As this issue of Biotech international goes to press, the news from the United States that polluting oil has finally reached the beaches of Texas and the bayous of Louisiana confirms that now all the US states bordering the Gulf of Mexico have been affected by what President Obama has qualified as the worst ecological disaster in the US ever, namely the catastrophic blow-out from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. For the last 12 weeks the world’s media has been full of images of oil-bedraggled pelicans, polluted beaches, laid-up shrimp fishing boats and, worst of all, live video feeds showing the non-stop underwater spewing of the ruptured well. All hopes of trying to temporarily cap the leaking oil have now been all but abandoned, with the only realistic chance of definitively stopping the leak now resting on the successful drilling of a relief well, which won’t happen for several more weeks. Until then it looks as though the news on the ecological front will be unremittingly bad. The inevitable effect of all this bad news on the general public (even the automobile-addicted US public) is already a dawning realization that the constant search for new oil reserves necessarily located in areas more and more at the limit of current marine engineering technology is unsustainable. The dreaded “Peak Oil” may be closer than we thought (“Peak Oil” is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline).
The one silver lining behind these dark clouds could however come with the correspondingly growing appreciation that much more attention should be paid to alternative sources of fuels. Biotechnology stands to be a big winner in the current disenchantment with Big Oil. At the recent World Congress of Industrial
Biotechnology and Bioprocessing
(www.bio.org/worldcongress/ ) held in Washington DC, one speaker, a committed proponent of bioprocessing-derived ethanol as a biofuel, put it with more than a touch of schadenfreude “no beaches have ever been closed because of ethanol spills.” The mood at the huge congress, organized by the industry’s umbrella organization Bio, was resolutely upbeat, in part because of the realization that the future for biofuels is looking more positive. Most policymakers and economists now accept that the biofuel industry must look beyond ethanol derived from corn, which is not only less efficient than sugar-derived ethanol but also drives food prices higher ( yet for political reasons shelters behind US protective tariff barriers). Heavyweight consultancies such as McKinsey reckon that the overall industrial biofuel industry will grow almost four-fold to reach €450 billion by 2020. The World Economic Forum is slightly less ebullient, estimating that the market for “biorefinieries” will reach €300 billion by 2020.
Brazil, the market leader in sugar-derived ethanol has already announced that it will actively support the transition to cellulosic-based ethanols. Not to be undone, the US Department of Energy proudly announced at the Biotech congress that it would be increasing funding for algae-based biofuels by $24 million on top of an existing $145 million support level. Sceptics point out that government support is all very well, but the true sign of a developing industry finally leaving the publicly-financed incubator stage is when private investment occurs, where companies invest not for strategic politico-economic reasons but simply because they think they can make handsome profits. We might not be at this stage yet but the fall-out from the Deepwater Horizon disaster may yet move us along the way.
