Will algae biofuels become viable?

Will algae biofuels become viable?

Subject : Environment

Context: Algae biofuel becoming more common

• Algae came to the limelight in the world’s fight against climate change about a decade ago for its vast benefits in industrial production.
• It can synthesise large volumes of oil (20 times more than that of mustard per acre), grow fast (10 times quicker than terrestrial plants) and capture carbon dioxide (CO2).
• Since then, big industries and startups around the globe have been working to commercialisealgae-based biofuel processes to reduce dependence on conventional fossil fuels like petrol and diesel.
• India’s Reliance Industries Ltd, at its Jamnagar facility, has developed catalytic hydrothermal liquefaction technology to convert algae biomass to oil. Under this process, water is used as a solvent under high temperature and pressure to extract oil from the biomass.
• The benefits of this technology include direct utilisation of wet biomass without any need for drying and conversion of every organic fragment of biomass into oilwithout any wastage.
• Japanese firms in collaboration with other global companies are planning mass-scale algae production in Malaysia.
• Earlier in 2022,Turkish airlines partnered with Bogazici University to build an algae-based jet fuel demonstration plant in Istanbul with the funding from European Union.
• Over 25 companies worldwide who initially pitched in to make algae biofuels have either gone bankrupt or moved to other algae products, includingAlgenol and Shell and Chevron.
• Energy return on investment (EROI) is an indicator of sustainability assessment, which is the proportion of energy produced by a given source to the energy required to produce it.
• When the EROI is less than 1, more energy is needed to create a fuel than is found in the fuel and co-products.
• For algal biofuels produced in open ponds or photobioreactors, the predicted EROI ranges from 0.13 to 0.71. For a fuel to be a sustainable energy source, it should have an EROI greater than 3.
• Phycobloom, a Cambridge and Oxford alumni startup, has developed an engineered algal strain that produces oil very efficiently without the requirement of any costly downstream machines.