Biodiesel By Shrooms

Imagine this: magic mushrooms that make fuel for your car or for the big trucks out on the highway. How cool is that?

Sound like something out of a Harold & Kumar movie? Well, folks, there's no Doogie Howser in this one. It's all about the science.

It's already well-established that corn ethanol is the worst solution to fuel problems. It's no better--and in many ways worse--than petroleum. Other solutions, like algae, have a ton of promise and look like the real future for biofuels.

But what about mushrooms?

There are some distinct advantages to using fungi as a fuel source. One of the biggest is that there's little requirement for displacing current food crops or even clearing new land for production. Mushrooms can be grown indoors, underground or in greenhouses and grow very densely with extremely high per acre yields.

A scientist in Israel, Professor Amir Sharon, has been pursuing the idea of fungi as a fuel source for some time and his team at the Department of Plant Sciences at Tel Aviv University have made a lot of headway. They've developed a cultivation technique which is transformation-based, producing less demanding 'shroom hybrids that are less sensitive to environmental conditions. This means they're easier to grow.

Using a type of mushroom that is particularly suited to fuel making (for its oil), called Aspergillus niger (pictured), Sharon's team has produced a more stable spore ('shroom) production technique. This produces a dramatic increase in fresh and dry biomass, which gives better viability to using the fungi as a fuel source.

This would mean that the production of biofuel could be made extremely low-cost. Of course, this would be in the future rather than imminently, but it's a cool approach that is definitely worth looking towards.

In my opinion, algae will likely be the largest of the biofuel sources, but competition is always good and multiple approaches are definitely warranted. This diversification will be the best overall approach to fuel production.

While many are promoting the idea of a total replacement of combustion fuels, this is not entirely realistic. I think there will almost always be a place for combustion engines as an energy source, especially in large applications. The question is the fuel itself to be used, not the engines. That is where biofuels will replace petroleum.