Kelp-fuel cars on the horizon in Scotland

Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 December 2008 18.12 GMT

The Hebridean Seaweed Company, established this year by Martin Macleod, is so far the UK's only gatherer and producer of seaweed. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian
Motorists may soon be driving cars powered by kelp and algae after scientists in Scotland and Ireland won European funding today for a new research project to create "mari-fuels" - the marine equivalent to plant-based biofuels.
Marine scientists based in Oban north of Glasgow are to lead a €6m (£5m) research programme which will investigate ways of converting seaweeds and plant algae into fuel as an alternative to the increasingly controversial use of food crops to produce bio-fuels. Fuels produced from plants are, in theory at least, carbon neutral and for that reason an attractive alternative to petrol.
The Scottish Association for Marine Sciences (Sams) laboratory has been pioneering techniques for exploiting the UK's vast quantities of wild seaweed stocks, particularly kelp, the ubiquitous, brownish weed which is common along the British coastline.
Ministers want 2.5% of all the petrol and diesel used in the UK to be from renewables sources, as the crops grown to produce the plants used in the fuel mixture absorb the CO2 released by the fuel, reducing its impact on climate change.
But unlike the plants currently used for bio-diesel such as oil seed rape, sunflower oil or palm oil, seaweed naturally grows at an extremely fast rate and it avoids taking valuable agricultural land out of food production or destroying rainforest - key concerns of environmentalists.
It is also likely to be more easily converted into ethanol, then mixed with diesel to create bio-diesel, or into methane, which could be burnt for electricity.
The EU funding, supplemented by money from economic development agencies in the UK and Ireland, will be shared by scientists at Sams, and scientists at Queens University in Belfast, the University of Ulster, and the Institutes of Technology in Dundalk and Sligo in Ireland.
Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, said the BioMara research project was another significant boost in the quest to find alternative fuel sources and also economic development in marginal rural areas.
"The development of mari-fuels could have a lasting impact on remote and rural communities by providing locally produced, relatively cheap, low impact fuel as well as serving the local public transport infrastructure," he said.
Dr Ben Wilson, who heads an informal "blue energy" research group at SAMS involved in marine sources of renewable energy, said one of the major problems with using agricultural crops for bio-fuels was that it wasted potential food sources.
Marine fuel sources such as farmed or wild kelp, "completely side-step that argument". He added: "We won't have kelp fuel in every forecourt but it will be a niche in this requirement to produce alternatives to hydrocarbon fuel sources."
Research at the Sams laboratory also suggest that seaweed has another valuable quality - it thrives on the potentially damaging waste discharged by the salmon farms which dot Scotland's coastline. Salmon excrete ammonia and nitrates which, in concentrated doses, pollute surrounding waters.
But these chemicals are also nutrients for seaweed and sea urchins - a delicacy in Europe and Japan - and other commercial marine life such as mussels and oysters. Sams scientists believe exploiting the waste from fish farms could have substantial environmental benefits.
The laboratory has tested the theory at Loch Duart salmon farm in north-west Scotland, which has planned to commercially market the seaweed and sea urchins cultivated near its fish-farm cages. Seaweed grown near the farm doubled in size in a month.
Kelp is already highly sort after by the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries because of its chemical, culinary and medicinal properties. Kelp harvesters in the Western Isles can earn £250 a day and one local producer recently estimated his firm would need to cut kelp 24 hours a day to satisfy demand.