The demand for fuel (or plastics) from biomass competes with food. Cornell University experts calculated that powering an average US car for one year with biodiesel or ethanol would require 11 acres of farmland, which would otherwise produce food for seven people. However, this is only part of the problem: it takes more energy to make ethanol from farm crops, than the combustion of ethanol produces. The main problem is that 8 percent ethanol with a purity level of 99.8 percent needs to be separated from 92 percent water. If one adds the hard reality that corn erodes the soil 12 times faster than soil can be regenerated, and irrigation of corn mines groundwater 25 times faster than the natural recharge rate, it cannot be considered sustainable. If all automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of 97 percent of US land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. It is hard to explain how plastics or fuel from corn can be considered a sustainable substitute to fossil fuel.

The late Prof. Dr. Carl-Göran Hedén, a Member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, and for years director of the Microbiology Department at the Karolinska Institute introduced the concept of the biorefinery in the early sixties in an effort to get out of the food versus fuel and plastics trap. He introduced the concept of processing the  biomass along the same logic as crude oil is cracked and recombined into 100,000 different molecules, while generating energy. Whereas numerous research institutes like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Wageningen pursued the concept, it was Prof. Dr. Jorge Alberto Vieira Costa from the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG), Brazil who put it into practice, not with plants but with algae.

Prof. Jorge Vieira initiated in the nineties research on sweet water algae, native to the alkaline lake Lagoa Mangueira in the South of Brazil in an effort to respond to malnutrition in the region. His insights in scaling up production resulted in the extension of the program from food security to climate change mitigation. Whereas the production of algae was successful, a better understanding of the demand for CO2 as a nutrient for algae presented a new opportunity tapping the excess emissions from the local coal-fired power station and convert the retention basin into an algae production unit. A detailed study of the production capacity revealed that an over-production of algae for human consumption paves the way for the extraction of lipids from the algae to produce biofuels. Dr. Michele Greque, a colleague of Prof. Jorge Vieira cascaded the biorefinery to the next level and identified the opportunity to produce esters (and polyesters) from the residues thus presenting a solid case for the biorefinery producing food, fuel and plastics from CO2.

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