The Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI) is requesting the government to amend the Biofuels Act to allow the use of palm oil, together with coconut oil as a fuel additive. They believe that this will reduce the cost of biofuels in the country.

The specifications, particularly the formulation for the fuel mix, in the Biofuels Act were specifically made so that only coconut can qualify. The Biofuels Act, passed in 2006, mandates mixing a percentage of biofuels in the making of local gasoline and petroleum diesel to decrease dependence on fuel imports and meet environmental goals.

Palm oil is used as a feedstock, particularly in biodiesel, to be mixed with petroleum diesel. Currently, the price of palm oil is half of the coconut oil price in the world market, or $1,500 per metric ton for coconut versus $725 per metric ton for palm oil.

In the law, both bioethanol and biodiesel are governed by the Philippine National Standards. The mandated biofuel percentage to total volume of liquid petroleum is now at 2%.

The production of value-added chemicals alongside biofuels from lignocellulosic sources could be vital in developing economical biorefineries. Xiaoqing Wang from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory evaluated the production of propionic acid (PA), a potential building block for C3-based chemicals, from corn stover using the PA-producing bacterium, Propionibacterium acidipropionici.

A range of conditions and parameters were examined and optimized to maximize the PA yield. It was found that nitrogen gas exhibits improved performance over carbon dioxide. The effects of different hydrolysate concentrations, nitrogen sources, and neutralization agents were also investigated.

One of the best combinations found used yeast extract (YE) as the primary nitrogen source and NH₄OH for pH control. This combination enabled high PA yield concentrations, while successfully minimizing lactic acid production, which can hinder biofuel production.

These results demonstrate the feasibility of producing PA from corn stover hydrolysate, which would be a potential additional income in biofuel production.

Integrating cultivation with wastewater treatment improves the economics of microalgal based biofuel production and allows for the sustainable reuse of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from waste streams. This was the aim of a research led by Mikael Jämsä from University of Turku in Finland.

His team performed a batch-cultivation of a locally isolated green microalga, UHCC00027, and an indigenous algal-bacterial consortium on screened municipal wastewater in pilot reactors. They then evaluated the growth as well as N and P removal of the microbes. Lipid accumulation and fatty acid composition were also examined. The wastewater treatment performance under cold temperatures, were also tested.

Results revealed that vigorous, temperature-dependent growth of microalgae was the most important factor in the removal of N and P in the wastewater. The studied cultivation strategy and organisms achieved regulatory N and P removal levels.

However, the biodiesel properties of the resulting biomass did not meet international standards due to a high proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids. More studies are required to increase the quality of the resulting biofuel.

High-temperature fermentation (HTF) technology is expected to reduce the cost of bioconversion of biomass to fuels or chemicals. For stable HTF, the development of a thermotolerant microbe is indispensable. However, understanding the molecular mechanisms of thermotolerance in microbes needs to be improved. Kannikar Charoensuk from the Rajamangala University of Technology in Thailand aimed to study genes from the thermotolerant Zymomonas mobilis, an efficient ethanologenic microbe.

Thermotolerant genes essential for survival at a critical high temperature (CHT) were identified via transposon mutagenesis in Z. mobilis TISTR 548. Products of these genes were classified into nine categories, namely metabolism, membrane stabilization, transporter, DNA repair, tRNA modification, protein quality control, translation control, cell division, and transcriptional regulation.

Cells with transposon insertion in these identified genes showed a defect in growth at 39°C but grew normally at 30°C. Among those, more than 60% were found to be sensitive to ethanol at 30°C, indicating that thermotolerance partially overlaps with ethanol tolerance in the organism.

The thermotolerant genes from Escherichia coli and Acetobacter tropicalis can also be classified into 9 categories according to the classification of those of Z. mobilis. Analysis showed that there are 7 conserved thermotolerant genes that are shared by these microbes.