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Algae That Cleans Emissions and Produces Fuel

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jan 11, 2006 03:53 PM
from the nature-already-efficient-enough-for-production dept.
Power Science
**$tarDu$t** writes "Isaac Berzin, a rocket scientist at MIT has come up with an idea for using algae to clean up power-plant exhaust. His research began 3 years ago in an experiment for growing algae on the International Space Station. His idea consists of building algae farms near power plants to provide a means to reduce CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions. Emissions are filtered through the algae. Then the CO2 saturated algae is harvested and squeezed to produce a combustible vegetable oil (biodiesel) and a dried green substance that can be further processed into ethanol."
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  • I don't have a biology degree but it seems to me that there might be faster ways of creating strains more efficient at harvesting/reducing CO2. I have seen lectures given where Alzheimer's susceptible genes were spliced into the genes of mice neurons using a strain of the herpes virus that had previously infected neurons of Alzheimer's patients [nih.gov].

    Does anyone know if there are techniques like this to use to directly alter the genes of other organisms (like algae) using perhaps similar tricks?

    Furthermore, what if this could be used for gases other than nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide?

    Is there maybe a possibility of coating hot air balloons or zeppelins with this algae and letting them float about in the atmosphere until they become so heavy with algae they descend? I know it's kind of farfetched to propose that but stranger things that once were science fiction have become useful. The article seems to make it sound like just having the algae exposed to the air near a plant.
    • I will personally take care of any spare nitrous oxide gas you happen to have. Please contact me via the email address attached to this account.

    • Re:Better Strains and Algae Zeppelins? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Politburo (640618) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:12PM (#14448910)
      I don't have a biology degree but it seems to me that there might be faster ways of creating strains more efficient at harvesting/reducing CO2.

      Well gee, please do enlighten the biologists then.

      The article seems to make it sound like just having the algae exposed to the air near a plant.

      Did you miss this part in the summary in your rush for FP? "Emissions are filtered through the algae."
      • Actually, I RTFA instead of the summary and as it turns out:

        In 1990, Sheehan's NREL program calculated that just 15,000 square miles of desert (the Sonoran desert in California and Arizona is more than eight times that size) could grow enough algae to replace nearly all of the nation's current diesel requirements.

        They make it sound like you just need to grow it and it will clean the air. Why would you put that figure out there if you have to build just as much pipe filled with algae to clean the air?

        • Correct me if I am wrong, but I remember reading that to produce a useful amount of algae, the air needs to be at least 13% CO2. Coal plant emissions reach that level. So it would be possible to run the nation's diesel fleet off 15,000 square miles of desert if that desert contained a few dozen coal power plants and a system of pipes to carry exhaust to the algae ponds.

          • Re:Better Strains and Algae Zeppelins? (Score:5, Informative)

            by arivanov (12034) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @05:24PM (#14449524) Homepage
            Nope you are not wrong. Algae are an extreme pain in the arse to grow. They require loads of sun, loads of CO2 and the moment their concentration reaches a usefull level the broth tends to start dieing out, bacteria take over and contaminate the broth. So on. Of course, growing them for fuel is different from growing them for biotech where you need them "pure", but still. The idea of using algae is wildly optimistic.
            • Algae are an extreme pain in the arse to grow. They require loads of sun, loads of CO2

              Tell this to anyone who has an aquarium, artifical pond in the garden, or swimming pool. I'd say it is an extreme pain in the arse to prevent algae from growing in any water that is exposed to light. I have seen them grow in cooling-water hoses that were only exposed to fluorescent light tubes. Mind you, the cooling-water circuit was filled with deionized water, so all the nutrients must have been leaking out of the vari

              • Re:Better Strains and Algae Zeppelins? (Score:4, Insightful)

                by arivanov (12034) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @06:08PM (#14449900) Homepage
                You are kind'a correct. True, algae grows everywhere. The problem is that it is not growing in a concentration for anything usefull. If you dip your fish in an algae broth that is as concentrated as necessary for it to be of any use for extracting food supplements they will die in 5 minutes or less because their gills will be completely clogged up. I assume that biofuel is the same (I may be wrong). And by the way - I used to study this (granted this was 20 years ago) and I used to have 8+ fish tanks around the apartment. So I know both sides of the story first hand.
                • well, if one grows algea on land you run into the issue of harvesting enough, unless you're using controlled environments where every nutrient level is precisely tuned to the needs of the algea. in which case you're not producing a huge volume, but it's very useful for cleaning emissions from coal power plants. and if every coal plant in the us used algea tanks insted of conventional 'scrubbers' enough algea to produce enough biodiesel to run a large segment of our diesel market would be produced. now tha
    • Three guesses, in decreasing order of likelihood:

      1) The guy isn't a molecular biologist and doesn't know how to do that, but does understand how to do selective breeding.

      2) The alga used here isn't a common experimental system so you don't have the tools available that you do for mice.

      3) The CO2 uptake is controlled by a pathway such that hitting one or two genes isn't enough to change it significantly.
    • The article seems to make it sound like just having the algae exposed to the air near a plant.

      Actually, I got the impression that they diverted the flue gasses from the powerplant and bubbled them through the algae; instead of just venting the gases right into the air.
  • ... seeing this in some documentary awhile back. It looked pretty neat. One thing that I wasn't so sure about is how the tubes that carry the circulating algae solution can be kept clean and leak free in any number of climates where it might be useful.

    Still, very neat.

  • Obligatory 'Soylent Green' reference (Score:5, Funny)

    by trailerparkcassanova (469342) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @03:56PM (#14448753)
    Isaac Berzin's algae IS people!!!!

  • OILIX (Score:3, Funny)

    by HunterZ (20035) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @03:56PM (#14448756) Homepage Journal
    Nice, they've invented OILIX from Metal Gear 2 (MSX, not PS2)!
  • ...this does not sound like rocket science at all?!
    ;)

  • Algae (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mysqlrocks (783488) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @03:58PM (#14448771) Homepage Journal
    Can't algae itself get out of control and cause environmental problems?
    http://www.google.com/search?q=algae+blooms [google.com]
    • Yes, under the proper conditions. Stack emissions are primarily CO2, NOx and various sulfur compounds. What primarily keeps algae levels in check in the environment are various micronutrients (phosphorous, nitrogen, iron). Given that smokestack emissions should be fairly defined composition, it should be straight forward to supply the exact amounts of additional nutrients to stimulate growth without overpopulation problems. Besides, this is an engineered process, not simply dumping emissions into a rive

  • Cheap Solar Power? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2006, @03:59PM (#14448776)
    1. Fuel -> Power Plant -> Emissions
    2. Emissions -> Algea -> Fuel
    3. Profit!
    • From reading the article, it's just plant-based solar power, with taking the emissions from the smokestack to help them grow. But still has all the pitfalls of solar (massive amounts of space required to soak up the sun's rays).

      And this has an additional downside: won't all the absorbed CO2 just be re-released when the fuel the process creates is burned? Thus you're back to where you started with the same amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere.

      This just seems like robbing peter to pay paul environmentali

  • UNH Biodeisel? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ydnar (946) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @03:59PM (#14448781) Homepage
    This sounds very similar to a similar process documented by the UNH Biodeisel Group [unh.edu].

    • Re:UNH Biodeisel? (Score:5, Informative)

      by PaintyThePirate (682047) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:14PM (#14448919) Homepage
      The UNH study is based on a ~20 year U.S. DoE study on algae biodiesel [energy.gov]. Anyway, while it is true that there is enough land in the United States to grow enough algae to replace all gasoline and diesel fuel use, it's not the ideal solution. The problem is that the algae requires something around 13% CO2 gas to grow in any useful amount. The level of CO2 naturally occuring in the atmosphere is about 0.035%. The only economical source to generate that much CO2 is burning Coal. So, the entire process still yields tremendoes amounts of CO2, contributing to global warming. Certainly, it is better to harness CO2 from existing Coal power plants for biodiesel instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, but it is not a permanent solution.

  • New advertising campaign (Score:4, Funny)

    by eclectro (227083) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:00PM (#14448789)

    Now -- With the cleaning power of Slime!!!

  • covered on PBS (Score:5, Informative)

    by LEPP (166342) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:01PM (#14448809)
    They had a Scientific American segment on this. Here [pbs.org] is the segment transcript. It was quite interesting.

    LEPP

  • How does this really help? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bob_Villa (926342) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:05PM (#14448848)
    From reading the article, the algae suck up the CO2 and the Nitrogen Oxides from the power plant emissions. That's obviously a good thing. The algae are then used to create methanol and biodiesel. What happens when you burn the methanol and biodiesel? Doesn't that just release the stored CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides back into the atmosphere, or am I missing something here?

    Also, if these algae are so great, why don't we fill up thousands of acres with them, not just 15,000, and suck the CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides out of the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gasses. Maybe the algae could then be dumped into the deep ocean, creating a carbon sink.

    Does it take less pollution to create methanol and biodiesel this way, versus drilling them from the earth?
     
    • What happens when you burn the methanol and biodiesel? Doesn't that just release the stored CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides back into the atmosphere, or am I missing something here?

      Yes, you are. See in the current situation, both powerplant CO2 and vehicle CO2 (and NOx) are being emitted from different energy sources. For the sake of argument, let's assume equal amounts of emissions are emitted from the powerplant and the vehicles.

      So you put in the algae and you get .4x CO2 out the powerplant stack, and let's as
      • But what about the other emissions? Coal plants put out a lot of arsenic and radioisotopes, among other things. Releasing it from smoke stacks is bad enough. When it's coming out of exaust pipes on busy streets, we're gonna have some problems.
    • am I missing something here?
      Yes. The theory is that you'd get twice the amount of use from the same amount of CO2 emissions -- once to generate electricity, and again to drive some cars (or something else). End result is total CO2 emissions are reduced because driving the cars only emitted the CO2 that the electicity generation plant would have already emitted otherwise.
    • It's not carbon neutral is what your getting at. That's ok. It cuts carbon in half. The CO2 that was used from that plant to make auto fuels, would have gone into the atmo anyway. But we do save on the carbon output of the cars, since they are only spitting out CO2 that we took from the (already waste) exaust of the coal plant.

      Oh, and you DEFINETLY don't want to sink the dead algee to the bottom of the ocean. Were as CO2 will stay submerged, rotting organics make methane... that doesn't stay submerged, and

    • Re:How does this really help? (Score:5, Informative)

      by j1m+5n0w (749199) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:31PM (#14449074) Homepage Journal
      What happens when you burn the methanol and biodiesel? Doesn't that just release the stored CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides back into the atmosphere, or am I missing something here?
      Yes, it ends up in the atmosphere in the end, but you get to use it twice. If you're going to polute, you might as well pollute in a way that maximises the energy generated per quantity of carbon dioxide produced. Also, this could partially solve a political problem of reliance on foreign fuel.
      Also, if these algae are so great, why don't we fill up thousands of acres with them, not just 15,000, and suck the CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides out of the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gasses. Maybe the algae could then be dumped into the deep ocean, creating a carbon sink.
      I assume that the algae grows better in an environment with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, such as power plant exhaust. The gains from pumping regular air through an algae filter would be less dramatic (and you could probably acheive a similar result by, say, planting a tree).

  • While he is certainly one of the first to moot this idea I struggle to believe he is the first. I have heard people talking about this sort of thing for years. I haven't read the article yet (naturally) but I do know that there are some big problems with this type of technology that aren't going to be solved in the near future. I suspect this is just another set of plans talking about how we could remove CO2 using algae rather than an in depth costing to see if it is actually worth it. By worth it I don't m

    • A coal plant with a 2000 acre algae farm might produce 40 million gallons of biodiesel. Sold at market value, that's $100million USD. Per year. Amortized over a period of many years, just how much could the system cost for that one coal plant, before it's not worth it?

      Especially considering that it means staving off new regulatory costs when we have a non-asshat president and something like Kyoto goes through? (If we were going to have to spend $25 million per year starting in 2009 anyway, just to be clean.
  • Maybe it's just me, but the way the story is worded makes me feel a little sorry for the algae.

    Dan East
  • Sounds a lot like perpetual motion to me:

    1) Burn oil fuels

    2) Oil turn into CO2

    3) Turn CO2 into oil.

    Rather, rinse, repeat.

    Now I know it isn't literally perpetual motion because of all the energy that goes to work, heat, etc, but still if this is true then it sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
  • are interesting, the real solution as I've pointed out in the past is cost effective Solar power. Solar power has been coming down in price exponentially for years and the latest breakthroughs in nanotech promise to make it cost effective when compared to even Oil and Coal. This company [nanosolar.com] is one of the many companies that are working on this type of technology. And no, I do not have a financial interest in this company.

  • sprayers vs bubblers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by G4from128k (686170) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:27PM (#14449030)
    I'd bet that this will work more effectively if the algae/water mixture is sprayed into the power plant exhaust rather than bubbling exhaust gas. Spraying will maximize the surface area exposed to the exhaust and reduce the system's energy use. It will take much less energy to compress a small volume of algae-liquid and make small drops than it does to compress a massive volume of gas to make small bubbles.

    I can even imagine a multistage sprayer. A hot-stage sprayer injects matured algae-mix into the hot exhaust gases to both cool the exhaust stream and create a desiccated algae powder (for fuel production). A cool-stage sprayer injects living alga mix into the cooled water-saturated exhaust stream. Even with the two stage process I'd bet that the "cool" stage will still run at a relatively high temperature. Perhaps the engineers will need to adapt a thermophilic algae (such as live in hot-springs) to make the system feasible.

  • Real world implementation (Score:4, Informative)

    by ikornalot (734157) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:32PM (#14449087)
    This has been under discussion here [biodieselnow.com] since 2004.

  • More CO2 scrubbing/sequestering (Score:4, Interesting)

    by greg_barton (5551) * <greg_barton&yahoo,com> on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:34PM (#14449099) Homepage Journal
    Check out this dangerous idea [edge.org]

  • all time favorite (Score:3, Informative)

    by alex_guy_CA (748887) <(moc.tdlefneohcs) (ta) (xela)> on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:44PM (#14449201) Homepage
    This issue was previously reported on Slashdot. last year [slashdot.org]

    I have to say, as an environmentalist, this line of research is one of the most hopeful I have seen. Besides cleaning power emissions, it can clean farm and industrial waste while generating fuel.

    While at a farm products convention I talked to the bio- diesel and ethanol people from Iowa about this stuff. They had never heard of it, which is a shame. It seems like there should be better ways to get good ideas out there, but I guess market forces are the best we can do considering the government is so in line with the status quo.

  • This might actually work. But does it scale? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:45PM (#14449218) Homepage
    It's not actually processing any significant fraction of the flue gases. It's just connected to a sampling line from the smokestack. The big question is how much equipment you need to process the output from a power plant. Numbers like a thousand acres of tube field are mentioned. And how much manual servicing does this gear take?

    Here's the technical paper. [greenfuelonline.com]

  • Check out the original (Score:3, Interesting)

    by brianerst (549609) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:46PM (#14449237) Homepage
    I've long been fascinated by the UNH and GreenFuel proposals for algal biodiesel, so everytime it pops up, I take a look. No big changes lately, but the GreenFuel process still seems like the one that could actually have a real impact in our lifetimes.

    Check out the original Slashdot thread [slashdot.org] on GreenFuel from back in May, 2005. The news.com article link has changed [com.com].

    News.com had a few followup articles as well here [com.com] (about investing in clean tech) and here [com.com] (about J. Craig Venter looking at bioengineering more effective microbes for doing this kind of stuff).

    • Yeah. Comes nothing good ever comes from research, we should just stop trying.

    • Re:Alright, another idea that will go nowhere! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Red Flayer (890720) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:28PM (#14449040) Journal
      "I wish I had a nickel for every "So and so scientist at so-and-so university has come up with such-and-such alternative to gasoline" story I've seen over the last 30 years."

      Wish I had a penny for every knee-jerk post made by someone who didn't even bother reading TFS, let alon TFA.

      This isn't about alternative energy supply (mostly). This is about waste mediation, particularly CO2. The generation of usable fuels by the algae is just a nice little benefit, kind of like using an afterburner to generate extra power while reducing particulate emissions.

    • Re:Alright, another idea that will go nowhere! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RingDev (879105) on Wednesday January 11 2006, @04:51PM (#14449273) Homepage Journal
      Actually, WI is upping their ethanol blend again, we have a 200mil gal/year soy plant going in just out side of madison, and the new Milwaukee power plant could wind up being one of the most advanced clean coal burning plants in the US.

      The big problem is not solutions, but cost. $3/gallon is the magic point for gas. Unless vehicles shoot way above 30mpg and gas prices don't increase past $3/gal alternative fuels will be cheaper. And the joy of capitalism is that the most financial sound path is the best funded. So yeah, hydrogen fuel cells have been possible for decades. But why would anyone invest in hydrogen when it costs the equivilant of $3/gal of gas today when gas has always been cheaper? If hydrogen costs 15 cents per mile, and gas costs 10 cents per mile, gas is going to get the investment. But when gas costs 13 cents a mile, and is only going to rise, people start looking into hydrogen.

      That's where we're at now, gas is still cheaper, but just barily. As the hydrogen and alt fuel networks expand, and the cost of gas increases, alt fuels will become more and more popular.

      -Rick
      • While I agree that we need to rely more upon nuclear energy, it can't (at least yet) replace fossil fuels. The trouble is obviously in getting energy from a nuclear power plant to a car. You can't just stick a reactor on four wheels and call it done. A convenient energy storage medium doesn't yet exist. Hydrogen is difficult to store, and batteries charge slowly and are absurdly expensive.

        I believe biodiesel will succeed at least as a stopgap though, as it is already on the market and runs in diesel
      • > Nuclear energy could solve all of our energy needs but we, instead, choose to use a non-renewable energy source for our needs.

        Nuclear power is non-renewable.

        (Actually no power source that I know of is really "renewable"...it just gets automatically recycled thanks to the sun ;-)
    • The fact that innocent algae have to be subjugated to digest our waste will still irk some environmentalists.
      Can this MIT guy perhaps develop a separate strain of algae that will feast on hippies?

    • so, review: modern nuclear tech has no greenhouse gases

      Please stick with reality - the fuel is made from a rock dug out of the ground and processed, so there are greenhouse gasses, but with high grade fuel it comes out at about one third less than the next contender (gas turbines). This still makes nuclear look very good on that point but has the advantage of being real and not just being advertising spin. If you want to advocate nuclear power on an unrelated article first learn about how it works and the

      • Doesn't that total energy content come from one trip through a thermal reactor? You get about a 1000 kilowatt per gram, but you also produce plutonium.
        octave:1> kw_per_gram=1000 kw_per_gram = 1000
        octave:2> kw_per_metric_ton=kw_per_gram * 1000000
        kw_per_metric_ton = 1000000000
        octave:3> 3.4 * kw_per_metric_ton
        ans = 3400000000

        So this agrees with your calculation. But we aren't at this point "right back where we were before", because the "waste" is actually a fuel (which France's and Japan's br

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