LANL Says Algae Biofuel a Real Possibility

As the world hopefully wakes up to the importance of looking after our planet, given recent climate warnings, it’s heartening to see changes to how we fuel our cars being made. While there’s always stores if people trying to run their cars on chip fat from a full fat fryer, there’s also more hygienic, impressive ways of fuelling our cars being created. For example, experts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) believe that we could be on the cusp of creating a new kind of biofuel – using alga as the source.

By using raw plants as the source of our carbon energy, we could power our cars and stop producing such garbage into the air. As most know by now, cars emit a large amount of problematic substances into the air, and this plays a role in creating the damaging climate conditions that we now face. With changes like this, though, we could make small yet significant improvements to the environment without having to cut off any technological improvements that cars provide.

This, then could be a huge movement for the auto industry as it searches for answers to send the blame elsewhere.

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Speaking about the program was Amanda Barry, who  works as part of the Bioenergy and Biome Sciences group. Speaking to Algal Research, a popular journal on the topic, she said: “Algae hold great potential as a source of renewable fuel due to their ability to produce refinery-compatible diesel and jet fuel precursors,

“Identifying algae strains that can use plant substrates, such as switchgrass and corn stover (the part of the plant left in a field after harvest) to grow faster and with more lipids suggests that waste plant material can be used to increase the productivity of algae during cultivation for biofuels or bioproducts.

“Pinpointing the unique enzymes and biochemical pathways algae use to break down complex plant lignocellulose increases our understanding of algal biology, and it opens up new avenues of future designer engineering to improve algal biofuel production strains,”

This is a very important step forward then for the industry. This will help to provide us with the first real example of algae being utilized for a useful process such as this. It’s going to make it easier in the future for the floor to be opened up to other forms of biofuel, too; once one substance is found to work, it’s only likely that more will follow suit.