[MUSIC] In terms of biodiesel, this is a different situation. Biodiesel can go into diesel engines. It's energy density is higher than we have for ethanol. But we still have a problem with where we get that biodiesel from, where do we get the oils and the fats that we're going to use to make the biodiesel and we still have this problem with the tradeoff with food crops. And what you can see here is looking at different kinds of crops and the oils they produce that can be used to make biodiesel, and you can see that one has a much better yield per hectare than some of the others, and that is palm. So palm oil came up when, as biofuels and biodiesel started becoming more popular, it became obvious that palm oil was a good way to get biodiesel, and many countries who didn't have access to other sources of diesel from petroleum sources were quite interested in being able to grow their own diesel. Now, you get oil from the oil palm, this is a plant that can produce for about 25 years, and oil palms produce seeds that have two kinds of oil. There's both a mesocarp and a kernel, both of which are oil-rich, and both of which are used for food as well as for fuel. And the main difference is the level of saturation of the oils that are here and how saturated the fatty acids are in a fat, in a oil will determine what best uses it can be used for. Now there are a number of so even though, even though oil palm is quite good in terms of its yield compared to a lot of other crops, there are still some problems. And one problem in particular is that if you look at where oil palm grows, it's really in a very narrow range around the equator. So you can't just grow oil palm everywhere. And unfortunately where you can grow it is in a very delicate part of earth's eco system, and that is that this is also the band where you see the majority of our tropical rainforests. And so there is a big concern that a lot of countries that have been growing a lot of oil palm, have been doing that at the expense of some of old ancient rainforests that have been taken down to grow oil from. So there's a limit to where it can be propagated, and there are even concerns about propagating where it does grow. Now there are a lot of groups that are trying to improve. Where can we find better feedstocks that can do the same thing but with less impact on the environment and more utility in terms of being applicable to a greater part of the country. And there is another plant that also produces oil and that is a plant called jatropha. And jatropha will grow in a wider range, a wider belt, than will palm oil. And jatropha is a plant that is a small perineal shrub that also makes oil bearing seeds. It has some very good properties. It will grow on some very scruffy land, it can, it's very drought resistant so it can go a couple of years without water and still survive. But if you compare jatropha to oil palm, what you see is that its yield is not as high, so it's not as productive, but when you look at why this is true, there is a real opportunity here, and that is that it turns out the jatropha that is being grown and harvested is actually a completely undomesticated crop. In other words, there is a variety of jatropha that has been grown, and that genetic material is all that's been worked with. Now, when we talk about agriculture, if you look at any of the plants we grow, the corn, the wheat, the soybeans, nobody is working with the first variety of that kind of plant that was first cultivated. Instead, a lot of breeding has gone to try to improve the agricultural properties to domesticate the plant. And so there is, in fact, the big effort that's at a company that's spun out of work at UCSD, a company called SG Biofuels, that has gone back to where jatropha originated in the world and found that there are, in fact, many, many varieties. And they haven't been looked at all. And so they found that by examining many many varieties of jatropha and breeding them, they can greatly improve the properties of jatropha. They can increase the yield. They can get plants that will produce more of the seeds. They're mini agricultural properties that you would want, so that your plants could be harvested easily, so that everything will bear fruit at the same time, so that it will have a growth habit that will be easier to harvest. And all of this potential is there, and what's being currently harvested from jatropha, is just a fraction of what the potential is, because this is from a completely undomesticated plant. And so we can look forward to more gains in the use of jatropha. So we've been talking about terrestrial plants and different sources of biomass that can be used for biofields, but there's also the possibility of nonterrestrial plans. And so now I'd like to talk to you about another group of organisms, aquatic organisms that are referred to as algae, that are also being worked on quite a lot at UCSD. So, I'm part of the California Center for Algae Biotechnology, as is Dr. Mayfield, and many other people here at UCSD who are working on the organisms that going to be telling you about here. And just as technology from UCSD spun out to help form SG biofuels with jatropha, also work from UCSD went into the establishment of sapphire energy which is one of the algae biofuel companies that you've already heard a little bit about. So the reason for interest in algae is first of all scalability, that you can grow a little pond, you can grow a big pond. The ability to grow the organisms at different scales is available. In terms of productivity I'll show you a little bit of data about that, that in terms of absorbing sunlight and getting that converted into some chemical energy that you can store. They're better than land plants at that. And a very important one is sustainability. So one of the things that we really wanna get away from is the idea of using plants that you could be using for food and using them for fuel. And that's one thing that I forgot to emphasize about jatropha. One of the other interesting things about jatropha is it's not a food. And for that reason, it's not growing in agricultural lands, so we really wanna get away from using the same land, the same water that we use for agriculture, we don't wanna be using that for generating our fuel. The other thing is that you can make fungible fuels. The idea of a fungible fuel is a fuel that you can use the same way that we use petroleum and petroleum-based fuels right now. Unlike ethanol which has to have it's own kinds of engines that can work well with that can in fact from algae extract oil based fuels that you're gonna be able to drop right into gas tanks. Algae are already grown at commercial scale, at least small commercial scale for various kinds of products that you either eat or put on your face or in your hair, so seaweed is the nori that you find around your sushi, and many people are now drinking drinks that have various kinds of algae and siano bacteria in them. And I mentioned something about productivity that the reason that there's so much interest in algae is that if you look at their growth efficiency in terms of how much biomass they put on, how much they double their biomass. How much productivity they show during the course of the year, what you see is that algae will, in fact, grow faster and use their sunlight more efficiently. So they're able to use a broader spectrum of the light that for photosynthesis than land plants can and they tend to have a higher efficiency of just converting once they absorb light energy getting that converted over into chemical energy. Now, I should say that whenever you make these calculations though, and especially when you make calculations where you say well, how much oil content do they have compared to other kinds of plants? And if you extrapolate that in to having a whole bunch of great big ponds of these, how much could you make? Algae come out looking very good. However, scaling up is not trivial and in fact how do you scale up? So there are two basic ways that algae are grown commercially and that is either in open ponds and this has a lower energy input than other methods and so a lower price to set them up but they're big challenges because. These ponds can get contaminated. They're out there open to the air. Animals walking around through them. They become contaminated and you have to be careful to protect your crops so that it doesn't get overtaken by various kinds of predators and grazers and things that would infect ponds. The other way is to have photobioreactors. So to grow the algae in enclosures, where they can absorb the light energy, they can get the gas exchange that they need, but they're protected because you have a pure culture in here, and you aren't letting other organisms in or out. The problem though, so good thing about limiting contamination but it's costlier, it's harder to get a very large scale and to get those organisms where they're exposed to the sunlight, and there are various companies that are using both kinds of strategies. So it's not really an either or, there are pros and cons to both ways. So I've just been saying algae and I haven't really told you what kinds of organisms I'm talking about. In fact, there is a very huge diversity of organisms that are referred to as algae, and in particular when we're talking about biofuels typically we're talking about microalgae. So macroalgae, or seaweeds, some people are in fact trying to develop seaweeds for biofuels largely by using their sugars for fermentations that, can be converted to make ethanol or biogas. In the case of microalgae, which just means microscopic algae, we're really talking about two very completely different kinds of organisms and then even within those kinds of organisms we're talking about a great deal of diversity. So the cyanobacteria, which produce a lot of sugars, lipids and hydrogen, and then also true microalgae, and I'll tell you what I mean by that in a moment, which produce biodiesel type lipids and also hydrogen. So the main characters that we're talking about here are organisms that are bacterial in nature but are also photosynthetic and have the same type photosynthesis as plants have so when I was telling you earlier about how the sunlight can be converted to store chemical energy cyan bacteria can carry out that same process that plants and these algae do. With respect to other algae, the eukaryotic algae, these are the diatoms, red algae, and green algae. And so if we look at what the different groups are, again there's a great deal of diversity. This is a phylogenetic tree, which is just a way of depicting how related organisms are to one another. And, the diatoms, the green algae, the red algae, the fact that they are spread out in a large space over this phylogenetic tree tells you that they are very genetically distant from one another. But they are at least all related to each other and to plants. Where as cyanobacteria are off here on a branch more related to ecoli and other bacteria, than they are to these other algae. So algae just means seaweed from Latin, and this refers to eukaryotic aquatic organisms, and then cyanobacteria coming from the Greek for blue because they have different pigments, and they look more blue-green, are photosynthetic, pro-eukaryotic organisms, bacteria. But again, the photosynthetic process they carry out is the same, and for the purposes of biofuels, usually when you hear somebody talking about algal biofuels, it's just as likely that they're talking about these cyanobacteria, as though they are talking about some kind of a true alga. And in fact, when we show you big pictures of these outdoor ponds growing algae, just from looking at them, we usually couldn't tell you if that was a cyanobacterium or an alga, and both are being used in these large outdoor ponds. Okay, something about the diatoms. Because all of these organisms are, that I mentioned, are good potential biofuel producers. The diatoms have been of a great deal of interest largely because they're very good a making neutral lipids are fats. These are triacylglycerol, or TAGS. And they can produce by biodiesel very easily by a transesterification reaction. And these diatoms if you put them under, and here you're just seeing they have these very lovely little glass enclosures for their cell walls. And if you put them under particular nutrient conditions, you can get them to convert a lot of their cellular material to these neutral lipids. And so what you're looking at here is a diatom that has just filled up with oil, and that oil's just ready to be harvested and transesterified so that it can be used also the green algae and the cyanobacteria. And the cyanobacteria also greatly diverse organisms living everywhere from deserts to oceans, and also having many interesting properties that are useful for biofuels. And I'm gonna skip ahead because I'm running short on time here, but I just want to show you a picture from New Mexico where Sapphire Energy is putting in very big algae ponds where they are harvesting them and are extracting oil from the biomass. That oil then is so called green crude that can be treated pretty much like petroleum and then this has in fact been used to be blended with jet fuel, to run cars. And this also something similar has been done by the company Solazyme which is also making algae oil and with that I will just leave you with the idea of what the challenges are scale is a big problem. So how do you scale out so that we can grow enough algae that we can get out oil from them. How about economic liability of the products so that it is comparable this algae. And then also economic sustainability. How do you get this going and keep it going without subsidies? And I'm gonna leave it at that point and then in a few minutes all the panelists will come back and take the questions that we've gotten from the web. [APPLAUSE]
