ExxonMobil has announced an important milestone on the quest to develop an algae-based biofuel that’s viable for commercialization.
According to a report in Bloomberg, the oil giant and its partner, Synthetic Genomes Inc., are announcing the development at a conference this week in California.
The big breakthrough involves research into using algae-based biofuels. While plant products like corn, soy and sugar are often used in biofuel R&D, several companies see promise in algae as well, due to its oily content ability to thrive in rough, salty environments.
One of the hurdles, however, has involved the amount of oil produced by algae. So far, algae grown in conditions akin to a normal spring day in California produced about 10 to 15 percent oil. But using a new technique, the Exxon/Synthetic team were able to increase it to 40 percent.
To achieve the breakthrough, the team had to understand the inner workings of algae cells — which was poorly understood in formal research.
After identifying the gene that controls the accumulation of fat and then starving it of nitrogen, the team found they could plump up the strain of algae to increase the production of lipids.
"To my knowledge, no other group has achieved this level of lipid production by modifying algae, and there’s no algae in production that has anything like this level," a scientist on the team told Bloomberg. It’s "our first super-strong indication that there is a path to getting to where we need to go."
Exxon hasn’t said how much this current venture with Synthetic has cost the company. But when the project was announced in 2009, Exxon said it was investing $600 million in algae-based fuels.
At the time, the companies predicted they would be able to make algae fuels within a decade. They later admitted it might take a generation. But with this latest development, Exxon hopes algae-based fuels could, once again, be just decades away.
