Shell to build facility to grow algae for biofuel

Royal Dutch Shell plc and HR Biopetroleum announced Wednesday the construction of a pilot facility in Hawaii to grow marine algae and produce vegetable oil for conversion into biofuel.

By EnerPub, Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Royal Dutch Shell plc and HR Biopetroleum announced Wednesday the construction of a pilot facility in Hawaii to grow marine algae and produce vegetable oil for conversion into biofuel.

The announcement is a further step in Shell's ongoing effort to develop a new generation of biofuels using sustainable, non-food raw materials. Algae hold great promise because they grow very rapidly, are rich in vegetable oil and can be cultivated in ponds of seawater, minimising the use of fertile land and fresh water.

Shell and HR Biopetroleum have formed a joint venture company, called Cellana, to develop this project, with Shell taking the majority share. Construction of the demonstration facility on the Kona coast of Hawaii Island will begin immediately. The site, leased from the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA), is near existing commercial algae enterprises, primarily serving the pharmaceutical and nutrition industries.


The facility will grow only non-modified, marine microalgae species in open-air ponds using proprietary technology. Algae strains used will be indigenous to Hawaii or approved by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture. Protection of the local environment and marine ecosystem has been central to facility design. Once the algae are harvested, the vegetable oil will be extracted. The facility's small production volumes will be used for testing.

An academic research programme will support the project, screening natural microalgae species to determine which ones produce the highest yields and the most vegetable oil. The programme will include scientists from the Universities of Hawaii, Southern Mississippi and Dalhousie, in Nova Scotia, Canada.

An advantage of algae is their rapid growth. They can double their mass several times a day and produce at least 15 times more oil per hectare than alternatives such as rape, palm soya or jatropha. Moreover, facilities can be built on coastal land unsuitable for conventional agriculture. Over the long term, algae cultivation facilities also have the potential to absorb or 'capture' waste CO2 directly from industrial facilities such as power plants. The Cellana demonstration will use bottled CO2 to explore this potential.

"Algae have great potential as a sustainable feedstock for production of diesel-type fuels with a very small CO2 footprint," said Graeme Sweeney, Shell Executive Vice President Future Fuels and CO2. "This demonstration will be an important test of the technology and, critically, of commercial viability".

"HR Biopetroleum's proven technology provides a solid platform for commercial development and potential deployment worldwide," Mark Huntley, HR Biopetroleum Chief Science Officer said. "Shell's expertise and commitment to next generation biofuels complements our own strengths, and makes this a truly collaborative partnership."

Booming palm oil demand from Indonesia fuelling climate crisis

London (ANTARA News) - Booming world demand for palm oil from Indonesia for food and biofuels is posing multiple threats to the environment as forests are being cleared, peat wetlands exposed and carbon released, a report said on Thursday.

The massive forest clearance for palm plantations underway in Indonesia removes trees that capture carbon dioxide, and the draining and burning of the peat wetlands leads to massive release of the gas, said environment group Greenpeace in its report "Cooking the Climate".

On top of that, the booming demand for biofuels that include vegetable oils to replace mineral oil is in many cases actually generating more climate warming gases, the report was quoted as saying by Reuters.

"Tropical deforestation accounts for about a fifth of all global emissions," said the report. "Indonesia now has the fastest deforestation rate of any major forested country, losing two percent of its remaining forest every year."

"Indonesia also holds the global record for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from deforestation, which puts it third behind the U.S. and China in terms of total man-made GHG emissions," it added.

It said that on top of Indonesia's existing six million hectares of oil palms, the government had plans for another four million by 2015 just for biofuel production. Provincial governments had plans for up to 20 million hectares more.

The report is aimed directly at a meeting next month of UN environment ministers on the island of Bali which activists hope will agree on urgent talks to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon emissions which expires in 2012.

Degradation and burning

It said every year 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide -- the main climate change culprit -- are released by the degradation and burning of Indonesia's peatlands.

Once the peatlands are drained, they start to release CO2 as the soils oxidise. Burning to clear the land for plantations adds to the emissions.

The report said peatland emissions of CO2 are expected to rise by at least 50 percent by 2030 if the anticipated clearances for expansion of palm oil plantations goes ahead.

It cited a report by environmental NGO Wetlands International that said production of one tonne of palm oil from peatlands released up to 30 tonnes of CO2 from peat decomposition alone without accounting for carbon released during the production cycle.

Greenpeace also noted that the European Union's push to boost the use of biofuels as part of its plans to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020 was a decisive factor in booming palm oil demand.

"This use alone equates to the harvest from 400,000 hectares or 4.5 percent of global palm oil production," it said.

"Meanwhile, palm oil use in food continues to increase, partly as food manufacturers shift to using palm oil instead of hydrogenated fats and partly as it replaces other edible oils being used for biodiesel," the report added.

Greenpeace called for a ban on peatland forest clearance, urged the palm oil trade not to buy and sell produce from degraded peatland areas and said governments should exclude palm oil from biofuel and biomass targets.

Related Article:

Indonesia blames western nations for deforestation,
demands compensation

World's carbon dioxide emissions rising at alarming rate

By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

Carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas considered most responsible for global warming — has been emitted into the Earth's atmosphere at a dramatically accelerating pace since 2000, researchers reported Monday.

"Carbon dioxide is rising at a much faster rate than before," says study co-author Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in California. "In the 1990s, CO{-2} emissions increased by about 1.3% per year. Since 2000, the growth rate has been 3.3% per year." The researchers calculate that global carbon-dioxide emissions were 35% higher in 2006 than in 1990.

What's especially troubling, notes lead author Josep Canadell of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, is most climate scenarios used by scientists and policymakers to predict temperature increases are based on the 1.3% rise. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide warm the planet by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Canadell says that while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts "we will have temperature increases of 3.2 to 7.1 degrees by the end of the century, … we're well on the way to the higher temperature increase if the emissions keep going up at this rate."

Higher global temperatures have been predicted to cause rising sea levels, more frequent heat waves and wildfires, and huge losses of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic.

The study was published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It states that carbon released from burning fossil fuels and making cement rose from 7 billion metric tons a year in 2000 to 8.4 billion metric tons in 2006. A metric ton is 2,205 pounds.

The growing world economy is fueling the emissions. "Our ability to become more carbon-efficient is declining, especially since 2000," Field says. "We're no longer seeing progress in this area, which is probably a reflection of a large amount of coal coming into the power system."

Another factor is the reduced amount of carbon dioxide naturally absorbed by the Earth's land, plants and oceans, known as "carbon sinks." Study co-author Thomas Conway of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., says, "Carbon sinks were keeping up with the increased emissions, but now they're not."

Canadell confirms this: "We now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO{-2} arise from the slowdown" of nature's ability to take the chemical out of the air.

The research was supported by Australian, European and other international agencies.

Contributing: The Associated Press

Oceans are 'soaking up less CO2'

The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans has reduced, scientists have said.

BBC News

University of East Anglia researchers gauged CO2 absorption through more than 90,000 measurements from merchant ships equipped with automatic instruments.

Results of their 10-year study in the North Atlantic show CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.

Scientists believe global warming might get worse if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas.

Researchers said the findings, published in a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research, were surprising and worrying because there were grounds for believing that, in time, the ocean might become saturated with our emissions.

'Saturated' ocean

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said: "The researchers don't know if the change is due to climate change or to natural variations.

"But they say it is a tremendous surprise and very worrying because there were grounds for believing that in time the ocean might become 'saturated' with our emissions - unable to soak up any more."

He said that would "leave all our emissions to warm the atmosphere".

Of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, only half of it stays there; the rest goes into carbon sinks.

There are two major natural carbon sinks: the oceans and the land "biosphere". They are equivalent in size, each absorbing a quarter of all CO2 emissions.

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Indonesian women to plant 10 million trees to help overcome climate change

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Seven woman organizations will plant an estimated 10 million trees throughout Indonesia starting on December 1, 2007, to help deal with climate change.

The planting of 10 million trees was also expected to be put in the book of records, Dewi Motik, chairman of the tree planting organizing committee, told the press at the Presidential office here on Tuesday after meeting President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

"There will be 10 million trees, and the event will be the first ever," Dewi Motik said.

President Yudhoyono on November 28, 2007 was expected to officially launch the tree planting activities which would be conducted simultaneously throughout Indonesia starting on December 1, 2007, at 8.00 am Western Indonesian Time (WIB), or 9.00 am Central Indonesian Time (WITA), or 10.00 am Eastern Indonesian Time (WIT), she said.

Most of the trees to be planted would be fruit-bearing trees to give benefits to local people living surrounding the areas where the trees would be planted, the businesswoman said.

The seven organizations to get involved in the tree planting activities would be the Solidarity of the United Indonesian Cabinet Ministers` Wives (Sikib), Kowani, Dharma Pertiwi, Dharma Wanita Persatuan, the Woman Alliance for Sustainable Development, The Family Welfare Movement (PKK), Bhayangkari and the organizing committee of the Mothers` Day 2007.

Meanwhile, First Lady Mrs. Ani Yudhoyono said that tree planting was a hobby of women.

"Women are fond of planting, none of them cut trees," she said.

In connection with the event, a national conference of Indonesian women to anticipate effects of climate change and global warming, will be organized in Jakarta, from November 26 to 28, 2007.

Erna Witoelar of the conference`s organizing committee said that around 700 women from all over Indonesia would take part in the conference which will discuss efforts to solve the problem of climate change.|

The former minister hoped that the 10 million tree planting activities could become a start up of larger scale reforestation programs to rehabilitate the country`s forests.

"Indonesia needs to plant around two billion trees in the next five years. So, 10 million trees that we will plant are a very small number. We hope to encourage the people to do similar activities," Erna Witoelas said.