Great interest in biofuels will stimulate the development of industrial biotechnology, as well as the breeding technology for energy plants.
One can predict that biotechnology for recycling CO2 will soon attract even greater interest. It is not only for biofuels, but also for tomorrow's chemicals.
A new OECD report, The Bioeconomy to 2030: Designing a Policy Agenda, proposes that biotechnology is the key to tacking future global challenges. Biotechnology has great potential, which has been already demonstrated in the sectors of pharmaceutical and agriculture. However, the contribution of biotechnology to the sustainable development of industry is still minor.
Currently many companies are investing the biofuel industry. This is especially true in US, where developing biofuel is one of the main objectives of Obama team. However, few biofuel companies are running well. Taking cellulosic ethanol for example, different processes employing various microbes, either engineered or not, are receiving great venture capitals as well as government funding. Many claims that the technology is great, but none of the companies can further scale-up their technology: as this is not economically viable.
Can we say that the development of these companies is waste of time and money? Clearly not. It is a very important step towards efficient utilization of biomass raw materials, which ultimately will replace petroleum to become the major material for industrial processing. Currently cellulosic ethanol is still not economic competitive, this is mainly because the market price of ethanol is low. Essentially, ethanol is a chemical. Today's biofuel technology could be applied to produce bulk chemicals from biomass for tomorrow.
Algae biofuels might have a brighter future as compared with bioethanol. This is on one hand that the oil produced by algae has a higher energy content; on the other hand CO2 can be used as raw material. Currently the technical bottleneck is the low efficiency of assimilating CO2. A recent paper recycling CO2 to produce isobutyraldehyde on Nature Biotechnology opens a way for production of bio-based chemical from CO2.
Very likely, the investing enthusiasm into biofuels from the industry is driven by the low carbon policy. Currently it's better to consider biofuels as one of the alternative energy, no one knows when and where, which biofuels technology will succeed. Today's investment in biofuels can well be the motor for tomorrow's chemical production.
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