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.