Finnish Oil Company Provides Major Grant to Make Bio-fuel From Algae

Professor Yusuf Chisti, a biochemical engineer based in Palmerston North, has for the past 12 years been developing technology to produce commercial quantities of micro-algal biomass to make various products, including algal bio-diesel – a revolutionary alternative to existing fossil fuel alternatives.

Neste Oil Corporation, a major oil refiner in Finland, has just agreed to pour $850,000 into Professor Chisti’s research because of environmental concerns relating to using petroleum.

“Neste is attempting to move to renewable feedstocks for making diesel fuel. Vegetable oils are in principle a renewable source of bio-diesel, but using food oils, fresh water for crop irrigation and agricultural land for fuel production potentially competes with food supplies, freshwater supplies and is a potential cause of deforestation,” he says. “Using micro-algal oils for making biofuels is preferable to using vegetable oils.”

Although bio-fuel and bio-diesel made from agricultural crops such as palm and soybean oil and sugarcane have so far attracted the most attention as alternatives to fossil fuels, none of these “come close to micro-algae in being able to sustainably provide the necessary amounts of bio-diesel.”

“Bio-diesel from micro-algae seems to be the only renewable bio-fuel that has the potential to completely displace petroleum-derived transport fuels without adversely affecting supply of food and other crop products,” says Professor Chisti.

Oil content of some micro-algae – microscopic, primitive plants which can grow in marine or fresh water - is more than 80 per cent of the dry weight of algae biomass, compared with less than five per cent oil in agricultural crops such as soybean and oil palm, he says.

“Another important advantage of micro-algae is that, unlike other oil crops, they grow extremely rapidly and commonly double their biomass within 24 hours.”

Based at Massey’s School of Engineering, Professor Chisti has been producing algal broth from marine algae in tubular photo-bioreactors which collect sunlight for photosynthesis needed to promote growth. He and his team of researchers have been able to extract oil from algae for converting to bio-diesel using already existing methods.

What is more, the residue that remains after oil has been extracted can be used to generate sufficient electricity to run the machinery that is required for producing the algal biomass and recovering it from the algal broth.

The latest grant will enable him to further develop photo-bioreactors and other systems for efficiently producing the oil-rich algae over the next two years.

In large outdoor algae production, the daily yield of biomass and its oil contents depend on sunlight levels and other growth conditions. Professor Chisti is developing methods to reliably predict the biomass and oil productivity of algal culture systems for the range sunlight conditions that are encountered at different geographic locations. This will allow the eventual commercial scale biomass production facilities to be precisely designed to meet given requirements. These would be land-based and would use seawater, and would probably be established in tropical locations where there are high sunlight levels all year, he says.

While costs for commercial production are yet to be confirmed, Professor Chisti says “in principle, it is possible to produce algal bio-diesel at roughly the same price as petroleum diesel but extensive research is required to achieve this”.

“Achieving the capacity to inexpensively produce bio-diesel from micro-algae is of strategic significance to an environmentally sustainable society,” he says.

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