Could seaweed power our cars in the future?

The solution to the world's energy needs could be in seaweed. A team with Bio Architecture Lab announced that they have found an enzyme that could be used to convert seaweed into its constituent sugars that in turn could be converted into affordable renewable fuels.

"About 60 percent of the dry biomass of seaweed are sugars, and more than half of those are locked in a single sugar--alginate," said Bio Architecture Lab CEO Daniel Trunfio in a statement. "Our scientists have developed a pathway to metabolize the alginate, allowing us to unlock all the sugars in seaweed."

Extracting biofuel from such crops as corn and sugar isn't as productive or financially feasible as getting biofuel from seaweed. Corn and sugar cane requires significant quantities of arable land and fresh water that will compete with resources for agriculture. Seaweed on the other hand can grow in salt water and has a high sugar content that makes it ideal as a productive energy source.

The scientists at Bio Architecture Lab inserted genes into E.coli bacteria that can convert the molecules found in the cell walls of seaweed into sugars. The bacteria can also ferment those sugars into ethanol and other commodity chemicals.

Seaweed could produce 19,000 liters per hectare annually which is about five times higher than ethanol productivity from corn and twice the level of ethanol productivity from sugarcane. It would only require less than three percent of the world's coastal waters to produce enough seaweed to replace 60 billion gallons of fossil fuel.

Bio Architecture Labs is now operating four seaweed farms off the coast of Chile and doing work for partner DuPont. The company hopes to design a process that will convert farmed seaweed into fuel without going through the traditional multi-step biofuel production method.

BAL's process is detailed in an article entitled "An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae", which appears on the cover of the January 20 issue of Science magazine.