They calculated that, by offsetting the cost of production through byproduct uses or sales, the resulting sugar could be sold for as low as 28 cents per pound, making it competitive with low-cost imported sugar.

Regardless, the economics could still be there if this is truly waste trash. The article did not mention how the cellulose is currently used. Animal feed? Mulch? Landfill? I guess there is somebody who pays something for access to the material.

Edit: mangled the phrasing

I look at all these bodies of water with massive algae blooms from fertilizer runoff and figure whomever figures out how to harvest that and make fuel out of it will be very wealthy indeed.

I notice they use potassium hydroxide to treat this, and I seriously doubt merely in a catalytic capacity. That means that a lot of electrical input needs to be run into a chlor-alkali plant to make the KOH. If it's just a sprinkling, great. But is it?

Now if you're making moderately valued commodities like sugars or bioreagents, or perhaps even bioplastics, it might be cost-effective in spite of an electrical chlor-alkali input stream.

If you're making biofuels, however, this looks like corn-based ethanol or certain kinds of biodiesel, where there's lots of electrical and petrochemical energy inputs that conveniently get omitted when they tout how great for the environment and home-grown that biofuel energy is. Really hope they're not planning on going the same way with this set of discoveries.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08553-z