CCRES Low Carbon Fuels in Aviation

 photo by CCRES

Biofuels are key to industry’s future

 In a bid to reduce its dependency on imported oil and tackle global warming, the EU has committed to raising the share of fuels from renewable sources in transport to 10% by 2020 – including biofuels, hydrogen and green electricity.

For the growing aviation industry, the switch to plant-based fuel is seen as not only environmentally smart, but a sensible financial move in an era or rising conventional fuel prices and worries about supply security.

Biofuel use in passenger aircraft is still a novelty, and industry officials are urging governments to help lift supplies, much as policies in the EU and United States have created a flourishing market in plant-based oils for motor vehicles.

The industry contends that sustainable fuels will reduce emissions even as passenger traffic grows. The airline sector has committed to meet 10% of its overall fuel consumption with biofuels by 2017 – though the goal is ambitious given that it is to account for just 1% by 2015...

Meanwhile, more doubts are being raised about the environmental benefits of biofuels.

The United Nations Environment Programme has warned that even though burning plant-based fuels can produce significantly lower levels of carbon emissions, production and land clearing to make way for new crops “may reduce carbon-savings or even lead to an increase.”

European conservation groups say the EU and European governments should wait to embrace aviation biofuels until there is proof of their environmental benefits.

 ”Given the right conditions, algae can double its volume overnight. Microalgae are the earth’s most productive plants –– 10 to 15 times more prolific in biomass than the fastest growing land plant exploited for biofuel production. While soy produces some 50 gallons of oil per acre per year; canola, 150 gallons; and palm, 650 gallons, algae can produce up to 15,000 gallons per acre per year. In addition, up to 50 percent (or more) of algae biomass (dry weight) is comprised of oil, whereas oil-palm trees—currently the most efficient large-scale source of feedstock oil to make biofuels—yield approximately 20 percent of their weight in oil,” says Zeljko Serdar, President of CCRES

 Airlines have committed to ramping up their use of biofuels in the belief that they can contribute to achieving the sector's pledges on carbon-neutral growth. For 2050, the EU foresees 40% use of "sustainable low carbon fuels" in aviation.

Croatian Center of Renewable Energy Sources (CCRES)

THIRD GENERATION BIOFUELS FROM ALGAE

THIRD GENERATION BIOFUELS FROM ALGAE

Croatian Center of Renewable Energy Sources (CCRES) have a new technology with major potential to contribute to the fight against climate change.As with all new technologies, careful consideration of potential impacts on the environment and human health is important.

The international community has acknowledges that global warming needs to be kept below 2˙C (3,6˙F) compared with the pre industrial temperature in order to prevent dangerous climate change.This will require significant reductions in the world´s emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) over the coming decades.CCRES have one of the technologies that can help to achieve this.

The EU, which is responsible for around 11% of global GHG emissions today, has put in place binding legislation to reduce its emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020.Europe is also offering to scale up this reduction to 30% if other major economies in the developed and developing world´s agree to undertake their fair share of a global reduction effort.

This is why the EU must support alternative fuels, in particular biofuels, with the triple objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, diversifying fuel supply and developing longterm replacements for fossil fuels.

Third generation biofuels from algae will have an important role to play as soon as they are ready for the market. They should be more sustainable, boasting both a lower enviromental impact and lower costs.Biofuels must become a commercial and competitive product using the broadest range possible of raw materials from both Nord and South Europe.

Biofuels from algae have a big role to reduce CO2 emmisions.

The sustainability of algae biofuels and their potential impacts on other sectors, including land use, are will remain critical issues.Algae biofuels provide an important contribution towards climate change mitigation and security of supply.They are only part of the solution, and must be considered in a wider context, in which efforts are also being made to reduce transport demand, improve transport efficiency and encourage the use of environmentally friendly modes of transport.

CCRES INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

CCRES international cooperation in algae biofuels research has a number of benefits for all involved:

• working together enhances synergies between the different partners
• partners can pool financial resources, share risk and set common standards for large or relatively risky research and development project
• it speeds up the development of the clean technologies we need if we are to tackle our energy related problems
• by linking up their efforts, partners can support a wider range of energy technologies and reduce the costs of key technologies
• networking allows partners to better coordinate their energy research agendas

Over the years, CCRES has build up strong and lasting research cooperation partnerships on specific energy topics with partner organizations.

Zeljko Serdar

President & CEO

Croatian Center of Renewable Energy Sources (CCRES)

Way to Create Biofuels

Way to Create Biofuels

Is there a new path to biofuels hiding in a handful of dirt? 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) biologist Steve Singer leads a group that wants to find out. They’re exploring whether a common soil bacterium can be engineered to produce liquid transportation fuels much more efficiently than the ways in which advanced biofuels are made today.

The scientists are working with a bacterium called Ralstonia eutropha. It naturally uses hydrogen as an energy source to convert CO2 into various organic compounds.

The group hopes to capitalize on the bacteria’s capabilities and tweak it to produce advanced biofuels that are drop-in replacements for diesel and jet fuel. The process would be powered only by hydrogen and electricity from renewable sources such as solar or wind.

The goal is a biofuel—or electrofuel, as this new approach is called—that doesn’t require photosynthesis.

Why is this important? Most methods used to produce advanced biofuels, such as from biomass and algae, rely on photosynthesis. But it turns out that photosynthesis isn’t very efficient when it comes to making biofuel. Energy is lost as photons from the sun are converted to stored chemical energy in a plant, which is then converted to a fuel.

“We’re after a more direct way,” says Singer, who holds appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division and with the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab.

“We want to bypass photosynthesis by using a microbe that uses hydrogen and electricity to convert CO2 into a fuel,” he adds.

Widespread use of electrofuels would also reduce demands for land, water, and fertilizer that are traditionally required to produce biofuels.

Berkeley Lab’s $3.4 million electrofuel project was funded in 2010 by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, which focuses on “high risk, high payoff concepts—technologies promising genuine transformation in the ways we generate, store and utilize energy.”

That pretty much describes electrofuels. ARPA-E estimates the technology has the potential to be ten times more efficient than current biofuel production methods. But electrofuels are currently confined to lab-scale tests. A lot of obstacles must be overcome before you’ll see it at the pump.

Fortunately, research is underway. The Berkeley Lab project is one of thirteen electrofuel projects sponsored by ARPA-E. And earlier this year, ARPA-E issued a request for information focused on the commercialization of the technology.

Singer’s group includes scientists from Virginia-based Logos Technologies and the University of California at Berkeley. The project’s co-principal investigators are Harry Beller, Swapnil Chhabra, and Nathan Hillson, who are also with Berkeley Lab and JBEI; Chris Chang, a UC Berkeley chemist and a faculty scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division; and Dan MacEachran of Logos Technologies.

The scientists chose to work with R. eutropha because the bacterium is well understood and it’s already used industrially to make bioplastics.

They’re creating engineered strains of the bacterium at JBEI, all aimed at improving its ability to produce hydrocarbons. This work involves re-routing metabolic pathways in the bacteria. It also involves adding pathways from other microorganisms, such as a pathway engineered in Escherichia coli to produce medium-chain methyl ketones, which are naturally occurring compounds that have cetane numbers similar to those of typical diesel fuel.

The group is also pursuing two parallel paths to further boost production.

In the first approach, Logos Technologies is developing a two-liter bioelectrochemical reactor, which is a conventional fermentation vessel fitted with electrodes. The vessel starts with a mixture of bacteria, CO2, and water. Electricity splits the water into oxygen and hydrogen. The bacteria then use energy from the hydrogen to wrest carbon from CO2 and convert it to hydrocarbons, which migrate to the water’s surface. The scientists hope to skim the first batch of biofuel from the bioreactor in about one year.

In the second approach, the scientists want to transform the bacteria into self-reliant, biofuel-making machines. With help from Chris Chang, they’re developing ways to tether electrocatalysts to the bacteria’s surface. These catalysts use electricity to generate hydrogen in the presence of water.

The idea is to give the bacteria the ability to produce much of their own energy source. If the approach works, the only ingredients the bacteria will need to produce biofuel would be CO2, electricity, and water.

The scientists are now developing ways to attach these catalysts to electrodes and to the surface of the bacteria.

“We’re at the proof-of-principle stage in many ways with this research, but the concept has a lot of potential, so we’re eager to see where we can take this,” says Singer.

CCRES

 special thanks to 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Croatian Center of Renewable Energy Sources (CCRES)

The Pentagon, the largest U.S. consumer of fuel goes green

 
Last month U.S. Army Energy Initiatives Task Force (AEITF) issued a draft request for proposals (Draft RFP) renewable energy contracts.
 
What’s on offer? Over the next decade, an impressive $7 billion. During the AEITF’s pre-solicitation phase, the Draft RFP is designed to gather information from potential bidders to assist the AEITF to develop a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) that it intends to issue later this year.
 
The United States Armed Forces, which currently fuels 77 percent of its machinery with petroleum-based fuel, has announced an aggressive goal, to be petroleum free by 2040. The Air Force intends to use biofuels for 50 percent of its domestic aviation needs by 2016.
 
A 2011 Pew Charitable Trusts report, "From Barracks to the Battlefield: Clean Energy Innovation and America's Armed Forces" reported that Department of Defense clean energy investments increased 300 percent between 2006 and 2009 - from $400 million to $1.2 billion - and are projected at $10 billion annually by 2030, adding that that by 2015, the Pentagon will be spending $2.25 billion each year to harness clean energy technologies for air, land and sea vehicles.
 
Driving the Pentagon’s green drive is Executive Order 13423, which mandates that the Department of Defense achieve a 30 percent reduction in non-tactical fleet fossil fuel use by 2020.
 
A second key piece of legislation driving the Pentagon’s mandate is the Renewable Fuel Standard, which Congress enacted in 2005 as part of the Energy Policy Act, amending it in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. The amended standard mandated that by 2022 the consumption volume of the renewable fuels should consist of: 15 billion gallons of conventional biofuels, mainly corn-grain ethanol; 1 billion gallons of biomass-based diesel fuel; 4 billion gallons of advanced renewable biofuels, other than ethanol derived from cornstarch, that achieve a life-cycle greenhouse gas threshold of at least 50 percent; and 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels produced from wood, grasses, or non-edible plant parts, such as corn stalks and wheat straw.
 
The draft AEITF RFP marks the beginning of the AEITF's plan to develop a large, coordinated procurement process for renewables. The AEITF's new program was developed in response to a National Defense Authorization Act that requires Department of Defense facilities to derive at least 25 percent of the electricity they consume from renewable energy by 2025, and a Department of Defense "Net Zero Energy" initiative, which challenges DOD installations to produce more energy than they consume, with emphasis on the use of renewable energy and alternative fuels.
 
So, what is holding back the production of commercially viable amounts of biofuels? Key barriers to achieving the renewable fuel mandate are the high cost of producing biofuels compared with petroleum-based fuels uncertainties in future biofuel markets, a lack of subsidies and crop insurance, along with a shortage of significant investment.
 
These factors have combined to produce a “perfect storm” up to now for biofuel producers, resulting in “designer fuels” of high cost for Pentagon testing.
 
To give but one example.
 
In October 2010 the Navy purchased 20,055 gallons of algae biofuel at an eye-watering cost of $424/gallon.  Nevertheless, the contract was one of the biggest U.S. purchases of a non-corn ethanol biofuel up to that time. A year later, the Navy reportedly spent $12 million for 450,000 gallons of biofuel. The bad news was that the biofuel’s cost worked out to around $26.67 per gallon, roughly six times the current cost of traditional gas.
 
The good news?  In a single year, the cost per gallon of biofuel plummeted by a factor of 15.9.
 
Furthermore, $7 billion in funding is likely to prove a significant game changer in the field.
 
So, where does this leave the investor? No single biofuel source, from jatropha, algae or camelina has yet to emerge as the clear winner, though the last seems most likely to emerge as the frontrunner. Accordingly, investors must do their homework and seek out potential winners.
 
For those wishing to broaden their portfolios, two websites will prove of immense value.
 
The first is www.usa.gov, the federal government’s website for the U.S. government, where one can come to grips with federal legislation and Pentagon initiatives.
 
The second is Jim Lane’s http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/, the self-proclaimed “world’s most widely read biofuels daily.” While the site has an element of tub-thumping boosterism, it nevertheless remains an immensely valuable source of information about the biofuel market and the major players.
 
It is important to remember how different the biofuels picture is now from even a year ago. The Pentagon, the largest U.S. consumer of fuel, is now under pressure to meet the various federal mandates, and careers and promotions hang in the balance.

 CCRES special thanks to 

John C.K. Daly ,

U.S.-Central Asia Biofuels Ltd

Croatian Center of Renewable Energy Sources (CCRES)