Algae's Powerful Future

[Paul Schumann]

Robert McIntyre, The Futurist, 3/1/09

Our oil addiction may be cured by one of the primordial sources of petroleum itself.

First, the bad news. A 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) predicts that cars and trucks powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells will total only one-tenth of one percent of new vehicle sales in the year 2030, mainly because of the limited driving range, high vehicle costs, and lack of infrastructure for refueling.

With fuel cells, there's also the problem of developing a cheap, abundant source of hydrogen to power them.

Under current policies, the DOE now predicts that relatively clean-burning ethanol and biodiesel won't supply more than 11% of the fuel for America's motor vehicles in the year 2030. Conventional crops can't produce enough of these biofuels per acre to meet the enormous demand, which is expected to grow 40% by then.

The numbers are daunting, but one solution to our growing hunger for transportation fuels may be very simple: algae.

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Robert McIntyre is an urban and regional planner with degrees and work experience in both landscape architecture and community and regional planning. Since graduating from the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Architecture at UT, he has spent most of his time at a homestead near Austin where he does applied research in agriculture, anthropology, architecture, and geology. Robert studied algae biofuel production for three years before publishing an article on the worldwide potential of this emerging technology. His article, titled "Algae's Powerful Future," appeared in the March-April issue of The Futurist magazine.

To contact Robert via e-mail, click here.

To watch a video of his presentation, click here. (wmv, 300MB, 85 min)


Algae's Powerful Future by CenTexWFS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United S....

[Elliot Hallmark]

I've been passively interested in this technology for a while. Rather than capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and selling transportation fuel, I've been thinking about individual businesses capturing gasses from their kilns/furnaces/boilers and supplementing their own fuel costs. This is along the lines of the "new village" Robert was talking about: smaller scale and decentralized.

The futurist article mentioned that the algae don't photosynthesize at night so they can't capture co2 unless we find a way to illuminate the pools. Unfortunately, except for the sun, every photon on earth is generated by breaking hydrocarbon bonds, and so using those photons to reassemble those bonds again in algae (from spent chemical energy in co2) is not going to work. And if we find a way to create light without burning fuels, then we'd use that energy directly and burn less coal rather than illuminate algae ponds to recycle burnt fuels.

I was thinking however of storing some co2 in large temperature swing adsorption (TSA) chambers. This would be really effective where it gets very cold at night because the adsorbent would store much more co2 when cold. Then one would flush it with low pressure solar generated steam during the day when the sun is intense to release the co2 for algae. TSA techniques use activated charcoal or ceramic materials to adsorb gasses on their surface area, which can be over 1,000 square meters per gram of adsorbent.

[Derek Woodgate]

Paul, Thanks for uploading the presentation. Sadly, I missed being there as I was in Santiago, Chile.

[Cliff Collard]

I think Rob's talk was a lot more encouraging than the Futurist article. There seem to be some technical barriers to harvesting algae. Technologies that breach those barriers could usher in whole new industries. The fact that algae biodiesel can be a by-product of solving other ecological problems has the potential to accelerate R & D.