Getting Oil From Bugs

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The "green" gurus of the world are debating and schmoozing in Copenhagen this week and Al Gore is being criticized for predicting that the polar ice caps will all have melted by the summer of 2014. Folks are squabbling over whether our gooses will be cooked by global warming or by the carbon emission caps meant to fight it.  In the end, though, average Americans are more concerned about just paying their heating bills and putting gas in their cars than about massively altering their lives to stop global warming.

Things may or may not be rotten in Denmark, but at least we see some valuable developments in California and Pennsylvania. Human ingenuity is coming up with alternative ways to heat our homes and run our cars, potentially helping our pocketbooks, our national security, and even pleasing the Copenhagen crowd. Biofuel is one of the hottest new technologies out there, and these creative geniuses are making oil from stuff that would ordinarily pour into landfills.

Oil From Algae
The first place winner in Biofuels Digest's 2009-2010 "50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy" rankings is Solazyme, a company that gets algae to produce oil. That's right. Solazyme's little green guys are busy pumping out high quality crude oil that can be easily refined to run your car. In fact, Solazyme has been driving about 200 delegates from Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, and India around Copenhagen this week in a fleet of cars all powered by pond scum waste.

"Pond scum waste" may not be precise terminology, but that's basically what it is. Solazyme takes waste products from wood chips to waste cooking oil and feeds them to the algae, which turn the waste into crude oil. This is a process similar to the one used in making ethanol from corn minus the cost of growing corn, boiling away waste water or distilling alcohol. This biofuel also quite conveniently does not take corn from the food supply, but instead actually makes use of other people's garbage.

"We take biomass like wood chips, switchgrass, waste glycerol. And we feed it to algae in a process where the algae will convert that biomass into crude oil," said Harrison Dillon, who founded the company in his garage six years ago. The crude oil can then be used to make "diesel fuel, jet fuel, high-nutrition edible oil like olive oil, or plastics."

The downside?  Solazyme is not able to produce the oil at a competitive cost at this time, but Dillon projects that they will be able to produce it at $60-$80 per barrel within two years.  With oil around $70 per barrel right now, that's still not super competitive, but if oil coming out of the Middle East spikes up to $140 per barrel, it's not bad. Home-grown oil has the strong added appeal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

San Francisco-based Solazyme is definitely going places. The US Department of Energy just donated $21.7 million dollars toward the company's new plant in Pennsylvania, and the US Navy wants 22,000 gallons of algae-made jet fuel and ship fuel for delivery next year.

Oil From E coli
Another California company, LS9, has engineered strains of E coli to turn waste materials like wood chips or wheat straw into crude oil. The feedstock for the E coli bacteria simply needs to be able to be broken down into sugars, and the bacteria produce quality oil that is nearly pump-ready. Chevron received $25 million from Chevron Technology Ventures and three other venture companies in September, and says it could sell its biofuel for $45 to $50 per barrel by 2011.

The company also claims that its "Oil 2.0" is carbon negative, which means that burning it in your car will emit less carbon into the air than was taken from the air by the raw materials used to make the oil.

A USA Today / Gallup Poll found that 55 percent of Americans, especially young people 18-29 years old, want a global treaty on reducing greenhouse emissions, but 46 percent are afraid it will also hurt the economy. [The poll didn't ask how many people were concerned about handing our sovereignty over to an international body.] Forcing the country to reduce its carbon emissions by significant amounts will indeed encumber the economy, starting with those sectors that will be the most greatly affected, like the automobile industry. But regardless of what happens in Copenhagen, it's a win for everybody if bugs can turn waste material into oil. We can potentially reduce our dependence on foreign oil by using renewable resources that eat waste products, and we can still put smiles on the faces of the environmentally savvy.

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