The Lie at the Heart of Making Biofuel from Sea Algae

Biofuels have proven to be a disaster. They result in the misappropriation of  food for the primary purpose of fueling automobiles. The result has been millions of people going hungry. The impossibility of using land-based crops as a petroleum replacement is obvious. Now the focus is on creating biofuels from sea weed—and it promises to be an even bigger disaster than land-based biofuels. Aside from the fact that they utilize genetic engineering, documented here, the basis on which they’re being hyped is a lie.

The Lie

Sea weed is algae. The promoters of sea weed for biofuel tell us that it’s a win-win situation. There will be no need to provide fertilizer because, as “everyone knows”, algae feeds off the effluent that pours down rivers from factory farms and other industries. Therefore, the logic goes, the biofuel algae will not only provide fuel, they’ll also provide the service of cleaning up the pollution from factory farms!

Wow! Who wouldn’t want such a great deal? Everyone wins—and we end up with cheap and nearly free biofuel on top of cleaning up pollution without even breaking a sweat.

There’s just one problem with this scenario: It’s a lie. It’s a blatant lie.

The Truth

There are three basic types of algae: green, red, and brown. Brown algae is the type that would be used to create biofuel. Green and red algae are the types that can bloom in the face of severe pollution. The red blooms release toxins that cause fish to be poisonous. The green blooms deplete the water of oxygen, resulting in dead seas. No fish can live in such waters.

However, the type that would be used in sea weed farms for biofuel isn’t green or red. It’s brown algae. It’s the type that includes the great kelp beds. Unlike green and red types, brown algae never blooms in the face of pollution. It is, in fact, something of a canary in the coal mine.

Brown algae dies in the face of pollution!

The win-win story being promoted to sell sea weed-based biolfuels is a lie. The fact is that one, probably more, of the following must happen if sea weed is to be grown for biofuels on a large scale:

• Fertilizer will be used, and that would almost certainly mean petroleum-based artificial fertilizers with the attendant pollution.
• Sea weed farms will rapidly deplete the sea of nutrients required by other plants, thus further degrading the oceans.
• Agribusiness sea weed farms will rapidly pollute the oceans, just as Agribusiness land-based pseudo-food factories pollute the land.
• Agribusiness farming of sea weed for biofuels will supplant community-based farming for food, like that shown in the image above.

Yasuo Yoshikuni, the CEO of Bio Architecture Lab, which developed the genetically engineered bacteria that will convert sea weed to ethanol, is promoting the claim that sea weed farmed for biofuel requires no fertilization. He told the Guardian that cleaning up nutrients washed [dumped] into rivers from farmers’ fields would be cleaned up, thus preventing the pollution of large algal blooms!

Sea weed-based biofuels introduce the potential risks of the combination of two pathogenic-prone bacteria, Vibrio splendidus and E. coli, further erosion of the world’s food supply, and further pollution of the oceans. The technology is not the panacea that’s being promoted.

The two fields of biofuels and genetic modification are being combined with utterly callous disregard for the potential risks. Major news media is already selling it as a win-win for everyone if just a few kinks in the process are resolved. But the reality is that it’s a lose-lose for people and nothing more than a profit center for the one percenters.

Sources:

• GM microbe breakthrough paves way for large-scale seaweed farming for biofuels
• An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae
• Uplifting the Value of Seaweed Biomass
• 3 Types of Marine Algae
• Decadal Changes in a Polluted Bay As Seen from Its Seaweed Flora: The Case of Santos Bay in Brazil
• Review of the potential use of brown algal ecotoxicological assays in effluent discharge and pollution in southern Australia

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