Purple Slime and the Fuelabolic pathway

This diagram of metabolic pathways and an expansion of some detail from it, is from Roche — why would Nature want fuelabolic pathways to be any less complex?

The Multi-Step system — the “fuelabolic” pathway

For years, researchers have been seeking the Holy Grail of Biofuels, which is to say a single microorganism that can “do it all” – ingest nothing more than pesky and abundant atmospheric CO2 and water and excrete drop-in, hydrocarbon fuels. Finding such a microorganism, keeping it alive, and making the process affordable in terms of energy and land cost inputs — well, it’s been a challenge, hasn’t it?

Which makes the idea of a multi-step system attractive. Since Nature works in terms of food chains, why shouldn’t energy systems? Which is to say, why not breed a colony of microorganisms. Then, rather than trying to protect them and finally extract their oils from 0.1 concentrations of biomass in seawater — feed them to larger critters who do some of the aggregating for us. Especially, sea varmints so unchoosy in their diet that it doesn’t matter much whether they ingest the original one-celled microorganism or the two-celled monster that devoured it?

It’s an approach that Live Fuels has been working on for some time — in their case breeding algae that would be in turn fed to organisms such as shrimp or fish that would accumulate the oils and be easier to harvest.

In the case of tunicates — interesting opportunity there, in the sense that it has some of the appeal of seaweed (cellulose without lignin, and fast growing), but at the same time has opportunity as a food source, especially with all those omega-3s.

The potential is vast. According to researchers, protein production from marine cultivation of tunicates has 100 times the potential per square meter than any land-based protein cultivation.

As the Washington State invasive species unit writes, “Tunicates are innocuous-looking organisms that are particularly prolific spawners, in some cases, reproducing once every 24 hours when the water temperatures warm to the right conditions. They can out-compete native organisms for food and space.”

In today’s Digest, we explore the particular case of tunicates, their commercial prospects and promise, a Norwegian project working on them right now, the problems and opportunities in dewatering and harvesting fuels — and the bottom line, via the page links below.