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Sugarcane the sweet choice for biodiesel

A spoonful of sugar already helps the medicine go down, and now it seems that enough sugarcane juice will support the growth of the alga Chlorella protothecoides by heterotrophic fermentation. Hmm, not quite got the same ring to it has it?

Still the impact is just as impressive as researchers at Tsinghua University in China reveal that sugarcane juice is a good feedstock for biodiesel production. In their paper on the study, published in the ACS journal Energy & Fuels, they find that heterotrophic fermentation allows algae to accumulate at much higher proportions of oil within less time. This allows for much easier scale-up.

This alternative may present a solution that is more economical in terms of both its energy saving and greenhouse gas relief.

According to the report, the work illustrates the feasibility of sugarcane juice served as a fermentable carbon source for oil production. The pathway from sugarcane to biodiesel has several advantages when compared to fuel-ethanol production by yeast fermentation including the fact that it takes a lot of heating power to prepare ethanol by distillation.

Researchers admit this is just the beginning for biodiesel production using microalgae to meet commercial needs. Indeed there are limitations to the process – the oil-carbon source conversion is dependent on the biomass/sugar conversion and as a result, the oil cell content typically ranges from 30-60 per cent, which limits the oil/carbon source conversion.

Indeed larger amounts of ethanol could be produced with relatively small amounts of microbial cells – but, in the future, reasonable improvements can be introduced to enhance the pathway of alga-based biodiesel production.

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Author: Paul Lucas, July 1, 2009
Filed under: Biofuels,Green cars,Latest news

1 Comment »

Sugar is fed to heterotrophic alga, which multiplies. The algae is extracted from the growth medium, and the oil is extracted from the alga. You’re going to get a bigger return out of the sugar by feeding it to algae. However, biodiesel and ethanol are going to be integrated – made from the same alga harvest, at the same biorefinery. Regardless of its lower Btu content, ethanol optomized engines are getting the same power and torque of diesel engines and the same efficiency. Biodiesel is a great fuel, but you still have to extract the oil from the alga, then perform transesterification, then dispose of the glycerine waste. Ethanol can be mixed 50-50 with water and still combust. Liquid ethanol-water can also be reformed onboard into hydrogen, simultaneously extracting half the hydrogen from the water it’s mixed with. It can also be used in direct ethanol fuel cells. Biodiesel has its place, but ethanol has more protential in the long term. You can get a generator that runs on 50% ethanol and 50% water and produces 8 times the energy that went into distilling the fuel. Don’t assume that biodiesel will conquer ethanol.

Comment by Aureon Kwolek — July 2, 2009 @ 3:28 pm

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