Alaska Airlines is teaming up with the Washington State University-led Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) to advance the production and use of alternative jet fuel from forest residuals.

Alaska Airlines intends next year to fly a demonstration flight using 1,000 gallons of alternative biofuel produced by the NARA team and its partners. This signals a growing interest in the aviation industry for a viable alternative fuel. A key task of the project is to evaluate the economic, environmental and societal benefits and impacts associated with such developments.

"Alaska Airlines is thrilled to partner with NARA to help further promote sustainable aviation biofuels," said Joe Sprague, Alaska Airlines senior vice president of external relations. "Sustainable biofuels are a key to aviation's future and critical in helping the industry and Alaska Airlines reduce its carbon footprint and dependency on fossil fuels."

A plant that turns leftover biowaste from local bakeries into advanced bioethanol has been integrated at an oil refinery in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Delivered to North European Bio Tech Oy (NEB), the first Etanolix plant from the Finnish energy company St1 will process biowaste and residues from local bakeries and spoiled bread from shops into ethanol for transport fuel.

The Etanolix process was developed as part of an EU funded LIFE+ Project and produces ethanol from biowastes. The process starts with the collection and transport of raw materials to the refinery. The ethanol plant will then produce both 85% ethanol and a by-product called stillage, which can be used as animal feed or for the production of biogas.

The 85% ethanol is then dehydrated to approximately 100% ethanol. After a quality check, the ethanol is pumped to the refinery storage tanks and blended according to specification.

In Minnesota, a recent research shows farmers can successfully grow both food and biofuel crops. Russ Gesch, a plant physiologist with the USDA Soil Conservation Research Lab in Minnesota, found encouraging results when growing Camelina sativa, an emerging biofuel crop, with soybeans in the Midwest.

"Finding any annual crop that will survive winters is pretty difficult," said Gesch, "but winter camelina does that and it has a short enough growing season to allow farmers to grow a second crop after it during the summer."

Researchers tested different growing methods, double-cropping and relay-cropping. Relay-cropping used less water than double-cropping since camelina plants have shallow roots and a short growing season and don't use much water. Moreover, camelina plants flower early in the spring, providing food for pollinators.

"We wanted to find alternative crops that could be integrated into the Midwestern corn/soybean cropping system in a sustainable way that also makes economic sense for farmers," said Gesch.

Microalgae have recently been attracting attention for the production of biofuels. Euglena gracilisa is a potential feedstock because it can produce large amounts of wax esters from paramylon, a storage polysaccharide. Thus, enhancing the amount of paramylon through genetic engineering should increase wax ester production.

Masahiro Tamoi of Kinki University in Japan expressed the FBP/SBPase from cyanobacteria in transgenic Euglena (EpFS) to enhance its photosynthetic activity. The photosynthetic activity of EpFS4 cells was significantly higher than that of the wild types under high light and high CO₂, resulting in enhanced accumulation of paramylon. When placed under anaerobiosis, the transgenic lines produced wax esters approximately significantly higher than wild-types.

Results indicate that biomass production in E. gracilis can be improved by genetic modification. This is the first step in using E. gracilis as a source for biofuel production.

Biofuels pioneer Mascoma LLC and the U.S. Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center have developed a revolutionary strain of yeast that could accelerate the development of biofuels from non-food feedstock.

Although cellulosic biomass is abundant and cheap, because of recalcitrance, it is much more difficult to process than corn. However, Mascoma's new strain of yeast, proved highly effective at converting them.

C5 FUEL™, features fermentation that converts up to 97 percent of the plant sugars into fuel. While conventional yeast leaves more than one-third of the biomass sugars unused in the form of xylose, C5 FUEL™ efficiently converts this into ethanol, and accomplishes it in less than 48 hours.