As argued by Glithero et al. (2013c), further incentives will need to be provided to farmers to engage in supplying biomass feedstock on a larger scale.
Therefore, the key strategies aimed at providing alternative fuels can be expected to benefit from reliance on a combination of feedstocks provided through reforestation with fast-growing and adapted species that can be harvested sustainably and processed into cleaner fuels.
These renewable monomeric feedstocks provide comparable properties to conventional petroleum derived products and are of growing importance as their supply improves and the price of petroleum continues to increase.
Therefore, using the proposed carbohydrate-rich microalgal biomass both as the carbon sink and as the feedstock provides a feasible alternative to current carbon-reduction and bioethanol-production strategies.
One plant employed this technology to convert inferior diesel fraction such as LCO and LCGO from naphthenic-intermediate feedstock, providing the yield of 83.65 and 16.93% for diesel and naphtha product, respectively.
Metabolic engineering applications are driven by a desire to decrease costs, increase yields, increase efficiency, increase consumer acceptability, and use renewable feedstocks to provide a more environmentally friendly process than traditional chemical approaches.
Agriculture is being looked to to provide the chemical feedstocks to produce pharmaceuticals, to produce chemicals that go into industrial processes and, at the same time, produce clean water, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change.
Advanced biomass feedstocks tend to provide more non-fuel ecosystem goods and services (ES) than 1st-generation alternatives.
Practical applications: The research reviewed in this paper aims to develop metabolic engineering technologies to radically increase the yield and alter the fatty acid composition of plant oils and enable the development of new and more productive oil crops that can serve as renewable sources of industrial feedstocks currently provided by non-renewable and polluting fossil-based resources.
Examples include pumping water for feedstock and providing electric power to lighthouses, telecommunications repeater stations, and mountain lodges.
