For cars of the future, the fuels they need, today, from algae

Of all the many wonders at the Algae Biomass Summit this week, perhaps there was nothing more interesting in terms of the Department of Energy’s laudable attention to the sector than a poster from NREL on a project “to screen microalgal biomass to discover novel molecules which have potential to be used as gasoline fuel.”

In the poster, the project lead, NREL’s Tao Dong, writes:

It is well known that oleaginous microalgae are promising for fatty acid production. In addition, microalgae are known to produce diverse volatile compounds, such as terpenoids, phenolics, carotene catabolic products, and etc. It is also possible that microalgae can produce other novel compounds which might serve as potential fuel compounds to enhance engine performance.

In the project, a number of algae strains were analyzed:  Chlorella vulgaris, Scenedesmus acutus, Nannochloropsis oceanica ccmp177, Nannochloropsis granulate ,Synechocystis, Isochyrsis and Pavlova.

Co-Optima and new fuels

Like the bell rung for Pavlov’s dog, most observers salivate at the prospect of new sources for novel high-octane fuel molecules.

Much of that goes back to the Department of Energy’s Co-Optima project’s goals. Co-Optima “seeks to accelerate the path to economic and sustainable fuels and vehicles. An initial approach involves simultaneously determining the fuel properties that maximize engine performance. New fuel products with novel formula are proposed to be developed to provide those advanced properties at the lowest cost and environmental impact.”

High-octane molecules open the door to high-compression engines, since high-octane fuels don’t knock under high-compression.  For those less familiar with the Otto engine cycle, the bottom line is that you get far more miles to the gallon with a high-compression engine burning a given fuel, than a low compression engine.

Why Co-Optima at all? The US among other jurisdictions has set exotic fuel efficiency goals. In the case of the US, an average for a manufacturer’s fleet of 52 miles per gallon by 2025. With this round of improvements — which bring huge environmental benefits and reduce fuel costs for consumers — it is felt that it is not simply a matter of lightweighting vehicles and improving engine design: Co-Optima takes into account that new fuels can enable new engine designs.

The other route to high-compression are diesel engines, but the excitement over diesel has faded substantially in recent months as the impact of the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal has taken its toll.

What the NREL project found

The research team writes: “Microalgae can produce a wide range of volatile compounds, providing new routes for biofuel/chemical production. Four volatile compounds with high RON have been found from 9 algal strains, indicating algae might be a promising bio-platform to produce novel gasoline fuels.”

RON – that’s industry shorthand for “research octane number”, and that’s a key part of the equation when determining the octane number displayed at the pump. RON and the motor octane number, or MON, are averaged to give you that octane rating you see when you re-fuel.

The gold standard in most respects is ethanol — it’s made in vast quantities and has a RON of 108. Most ethanol fans believe that advanced engines will be built with up to 30 percent ethanol blends in mind, because the octane lift gives engines the efficiency they will need to reach the required fuel efficiency levels of the future.

But ethanol has disadvantages for some — primarily, compatibility with existing engines, and the energy content of the fuel. And, there are concerns about how much ethanol can be sustainably produced in a given country. For example, switching to 30 percent ethanol blends in the US would require something like 30-40 billion gallons of ethanol. So, there’s attention amongst researchers paid to alternative molecules that can also provide octane boost.

Four molecules worth noting

Which brings us to algae and its candidate molecules. In this project, there were four of high interest:

Acetic acid ethyl ester with a RON of 118, found in Nannochloropsis granulata and ischrysis;  Butanoic acid, ethyl ester with a RON of 115.4, found in Nannochloropsis granulata, ischrysis and Pavlova;  2-pentanone with a RON of 105.7 , found in Pavlova; and 3-Pentanone with a RON of 103, found in Nannochloropsis granulata/oceania and Scenedesmus acutus.

Are these fuel molecules — that is, can they burn in an engine? Yes. Can they be produced and extracted affordably and burned efficiently in today’s engines? Certainly not. But for tomorrow — and that’s what Co-Optima looks at, we need all the molecule candidates we can find. No high-octane molecule is a bad one — and if there are processes for producing them that exist inside the genetics of algae, why not check out more algae?

Truth told, we’re still in the infancy of knowledge when it comes to the algae library. There could literally be thousands of strains that we don’t know about. Algae have had 500 million years to evolve capabilities, compared to a few million years for humans. What do we really know about what what’s out there, and which strain can produce which high-octane fuel molecules? Too date, there have been too many algae to consider, not enough time, and too many pressing R&D topics to address.

Tough questions to ask, yet asked with perspective

There are important questions that need to be looked into. What algae can produce what molecules, and in what quantities, and can they be affordably grown and extracted? The fact is, we don’t know – so why not research it? As with virtually every aspect of the Co-Optima project, we are quite a ways off from having all the solutions in hand.

On the other hand, just because it took almost 50 years from the day when Vannevar Bush first pencilled out the concepts of hypertext to the point where the World Wide Web debuted, doesn’t mean that the efforts that ultimately led to the Internet and the web were useless and wasted. The Internet is a powerful tool, and though in the 1940s it was an obscure topic, sometimes R&D topics that seem “off the beaten path” end up changing the world.

In fact, it is usually those ones that do so.

A bright shining project

Seen in that light, this little project is one of the most impressive we’ve seen in the entire Co-Optima array of R&D efforts — and the existence of efforts like these is proof positive to the broader public that Co-Optima is a good idea and that taxpayer funds are being well spent.

So long as Co-Optima is doing the job of finding fuel molecules instead of simply being a taxpayer-paid research arm for advanced engines that will need molecules we don’t know how to source — the project is not only a good idea, it is an essential step forward in the way that the Department of Energy has traditionally advanced research via a series of unsynchronized silos.

As President Kennedy once opined, ““All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days…nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”