BIOFUELS : FROM ALGAE

A team of researchers from Western Washington University and Chris Reddy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have created renewable fuels for replacing petoleoum.

with the growing population use of petroleoum and other non renewable sources are getting on risk. 

Keeping in mind the need of the times to create biofuels that could sustain our way of life, the research team has explored a way to use a commonly found algae (used to grow fish food) to create the source for both biodiesel and jet fuel. 

They have exploited a new kind of chemical compounds to generate two different fuel products from a single algae at the same time. 

This is a novel feat and could build towards a new strategy of creating renewable biofuels from algae. 

“It's novel…. It's far from a cost-competitive product at this stage, but it's an interesting new strategy for making renewable fuel from algae,” said the study's lead author, Greg O'Neil of Western Washington University in the US state of the same name.

Algae contain fatty acids that can be converted into fatty acid methyl esters, or FAMEs, the molecules in biodiesel. 

For their study, O’Neil, Reddy, and colleagues targeted a specific algal species called Isochrysis for two reasons: First, because growers have already demonstrated they can produce it in large batches to make fish food. Second, because it is among only a handful of algal species around the globe that produce fats called alkenones.

 These compounds are composed of long chains with 37 to 39 carbon atoms, which the researchers believed held potential as a fuel source.

alkenones are well known to oceanographers because they have a unique ability to change their structure in response to water temperature, providing oceanographers with a biomarker to extrapolate past sea surface temperatures. But biofuel prospectors were largely unaware of alkenones. 

 “They didn’t know that Isochrysis makes these unusual compounds because they’re not oceanographers,” says Reddy, a marine chemist at WHOI

The alkenones themselves, with long chains of 37 to 39 carbons, are much too big to be used for jet fuel,” O'Neil said, explaining that after cleaving carbon-carbon double bonds into pieces with only 8 to 13 carbons, “those are small enough to use for jet fuel.”

The scientists believe that by producing two fuels—biodiesel and jet fuel—from a single algae, their findings hold some promise for future commercialization. They stress that this is a first step with many steps to come, but they are encouraged by the initial result.

“It’s scientifically fascinating and really cool,” Reddy says. “This algae has got much greater potential, but we are in the nascent stages.”

Among their next steps is to try to produce larger quantities of the fuels from Isochrysis, but they are also exploring additional coproducts from the algae. The team believes there are a lot of other potential products that could be made from alkenones

This research was funded by the  national science foundation the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution