Algae shows promise as renewable fuel
Your eyes may say "Eeeww," but your car may someday say "Yes." That's because algae is currently up as an alternative-fuel candidate. (Zen Sutherland).
In this century, scientists are engaged in the search for renewable fuel. One unexpected source may be algae – what you might see, for example, as pond scum.
The starches in algae can be turned into ethanol, and algae’s lipids can ferment into biodiesel. What’s more, growing algae takes CO2, a greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere.
Jack Lewnard is vice-president of Process Development at GreenFuel Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His company was recognized recently for developing experimental algae farms in conjunction with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They used CO2 emissions to create renewable biodiesel and ethanol fuel.
Jack Lewnard: It’s basically converting sunlight into useful energy. Secondly, it has advantages in that it’s a fairly simple process because Mother Nature is doing most of the work for you. And it has a very good environmental footprint because we’re helping to both mitigate CO2 going into the atmosphere and addressing a critical issue for finding renewable sources of liquid transportation fuels.
According to Lewnard, algae has an advantage over other food crops grown for fuel – because it takes less land to grow. Now tests are needed to establish the economic viability of growing algae as a future fuel source.
Our thanks to:
Jack Lewnard
Vice President
Process Development
GreenFuel Technologies
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Biomass fuel is the buzz word but an investigation of scaling issues indicates there is precious little arable land to solve problems using traditional agriculture. Furthermore, using what little arable land we have to grow and burn food crops has huge moral implications globally, and would severely strain our water supplies, also a huge moral issue.
As an alternative to traditional terrestrial agriculture, society should also explore the potential massive industrialization of algae crops for biofuel and feed for animals. Algae farming is high intensity when done on land and presently costs too much to provide an option for biofuel or feed for animals. However, while algae farming is more intensive than traditional terrestrial agriculture, algae have the chance to pay back the extra costs since they create 10-15 times more biomass per area per time, they can be grown on non-arable lands, use less water, minimize nutrient loading of our waterways, and sequester more CO2 than terrestrial biomass options. Simple industrial scaling from present farms that range from 1-10 acres suggest that algae biofuels would be cheaper than fossil fuels at 10 million acres (the amount of land needed to grow sufficient algae biomass to replace all the USA transportation fuel). Where do we go from R&D demonstrations to operational profitability? That is not known, but likely in the range of investment of $30-60B and 15-20 demonstration farms that are about 5,000-15,000 acres. While $30-60B may seem like a lot of money, it is 10-20% of our annual costs to protect the oil transportation from the Middle East. My strong opinion is that a study by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science should be pursued that explores the total life cycle analysis (LCA) of all relevant biomass options, including available land, and implications for water use, soil depletion, nutrient loading of water ways, NOx to the atmosphere, impact on CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, etc.. If this is done at the scales that can make a difference, it is quite possible that algae will turn out to be an option we should, and must, consider very seriously.
Time to define options for solutions and aggressively pursue realistic options.
The idea of producing fuels from algae sounds great, but it will only temporarily ties up the carbon to be released as CO2 when the fuel is burned
I have been watching with much interest the debate about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As I see it, the only safe fuel that does not produce carbon dioxide when burned in an oxygen atmosphere is hydrogen. Any carbon based fuel will produce both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Since almost all living things past and present have a major portion of carbon in their molecular makeup, there is NO WAY to avoid the CO2 end product. When the old world was created, the balance between O2 and CO2 was maintained by all of the carbon tied up in coal, oil, vegetation, and animals. It was like a bank account, there was carbon stored in aforementioned places. Until the human race started using more carbon than the amount being tied down in the enviroment, the balance was maintained. Now we are using more carbon than can be stored in the trees and vegetation, so things are out of balance.