Seaweed-powered trucks - hope or hype?

Seaweed has long been touted for its potential as a sustainable ingredient for biofuels, green chemicals and biodegradable materials, but scaling up production to industrial levels in a way that maintains its environmental credentials is proving a real challenge for scientists.

‘The potential is there, all the data points to it,’ said Dr Jaap van Hal, innovation manager at ECN, part of TNO. ‘But you have to learn how to crawl before you can walk.’

Unfortunately, the infrastructure for such applications is still in its infancy. And before the public or private sector can scale up such solutions, more knowledge is needed to guarantee its sustainability credentials while also proving they could work in the market.

One promising application is to use seaweed as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. Dr van Hal is the scientific coordinator of a project called MacroFuels which is aiming to put in place all the steps to develop an industry for producing biofuels from seaweed – from cultivation to fuel production and testing – that could power heavy transport including trucks and ships with diesel engines.

But Dr van Hal says that to turn seaweed into a sustainable energy source requires a supply on a ‘huge scale’, but currently it is a ‘dot on the horizon’ that they will work towards.

Should all the steps be put in place, however, seaweed’s environmental credentials compared with that of other crops mean it has the potential to not only replace fossil fuels but also improve on the sustainability of current biofuels.

Original source: Horizon Magazine
Published on 5 October 2018