what kind of world does biofuel fit into?

I was reading a recent article by Greg Lindsay for Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/1583947/peak-oil-new-urbanism-biofuels-solazyme) in which he was challenging us to think about peak oil and energy in light of what he calls Jevon's Paradox. This idea was named after the 19th century Geologist who observed "peak coal", which prompted him to ask the question, "Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?"


Lindsay goes on to wonder if next generation biofuels will just help encourage societal behavors that create an insatiable demand for energy, while avoiding the true issue that our species is living beyond our means on this planet. He points out that the choices we make now will shape the landscape of the planet in the future. Lindsay says, "Energy, transportation and urbanism are inextricably entwined, but as far as I can tell, no one has asked the founders of biofuel startups what kind of world they envision if they succeed."

Well, hot dang! I love it when I get asked questions like this... even if it was meant to be rhetorical. In the rest of the article, he interviews Jonathan Wolfson, the co-founder of Solazyme, a San Francisco based algae biomass producer. Jonathan gives nice answers and you should go read the article to see what he thinks.


The world I envision uses diverse energy sources and distributed generation. Renewables such as solar, wind, tidal turbines, hydro and micro hydro, and biofuel will all have their place. All of these energy technologies leave an imprint on the planet with some unsavory side effects such as disturbing animal migratory patterns or changing our aesthetic surroundings, but as long as we are going to continue to live in a technological world, we need energy. The really nice thing about algae based biofuel is the way it can easily fit into existing systems, provide a bridge to an economy less dependent on liquid fuel, and essentially do no harm (except cost money to build infrastructure and maintain).

But beyond just producing fuel, algae have a lot of positive attributes. Algae can recycle CO2 emissions - in any situation now or in the future where CO2 is being emitted, the gasses can be funneled to algae and they will happily grow. Algae can remediate waste from non-potable water. Algae don't require arable land, they have very flexible physiologies, and they are found everywhere, all over the world naturally. Growing algae is a win win situation, once we've figured out the technical issues involved in scaling up algal cultures that are dense enough to make high quantities of oil (or be economical in some other way). This has proven to be difficult but not impossible. Its only been a few years since there has been a big push to produce high quantities of algae biomass and the scientific knowledge behind algae was a far cry from that of other industrial crops like corn and soybeans which have been genetic model organisms for a long time. We hardly even know what some of the algal strains are that are being isolated and tested, much less have a genome for them. Just a few years ago, I was one of a very small group of graduate students attending academic algae meetings... we were a small crop of people working in a pretty marginal field.

So what I'm saying is give the industry some time, and algae fuel could buy us some time to transition the economy. In the mean time, we can clean up some water and air in the process.