Last week I wrote about the advances being made in the development of algae biofuel production and their compatibility with existing oil transportation and refining infrastructure. Today Scientific American has an article up covering NASA's developments in this area.
(Diary 1 - Algae Based Biofuels - oil's replacement)
NASA :
Algae are the best source of biofuels on the planet that we know about
The best source of biofuels on the planet - let that sink in for a minute. This is a fuel source that is getting scant attention from the media or legislators, a fuel source that naturally absorbs millions of tons of CO2 each year in the Earth's oceans.
According to the Scientific American article
The space agency is growing algae for biofuel in plastic bags of sewage floating in the ocean.
Jonathan Trent, the lead researcher on the project at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said the effort has three goals: Produce biofuels with few resources in a confined area, help cleanse municipal wastewater, and sequester emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that are produced along the way.
NASA places a small amount of algae in these bags along with waste water. The freshwater exits the bag but salt water cannot enter through the membrane. The algae feed on the concentrated sewage in the bag, cleaning the water and producing lipids that are later refined into oil.
land-based methods have limits, Trent said. Open-air ponds and bioreactors gobble up large tracts of land that would be taxed and could potentially compete with agriculture. And even in deserts, where farming is less likely, evaporation of open-air ponds is a threat. Closed bioreactors face similar hurdles. They must be extremely robust in order to hold large amounts of water against air.
"We've solved the problem of evaporation, weeds, structure," Trent said. "And we think we've added other benefits like processing sewage and sequestering carbon."
Trent envisions the OMEGAs producing enough fuel to fill U.S. aviation needs – 21 billion gallons a year. Doing so would require about 10 acres of ocean, he said.
So with 10 acres, just 10 acres of open water covered in these bags and I assume surrounded by a pontoon system, we could produce CO2 neutral clean energy that would meet the entire energy needs of our aviation industry.
This is massive, a huge potential breakthrough. Its stories like this that remind me what has made this country great and why America needs to be at the forefront of green energy research.
Hopefully we'll see this technology commercialized in the near future. Algae based biofuel clearly is an important step toward a cleaner planet.
***UPDATE - Scientific American report and acerage estimates***
The 10 acre figure quoted by Scientific American has been questioned and does not appear in the original NASA report, which actually includes the following information :
"The reason why algae are so interesting is because some of them produce lots of oil," said Jonathan Trent, the lead research scientist on the Spaceship Earth project at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "In fact, most of the oil we are now getting out of the ground comes from algae that lived millions of years ago. Algae are still the best source of oil we know."
Algae are similar to other plants in that they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, produce oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis, and use phosphates, nitrogen, and trace elements to grow and flourish. Unlike many plants, they produce fatty, lipid cells loaded with oil that can be used as fuel.
Land plants currently used to produce biodiesel and other fuels include soy, canola, and palm trees. For the sake of comparison, soy beans produce about 50 gallons of oil per acre per year; canola produces about 160 gallons per acre per year, and palms about 600 gallons per acre per year. But some types of algae can produce at least 2,000 gallons of oil per acre per year.
So a best case figure of 2,000 gallons per year per acre.