O]ne of the things we have designed into this, the bacteria, that they can use nonfood feed stocks. It's actually agricultural byproducts, wood chips, wheat straw, rice straw, that are collected already. I think that's the big plus. You have to disconnect yourself from the food crop issue.

Also, you're not going to be able to drive economics without doing that, which is important for the consumer.

Amazing. Why is this not front page news? I don't know but The Times of London has a slightly more sober analysis:

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

Sequesco's Grow in the Dark Synthetic Super Bugs

Craig Venter, world famous biotech scientist extraordinaire, has for the last year been a high profile advocate for the potential of synthetic biology to create what he calls a "fourth generation biofuel" which are bacteria that eat carbondioxide and turn it into fuel. His company, Synthetic Genomics, has been hard at work on the problem for some time and a product is expected any minute now. Meanwhile, a company called Sequesco claims to have a synthetic bacteria that is already a fourth generation fuel. Here is the description by science writer Jeremy Jacquot, whose article has appeared on a number of blogs yesterday, that caught my attention.

Sequesco’s bacteria grow 10 times faster than most algae raised for biodiesel, and because they are non-photosynthetic, they can be grown 24 hours a day, rain or shine. Area isn’t a constraint for the bugs (only volume is), so they can be cultured in conventional, low-cost bioreactors. Since space isn’t an issue, there’s great potential for scalability, and the bioreactors can be installed almost anywhere.

As usual, we don't have any cost estimates about how much it costs to grow these bugs.  Since these bugs do not use photosynthesis for energy, they must metabolize something for energy.  What do they eat and how much does that food source cost?  Nonetheless, the potential for cost effectiveness is there.  The CEO of Sequesco, Lisa Dyson, is quoted by the Jacquot article as saying that the company plans to have a demonstration facility up by the end of 2009, to be followed in short succession with small and large commercial-scale plants in 2010 and 2011, respectively. It would be nice to see some peer review publications related to Sequesco's technology as well.