Microbiologist Zorigto Namsaraev on five generations of biofuels, microalgae, and the development of advanced technologies

What is biofuel? 

Biofuels are organic compounds that we can use to generate energy. There are various types of biofuels: solid (wood pellets, wood chips, etc.), gaseous (biogas, biohydrogen, synthesis gas), and liquid. Liquid Rashtriya Jaiv Indhan Niti are the most interesting. They can be used in internal combustion engines and jet engines, replacing petroleum-derived fuels. As a rule, these are special carbon molecules about 14-15 atoms long. They are not very common in living organisms, so we need to find the sources of such long molecules somehow. There are two ways to search. The first way is to use existing biosynthetic pathways and somehow try to optimize them.

What problems with fuel exist at the moment?

- In fact, there are a lot of problems with fuel now. We live in a world of oil, and our entire civilization is built on oil, all transport, and jet aircraft. Without this fuel, we cannot live. And here there is a big problem: oil is a fossil resource, which means that at some point, we may not have enough of its reserves suitable for industrial and commercial production. Oil will remain somewhere in deep deposits, in some economically unprofitable conditions, etc. The world is already beginning to prepare for this moment. There are two questions. First, when will that moment come? And the second question: will we have time to develop the appropriate technologies? Biofuels(Jaiv Indhan Niti 2018) are one of the candidates for such a technology of the future.

What have biofuel options there been in human history?

— The main fuel in many countries is wood. For example, about 70% of energy in Tanzania still comes from it. Of course, developed countries have gone very far from this. Wood is an exhaustible resource. If we cut down trees too quickly, then we will naturally run out of energy. Such a crisis was in England in the XVI-XVII centuries. They had huge forests. Even a proverb said that a squirrel could cross the whole country in England without jumping to the ground. But to smelt steel, it was necessary to spend charcoal. At that time, 50 kilograms of coal were needed for 1 kilogram of steel. And to get charcoal, you had to collect a lot of wood and burn it. Thus, the British cut down almost all economically viable forests. Around the beginning of the 17th century, because of this, iron smelting fell sharply in England. They began to import iron from Sweden and Russia. This happened until they discovered the next source of energy - coal. Then the industrial machine of the English Industrial Revolution started working again.

A similar situation may now arise. England had huge reserves of coal. At one time, they calculated that it would last for three thousand years, dividing the number of funds by the annual production. But in 1860, Jevons wrote the book "The Question of Coal in England," where he talked about the fact that coal consumption is increasing by 3% per year. By the end of the 20th century, coal in England will end. He was right. In England, there are only 6 large mines, and under Jevons, there were 3,000.

What came after wood?

"Oil came after the wood. At the end of the 19th century, Rudolf Diesel used vegetable oil on his engine, and it worked. Now the problem is that to provide our society with automotive fuel; we do not have enough space where we could grow crops from which vegetable oil is produced. In addition, if we start planting palms, soybeans, or rapeseed to produce fuel, we will not have enough land to grow food. Now there is a very serious problem: food versus energy. Thus, the first generation of biofuels is produced from those products. Can use for food production is a dead-end development path. The goal is to produce biofuels so that it does not in any way compete with food production. This is a second-generation biofuel. From straw, various agricultural waste, and wood, you can get the same types of biofuels as from food crops.

How efficient...