Young Hobart scientist breaking ground in biofuel production

Up-and-coming Australian scientist Kim Jye Lee Chang from the University of Tasmania was one of the state winners at the 2012 AusBiotech/GSK Student Excellence Award for his work in identifying new microorganisms that can be used to produce oil from recycled carbon sources. The discovery could provide Australia with a secure, environmentally sustainable fuel feedstock for the future.

Lee Chang’s PhD project is a joint initiative by the University of Tasmania’s School of Plant Science and CSIRO’s Energy Transformed Flagship. The project is investigating the use of Australian microalgae for the production of biofuel, biodiesel, omega 3 oils and co-products. It involved persuading microalgae, gathered from seawater, to produce dollops of oil.

“Most other efforts to produce biodiesel from algae have used photosynthesis, driven by sunlight, as the energy source, which required a lot of space,” says Lee Chang. Instead, he is using a fermentation process, where the microalgae gobble up glycerol, or other carbon sources such as sugar, as energy to produce a lot more oil in a small area. They can grow heterotrophically with a range of carbon sources, and some of these microalgae will soon to trialled in the waste stream of a food manufacturer.

Glycerol, also used in food and skin creams, is an increasingly abundant by-product of the conversion of animal fats and vegetable oils, such as palm oil into biodiesel. The heterotrophic cultivation process also produces the health-benefiting long-chain omega-3 oils (long chain denotes 20 or more carbons), which otherwise come from microalgae via fish. The study show these microalgae have potential for producing a feedstock for the long-chain omega-3 oils, as well as the shorter chain fatty acids suitable for biodiesel.

The experimental process still has a lot of room for finetuning, including the selection of various algae strains to produce different oil products using different feed sources. Lee Chang says the next steps in his research will include further optimising growth and also scaling up production into commercially viable culture vessels. “Overall, we have new Australian microalgae now available for commercial development of biodiesel and high-value co-products,” he says.

AusBiotech and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) hold the annual competition as a key initiative to encourage more students to pursue research and consider a career in biosciences.