The Question of the Next Century Will Be…
Bioreactor Photo Credit: Chlorophyll Collective
How do you take a damaging substance and evolve it into something beneficial?
In 2005, the United States produced 6,008.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
So, how do you turn 6,008.6 million metric tons of CO2 into something essential for human existence?
From the experts at the Chlorophyll Collective, the answer is simple: Take a bunch of algae, submerge it in water, blast it with carbon dioxide and sunlight, and get our essential OXYGEN as a waste product. (You may remember the basic equation for photosynthesis from your early days in Bio/Chem101)
In fact, did you know over 70% of the oxygen in the atmosphere is not produced by trees, but by algae? This means our very lives depend on algae for existence!
Given that we are now in an age where the U.S. contributes at least 6,008.6 million tons of CO2 to global warming every year, the Chlorophyll Collective has decided to start acting locally by creating basic air and water-cleansing machines using our CO2 emissions as fertilizer for the algae that in turn, give us back oxygen (as their waste product!) The machine, called a bioreactor, is pictured above and can be made very easily with plastic tubing and chicken wire.
Additionally, algae expert and CC counfounder Aaron Baum points out that algae are unique in their CO2 eating properties,
…because they thrive on concentrated CO2, which other plants can’t handle. This means they can eat the exhaust before it gets into the atmosphere! Algae also remove other damaging greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide and can also clean our waste water, such as agricultural run-off, sewage, and animal manure, transforming it into clean air, water, and fertilizer.
Taking it one step further with various experiments with intensive research, the Chlorophyll Collective has also discovered the benefits of growing algae with our CO2 waste far exceed original intentions to provide us with cleaner air and water. Using fat lipids and other algal nutrients for the latest clean technology, “We will be able to open up entirely new arenas in biodiesel, bioplastic, fertilizer, antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, & other health foods, or neutriceuticals,” says Baum. Potentially, we could even be making biofuel fertilized by its own waste products.
Using our CO2 waste to fuel the natural oxygen-giving processes of algae, the Chlorophyl Collective is creating natural global cooling methods to combat global warming while increasing our air and water quality to help us breathe better. In the city, this means setting up a bioreactor (or many) would help counterbalance the pollution and sickness that results from oxygen deficiency (or CO2 overload, depending on your view).
If you're interested in learning more about the Chlorophyll Collective, or want to start making you're own simple algae-based oxygen-machines, check out http://tribes.tribe.net/chlorophyllcollective
Tags: algae, Alternative Fuels, Biodiesel, biofuel, carbon dioxide, Chlorophyll Collective, clean tech, Climate Change, Green Tech, greenhouse gases, oxygen, Renewable Power, Science and Tech
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April 23rd, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Obvious question:
How the heck can one collect the CO2 gas emissions from their house or vehicle to bubble into the bioreactor?
The CO2 would have to be pressurized which requires energy from somewhere.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Here is something I came up with along these lines a few months back to help mitigate Coal Power Plant emissions.
http://rationalenvironmentalist.com/biomass.html
April 24th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Not to sound negative, but household CO2 recycling using bioreactors is a much higher expense lower return endeavor than doing the same thing at power plants. So instead of putting bioreactors in your yard and then risking carbon monoxide poisoning in your home by tampering with your furnace exhaust to feed the thing, you should probably consider finding companies that are researching the use of algae bioreactors to produce fuel from CO2 exhaust at power plants, factories, ethanol plants, breweries, anaerobic digesters and other sources of concentrated CO2.
These companies are currently investigating the most cost effective way to grow massive amounts of algae off the various sources of CO2 and the ones that are able to do so and produce fuel at a reasonable price will change the world. Folks who put algae bioreactors on their home are only going to get a cool conversation piece.
A partial list of companies known to be working on algae to biofuels processes:
Greenfuel Technologies - http://www.greenfuelonline.com/
This company has received venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Access Industries and Polaris Venture Partners
PetroSun -
http://www.petrosuninc.com/
This is a publicly traded energy company which has a wholly owned subsidiary, Algae Biofuels, through which they are investigating algae as a fuel source.
Solix Biofuels -
http://www.solixbiofuels.com/
This is a start-up company which is working with Colorado State University to develop their technology and helped start the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Cluster. Their initial source of CO2 is a brewery.
GS Cleantech -
http://www.gs-cleantech.com/
This is a publicly traded company using a bioreactor developed at Ohio University. Their bioreactor is a metal box filled with screens to which their algae attaches itself. They use fiber optics and glow plates to deliver and disperse solar energy inside the bioreactor.
I know I’m missing several others. There are companies who are partnering with some of these companies. For instance, NRG Energy, Arizona Public Service, and several companies outside the US are partnering with Greenfuel Technologies to test their bioreactor. They have already produced both biodiesel and ethanol from a batch of algae grown at their test site at the Redhawk power plant in Arizona.
It’s time to stop taking baby steps and put our money where our mouths are.
April 24th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Jimmy,
Your approach has been researched and rejected. That’s why the companies working on this problem right now are investigating closed bioreactors. Open canals require too much energy for stirring the water and collecting the algae. They also allow wild algae to outcompete more productive strains which would reduce the amount of oil produced and make the idea financially infeasible.
You have to think through every part of this before you can claim that your idea would work.
Now, the idea of using waste water as the medium for growing algae is a good one, but it should probably be treated wastewater that would otherwise be released into a river. The algae would remove the remaining phosphates and nitrogen which would actually enhance their growth. The clean water could then be released without concern that it would contain excess nutrients and lead to undesirable algae blooms in rivers or lakes.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/pdfs/biodiesel_from_algae.pdf
Biological processes have a huge potential for remediating waste and producing useful products. Pairing anaerobic digestion with algae bioreactors could be a two-stage process for turning putrescible waste (ag or municipal) into methane and soil amendment via the AD process and taking the waste products from that process, liquid digestate and CO2, and converting them to clean water, biofuels and soil amendment using an algae bioreactor.
So how do the companies working on these processes bring them to market? Either you need to create a groundswell of consumer demand for the type of energy they produce (which isn’t going to happen) or you put a cap on C02 emissions and let emitters trade credits. They’ll find the most cost efficient means for reducing CO2 emissions, which means they’ll reduce emissions by a larger amount.
But no matter what we do, no energy source we can imagine will be able to compete with the cost of acquiring oil from Saudi oil fields. That means OPEC can always take the option of increasing production to flood the markets with supply which would bankrupt the highest cost sources of energy. That is going to be renewables for as far as any of us can imagine.
So we need to pair that CO2 cap and trade regime with a tariff on OPEC producers. Folks can bash Bush all they want for his energy policies, but what Democrat is proposing anything impactful? None of them are serious about this.
April 24th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
You can’t.
That’s why in the short run we’ll most likely see plug-in hybrids do the heavy lifting. With work to develop algae bioreactors for removing CO2 from power plants, the electricity used to charge the batteries for the first 20 miles of any trip would come from a low-emissions process.
In the long run, developments in hydrogen technology may eliminate the problem of car emissions.
But car emissions are not the largest problem. Power plant emissions are. And that’s where we’ll get the most bang for the research buck as far as mitigation goes.
Hydrogen may also solve one of the major problems of using renewables such as wind and solar for grid energy. Intermittence of supply causes all sorts of problems for grid operators and adds inefficiencies to the production and delivery of electricity. Because wind can’t be counted on, plants must be maintained as back-up power for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine brightly.
So perhaps using wind and solar to produce hydrogen would be a more sensible use of that energy in the long run.
As far as uses of algae, biofuels for tranportation may not end up being the best use of that biomass. Instead, it may make more sense to use it where it was grown, right at the power plant. That eliminates the cost of transportation, the cost of converting the biomass into liquid fuels, and turns a coal plant into a solar powered biomass plant with an on-site industrial scale enclosed carbon cycle.
While the plant could run 24/7, the exhaust could be stored underground (the same way that natural gas is stored) and only used when the sun is shining to feed the algae in the bioreactors. So an intemittent power source (the sun) could provide a storable fuel (algae biomass) for continuous operation of the plant.
In a carbon reducing future, this is how we’ll maintain our lifestyles without resorting to the usual enviro suggestions of fewer people and reduced standards of living.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Why focus on power plant exhaust rather than setting up an algae bubbler in every back yard?
Scale.
If we’ve got 6 billion tons of CO2 emitted per year, 40% of that is from power plants. Still more is from other point sources which produce enough that they could conceivably collect and remediate it efficiently.
But let’s just focus on the power plants. Their product is around 2.4 billion tons of CO2. The company I mentioned earlier, Greenfuel Technologies, has demonstrated the ability to remove up to 80% of the CO2 from flue gases passed through their bioreactors during daylight hours.
With the type of gas storage approach I mentioned earlier, the bioreactors could be fed only when the sun was shining and the algae were most productive reaching a rate of 80% or more reduction in CO2 concentrations. That’s 1.9 billion tons of CO2 or a 32% reduction of total CO2 output.
If you come across another idea with that kind of potential, post it.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Thanks for the feedback A3K. Yes… it would need to be a tertiary treatment process rather than primary or secondary. I’ve added a diagram to make this a bit more clear.
I’m not so sure the canals wouldn’t be more practical (and certainly less expensive) if you could establish a flow; but I’ll defer to your research findings.
Also I think the backyard reactor Sara speaks of in her article is more an educational tool than the ultimate solution. Certainly this is something where economies of scale of larger applications would be immense.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
They aren’t my research findings. I hope you take a look at the ASP report I linked to earlier. The companies who are working on this problem right now have all undoubtedly taken advantage of the basic research done between 1978 and 1996 by NREL. It’s a good place to start if you’re seriously thinking this through.
One thing you should look at when you read the ASP report (it’s only about 300 pages, so if you’ve got some time this weekend…) is the problem the researchers found with ponds is that the algae in the top inch or so of the water blocks solar energy from getting to the algae below making the bulk of the water unproductive at growing algae. They tried to solve that problem through agitation, but that used up more energy than they could have hoped to get back in algae.
There’s also the problem of invasive or “volunteer” algae. Not all algae grow as quickly and they also don’t all produce economical amounts of oil. That’s why bioreactors are considered potentially viable. The user can control which algae are inoculated into the system.
Also, with some of the designs I’ve seen or read about, the rising bubbles of gas through a bioreactor actually do the work of agitating the algae in the water, alleviating the need for mechanical stirring.
There’s quite a lot of information out there so you don’t have to recreate the wheel. Build on what’s already known.
As far as the idea you’re talking about, there is a company in New Zealand trying to grow algae in wastewater treatment ponds. You may want to check with them to see how their process works:
http://www.aquaflowgroup.com/About%20the%20company/The%20Technology
Perhaps since there is already an expense incurred for aeration of wastewater ponds, this company is able to get the secondary benefit of a more productive algae growth. That’s not been explained, so one would have to contact them or get on a long flight.