Jul 14 2009
Exxon and Algae: Could It Be Love?; Wal-Mart Asks: How Green Are Our Goods?
Major corporations are beginning to get the memo: It pays to go green. GE has become a powerhouse wind turbine producer. BP’s logo now says “beyond petroleum.” And two of the biggest corporations of all—Exxon and Wal-Mart—join them this week, both breaking ground for plans to carve out potentially hugely profitable niches in a greener business environment.
Exxon Mobil Corp. said Tuesday it will enter the biofuels field in a $600 million partnership—tiny by Exxon standards—with biotech developer Synthetic Genomics Inc. to identify how to produce fuel from algae. It’s an impressive way to deflect recent criticism that the Texas giant has not done enough to examine alternative energy sources, while reaping record petroleum profits. (Above, headquarters logo: by MontroseDP, Flickr.com)
Exxon officials said there appears to a good chance algae has large-scale, long-term potential to produce biofuel, according to a report in the Huffington Post. Algae would be grown on land and water unfit for food crops. The idea is to harvest its oil, the structure of which is similar to the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel Exxon already makes. Exxon could then convert algae oil, or bio-oil, into transport fuels in its existing refineries and use existing pipelines.
Algae-based fuel is a second-generation biofuel thought to have the potential to supply fuel sustainably and affordably, compared to first-generation biofuels, such as corn- or sugar-based ethanol, which have come under increasing criticism for threatening food supplies, forests and biodiversity. (Above, algae covering a lake: by Peter Baer, Flickr.com)
The results of a major ethanol study, released in May, show it’s much more sustainable to bypass ethanol entirely and just use the biomass directly that goes into ethanol production. Published in the journal Science, the study results indicated that converting biomass to electricity, say in electric vehicles, yields 80 percent more transportation energy than turning biomass into ethanol, while leaving a 50 percent smaller carbon footprint.
In the study, researchers from Carnegie Institution, Stanford University and the University of California-Merced examined the life-cycle impact of producing a biofuel, from field to vehicle. “For every acre of land planted with an energy crop—like corn (below: by James Jordan, Flickr.com) or switchgrass—turning that biomass into electricity gives you more ‘miles per acre’ than converting it to liquid ethanol, which is how biomass is used today,” Time said.
Lately, as the ups and downs of the gasoline market have battered our budgets, we’ve been focused on electric vehicles. But the larger question of how to sustainably power the mammoth U.S. electricity grid still escapes us, albeit there has been progress. The Energy Information Agency, in a new study, reported at the end of last week that low-carbon energy sources provided a record 9.47 percent of generated electricity in the 12 months from April 2008 to April 2009. (It helped that overall electricity generation fell 5 percent during the same period.) Electricity from coal-fired plants dropped substantially, by 13.9 percent, TreeHugger.com reported.
A day before Exxon unveiled its plans, retail behemoth Wal-Mart (below: by Markomni, 
Flickr.com) revealed its own plans—the enormous task of measuring the sustainability of all the products it sells. The information will eventually be printed on sustainability and social-attribute labels of consumer goods, just as nutritional content is printed on food labels today. Mike Duke, Wal-Mart’s CEO, will host the new program’s coming-out party on July 16 for a gathering of suppliers, environmentalists and academics, according to GreenBiz.com.
The company has been working on a “sustainability index” for the past year-plus—no small task given that so many of Wal-Mart’s goods are produced abroad. The information is scheduled to go on labels within a couple of years. The company has seen the future, and it is sustainability.
