Flying on Algae Blooms

This week the Carbon Trust announced that it was going to give £30m in grants to people undertaking research and development in algae as a source for the production of biofuel.

It wants to ensure Britain keeps to the forefront of this new industry.

A few months ago KLM, the Dutch airline, announced that it aims to use algae-derived biofuel for all its planes.

KLM is beginning trials this autumn, and if all goes according to plan it will have twelve Fokker-50 planes – seven per cent of its fleet – flying on fuel derived from algae by 2010.

Microalgae can be cultivated and manipulated to produce high yields of oil that can be used as a feedstock for further refining into transport oil.

The potential biomass yield of microalgae is vast compared to conventional agricultural biofuel feedstocks and it has few of their negative impacts (it does not require arable land or freshwater and does not compete with commodity food crops).

Therefore, the production of microalgae biofuels at an industrial scale would represent a disruptive technological breakthrough.

According to the Carbon Trust many challenges remain to make low cost algae biofuels a commercial reality.

However, AlgaeLink says that it has developed a process that is fifty times as efficient as rival processes. In essence it uses tubes rather than ponds. The company is opening two plants in 2008, one in the Netherlands and another in Spain. Initially the algae-based kerosene will be mixed with conventional fuel, but KLM’s ultimate goal is to fuel its entire fleet with kerosene from algae and other plant-based oils.

Why is this change happening so rapidly? Well, we have seen conventional fuel prices jump sharply this year and in 2012, European airlines will have to pay extra for their CO₂ emissions.

Since algae-based fuel is CO₂-neutral, and is cost-effective when the price of oil exceeds forty pence a litre – it is now over fifty-five pence a litre; biofuels would save European airlines billions of euros a year.

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating. But what if the airline industry can be fuelled by algae – should we build the third runway at Heathrow, or should wait and see?

I am very happy to wait.