Canada, the land of maple syrup and high-test beer, is putting another tiger in its tank this month.

The Great White North will become the latest country to conduct a biofuel-powered commercial airline flight later this month. Porter Air, which conducted a test flight in February, plans to make the flight in mid-April.

“We are timing our biofuel-powered flight close to Earth Day to emphasize the contribution that biofuels are expected to make in helping the aviation industry meet its targeted reduction in emissions,” says Porter CEO Robert Deluce.

Continental Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and KLM Royal Dutch have all ferried passengers with the environmentally sustainable fuel since last summer.

Porter will be staging the flight on one of its Bombardier Q400 turboprop planes using a 50-50 blend of regular jet propulsion fuel and biofuels — in this case, derived from two kinds of oilseed (Camelina sativa and Brassica carinata).

Airlines are highly motivated to reduce their carbon emissions, considering the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) quest to reach CO2-neutral growth by 2020 and manage a 50 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by the year 2050.

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A thousand years ago, the Vikings pulled the old name-game switcheroo — calling one of their island territories Iceland and another Greenland in the hopes that rival conquerors would dash off across the Atlantic for the valuable real estate.

Nowadays, Iceland could be going green for an entirely different reason. An Iceland cleantech industry exec says the small island nation could produce so much algae-based biofuel that it may not need to import fossil fuel at all — and, in fact, could turn algae biofuel into an export industry.

Asbjorn Torfason of Vistvaen orka ehf says LED technology and Iceland’s hugely potent geothermal energy combine for great possibilities when it comes to producing biodiesel from microalgae or macroalgae (seaweed), calling the idea “absolutely reasonable.”

Torfason’s company will be searching this summer for the areas best suited to algae cultivation.

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The phrase “game-changer” is tossed around in the business world like a pigskin. But this discovery may truly tilt the playing field.

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute say they’ve created a draft genome of a marine algae sequence — one that may very well be capable of producing biofuel on an industrial scale. The results are in the most recent issue of Nature Communications.

Nannochloropis gaditana is the strain of marine algae that may supply the lipid yields required for a commercially viable fuel source. The work was performed by Robert Settlage, Ph.D., Hongseok Tae, Ph.D., in VBI’s Data Analysis Core (DAC).

“Getting the data is now the easy part. What we're doing in the DAC is enabling researchers to move beyond informatics . . . to regain their focus on the biological implications of their research,” says Settlage.

The researchers point out that algae is a more beneficial feedstock for biodiesel than corn or soybeans because of its capacity to grow in various water sources, from wastewater to brackish water, and can also be cultivated on wasteland in small, intensive plots.

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A couple of green projects are being seeded in the Golden State.

Algae International Group Inc. is developing its first $2M so-called “Algae2BioFuel” limited partnership venture using CO2, fuel cells, nitrates, phosphates, sunlight, and algae.

“This process, combined with a proprietary custom-built ‘press,’ will allow the venture to produce and deliver high-grade HRD and HRJ fuel to the Military and other commercial and industrial buyers,” says Mervyn Price, president of Regus Advisors Inc., a private global investment banking firm that will supply professional advisory services to the project. “This is one of twelve ventures we are working on in this space.”

Also in California, Ventura (a subsidy of Biodico, a biodiesel outfit) will be using algae as part of a project to produce biodiesel and renewable energy at Biodico’s 10-million-gallon-a-year facility in Port Hueneme. The project has just received a $2M grant from the California Energy Commission.

Ventura and Biodico hope eventually to feed electricity back onto the grid, since the project is expected to produce 25 times as much electricity as is required for biorefinery operations.

*** Image courtesy Bombardier Inc. ***