Can algae save the world - again?
The microscopic green plants cleaned up the earth's atmosphere millions of years ago and scientists hope they can do it now by helping remove greenhouse gases and create new oil reserves.
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By Stuart McDill
Tue Feb 10, 2009
PLYMOUTH, England (Reuters)
In the distant past, algae helped turn the earth's then inhospitable
atmosphere into one that could support modern life through
photosynthesis, which plants use to turn carbon dioxide and sunlight
into sugars and oxygen.
Some of the algae sank to sea or lake beds and slowly became oil. "All
we're doing is turning the clock back," says Steve Skill, a biochemist
at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
"Nature has done this many millions of years ago in producing the crude
oil we're burning today. So as far as nature is concerned this is
nothing new," he said.
The race is now on to find economic ways to turn algae, one of the
planet's oldest life forms, into vegetable oil that can be made into
biodiesel, jet fuel, other fuels and plastic products.
"So we are harvesting sunshine directly using algae, then we are
extracting that stored energy in the form of oil from the alga and then
using that to make fuels and other non-petroleum based products," Skill
said.
He predicted that industry will be cultivating algae in viable quantities for commercial oil production with a decade.
Such fuels are considered to be net carbon neutral because the algae absorb greenhouse gases when they grow.
TEST FLIGHT
Many companies are working on algae and biofuels including U.S. groups
Sapphire Energy, OriginOil, BioCentric Energy and PetroAlgae. Among
uses, Japan Airlines had a test flight last month with a jet fuel and
biofuels blend including algae oils. Brazil's MPX Energia plans to trap
10-15 percent of carbon emissions from a coal-fired power plant by
feeding them to algae when it starts in 2011.
Plymouth Marine Laboratory says it is taking what we know about algae
in the world's oceans and applying it to biotechnology, an approach
which differs from much of the commercial research underway, where some
claims about the possibilities of algal biofuels are overstated,
according to Carole Llewellyn, a marine chemist.
"They (algae) do have a lot of positive attributes but there are a lot
of hurdles that have to be overcome before this becomes a commercial
reality," Llewellyn said.
Cultivating crops on prime farmland to produce bio-diesel has been
widely criticized for helping sustain higher food prices. But many
strains of algae grow in sites otherwise uninhabited, from salt-water
marshland to deserts. They can grow 20 to 30 times faster than food
crops.
Research in Plymouth includes identifying which strains of algae will
produce the most oil or absorb the most CO2 in differing growing
mediums. Algae's requirement of a source of carbon dioxide has also
stimulated interest from industrial plants which see the possibility of
feeding algal beds with carbon-rich exhaust fumes from their power
plants.
Research into replacing petroleum based fuels and products with biodiesel from algae is not new.
The U.S. government began funding research in the 1970s and only
discontinued the program in 1996 when it was reported that producing
bio-diesel simply cost too much and would not become economic until oil
prices rose to $40 a barrel. Prices for Brent crude on Tuesday were $46
a barrel.