I’ll Take a Tankful of Green Crude
Some people think of it as going from the fish tank to the gas tank, while others simply call it the power of pond scum. What they are talking about is research to turn algae—the green slimy stuff you find in stagnant water—into a clean replacement for petroleum.
Two Arizona State University researchers, Milt Sommerfeld and Qiang Hu, recently learned that a technology they have been developing to produce renewable biofuel from algae was honored by Time magazine as one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2008. Time called the ASU project “green crude” because it capitalizes on the abilities of certain strains of green algae to turn carbon found in polluted water into an oil that works much like petroleum, but without the brownish side-effects. The invention’s 11th place ranking was announced on Oct. 27 and published in the Nov. 10 issue of the magazine.
For being pond scum, algae are a pretty clever lot. Much like plants they contain chlorophyll and are photosynthetic, which means they can use water and sunlight to convert carbon into a storable energy form such as sugar or starch. But unlike plants, algae prefer to live directly in water, some of them favoring “nutrient-rich” environments full of sewage or farm runoff. Among these algae are special strains that excel at breaking down carbon-laced gunk and reconfiguring it into an oily substance closely resembling the chemistry of petroleum-based products: gasoline, diesel, or kerosene. They accomplish this transformation while cleaning the water and releasing fresh oxygen. Hard to say that for the petroleum industry.
Sommerfeld and Hu have been working with algae strains for more than 25 years, both for producing fuels and for improving water supplies. They view algae as a possible solution to many sustainability challenges. Their goal at present is to ramp up the oil production processes to commercial levels and, possibly, help to clean up some of the planet’s air and water. Algae as a fuel have other benefits, too. They don’t compete with food crops because they will grow in glass tubes almost anywhere it is warm and sunny. Production is much safer than petroleum refining because it doesn’t require drilling or an expensive chemical or thermal cracking process. And potential algae spills—well, those would be completely biodegradable.
The researchers’ algae-to-fuel processes have netted a lot of investor interest in the last three years. In September, ASU announced a collaboration with private equity investors and Science Foundation Arizona to develop, produce, and sell a kerosene-based jet fuel derived from algae. In 2007 Sommerfeld and Hu partnered with UOP, LLC, a Honeywell company, on a Defense grant to develop the algal feedstock production system for Jet Propellant (JP-8) used by the U.S. and NATO militaries. The researchers also developed a technology for algae-based biodiesel that was licensed in 2006 to PetroAlgae, LLC, in Melbourne, Florida.
You might not want to think about pond scum in the fuel tank next time you’re driving the Interstate or flying at 30,000 feet. But green crude could be the fuel of the future, and it won’t have to travel across the world by supertanker.
Rick Heffernon is a senior writer and policy analyst for ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability and author of “Sustainability for Arizona: The Issue of Our Age” produced by Morrison Institute for Public Policy.
[…] ReGeneration reported earlier this year about “green crude” being developed by researchers at Arizona State University. They’re working on a way to use algae as a replacement for petroleum. For being pond scum, algae are a pretty clever lot. Much like plants they contain chlorophyll and are photosynthetic, which means they can use water and sunlight to convert carbon into a storable energy form such as sugar or starch. But unlike plants, algae prefer to live directly in water, some of them favoring “nutrient-rich” environments full of sewage or farm runoff. Among these algae are special strains that excel at breaking down carbon-laced gunk and reconfiguring it into an oily substance closely resembling the chemistry of petroleum-based products: gasoline, diesel, or kerosene. They accomplish this transformation while cleaning the water and releasing fresh oxygen. Hard to say that for the petroleum industry. […]
by Earth Day Special: Green Crude | willisays / April 22, 2009