Seaweed can be a potential raw material for biofuel

                 Green fuels have typically been made from palm oil or corn. But now there’s growing evidence that seaweed might fit the bill as a raw material for biofuel, and one Indian entrepreneur is hoping to exploit it. Shrikumar Suryanarayan, chairman of Chennai-based Sea6 Energy Private Ltd., set up his company in 2010 to look at the feasibility of turning the green algae into fuel.
So far, the venture is starting small. Mr. Suryanarayan has raised $655,500 from investors, including India’s Department of Biotechnology -which is keen for the country to boost its production of green fuels – and some individual investors.
“Why don’t we look at the sea for producing bio fuels ” Mr. Suryanarayan, a professor at India’s prestigious Institute of Technology Madras and a former senior executive at Biocon,  a leading Indian biotechnology company, says he asked himself a few years ago.
Turning seaweed into a commercially viable green fuel is a long shot. Until now, the green algae has not been used for biofuels because few organisms can consume the sugar that seaweed produces – a necessary step to producing ethanol known as fermentation.

But Mr. Suryanarayan says his company has successfully been able to turn red seaweed into ethanol in the lab through a fermentation process which uses normal yeast. “We’ve shown that we can convert it to ethanol without relying on any genetically modified bacteria,” he says.

Other researchers have been looking at genetically modifying bacteria in the lab to make it more effective at fermenting sugar into ethanol. In January, the journal Science published a study by researchers from Berkeley, California, who said they’d genetically engineered a bacteria that could feed on the sugars in seaweed and turn them into ethanol. The research could reduce the cost of turning seaweed into ethanol.

The benefits of producing green fuel from seaweed are large. It’s fast-growing and doesn’t use up scarce water resources during its production – a major benefit in drought-plagued India. It can be grown cheaply on the edge of India’s long coastlines. And it doesn’t take land away from other food crops like rice or wheat. (Some critics of biofuels made from corn, palm oil or sugarcane say their production takes up land that would otherwise be used to grow food, pushing up prices.)

India today makes most of its biofuel from sugar-cane. But that crop is also in demand from alcoholic beverage makers and paint producers, which has reduced its availability for green-energy production. Lack of land and water resources also has dimmed the prospects for green fuel.

That’s why India’s been unable to meet a target of producing 5% of its total fossil fuel needs from green energy. Today, biofuels account for only 3% of total fuel use. India’s biofuels target for 2017 is an ambitious 20% — something that seems impossible to achieve through biofuels derived from sugarcane.

Of course, seaweed-derived biofuel production won’t happen overnight. Mr. Suryanarayan isn’t expecting to get a pilot production plant up and running for two years. He’s hoping to later partner with large Indian or foreign energy companies to scale up commercial production.

The main challenge for Sea6 Energy is to turn what it’s shown on land in the lab – that seaweed can be turned into fuel – into a reality at sea as well. The company is working with Denmark-based Novozymes A/S NZYM-B.KO +0.68%, a biotechnology company, to  find a way to more quickly break down carbohydrates from seaweed into sugars that can be fermented.

Mr. Suryanarayan says there are advantages to red seaweed over other seaweeds that make it a good bet for a commercial biofuel enterprise. For one, it grows at a high yield per hectare – about 100 tons per hectare or almost double the yield of some land-based plants.  That will make it easier to produce the massive amounts of biomass needed to make commercially-viable amounts of ethanol. The idea is to produce the ethanol in the sea, obviating the need to use scare water on land.

Sea6 Energy has developed structures that could allow farmers to grow seaweed in deeper waters rather than shallow seas, a technology that could greatly boost production of the biomass.

What’s more, Mr. Suryanarayan says, biomass from red seaweed can be used for other purposes, such as in the production of cosmetics. That means the company can proceed with stage one of its project – growing the seaweed – without the risk that the biomass is wasted.