Darpa, Drone-Maker to Brew Algae-Based Jet Fuel

Pentagon way-out research arm Darpa and Predator drone-maker General Atomics are teaming up to try to turn algae into jet fuel. The Defense Department announced the $20 million deal earlier in the week.

The idea is to "demonstrate and ultimately commercialize the affordable production" of an algae-based surrogate for JP-8 jet fuel by 2010. The work is going to be spread all over the country, from the Scripps Institutions of Oceanography near San Diego to Hawaii Bio Energy in Honolulu to the University of North Dakota's Energy and Environmental research Center. General Atomics also seems to have pulled down an extra $4 million in Congressional pork money to set up a plant-fuel research facility at Eastern Kentucky University.

It's not Darpa's only effort to come up with alternative fuels. The agency has given millions to a Brooklyn-based professor to look into turning trash into "bioplastics," and then turning those plastics into fuel. Darpa has an program to make biofuels out of crops like corn, efficiently. And the agency recently kick-started a $4.5 million project to figure out how to transform coal into liquid fuel cheaply.

But the corn-based fuel drives up food prices, and "generates at best 30 percent more energy than is required to grow and process the corn -- hardly worth the trouble," Evan Ratliff noted in WIRED magazine last year. Coal-to-fuel programs, at least existing ones, create more greenhouses gases than they save.

Which makes this Darpa-Predator-Scripps-and-company algae effort so important. Algae and other cellulosic ethanol sources aren't food crops. And if this research pans out, Ratliff believes the cellulosic method could yield "roughly 80 percent more energy than is required to grow and convert it." Algae-powered jets for everyone!

By Noah Shachtman for Wired.com