Emma Valdez, a Sapphire Energy technician, holds a petri dish with 1 million algae cells. Algae is grown and scaled up to 20-liter containers in about one week.

With more and more cars on roadways worldwide – and fossil fuel supplies running low, can renewable fuels really replace crude oil?

In Nebraska, the alternative of choice is ethanol because corn is the mainstay of our economy.  But corn, along with many other crops, takes lots of land…and huge amounts of water.  As important as it is to Nebraska, ethanol, at best, is a 10% additive, not a future fuel in its own right.

So what’s a real alternative?  Research shows one promising alternative seems the least obvious – algae (see QUEST Nebraska: Algae for Fuel).

Algae is a microscopic plant-like marine organism.  There are billions of them in our world, and they exist all around us.  Algae are found in ponds, lakes, streams – all types of bodies of water…even in your bathtub if it’s not cleaned regularly.

It’s green and a bit slimy to the touch.  For the most part, we avoid contact with algae – but it just may be the key to our energy future.  How’s that?  Companies like Sapphire Energy in San Diego, CA are working with universities, including the University of Nebraska to make microscopic algae into the fuel for the future.

Algae conjures up thoughts about Soylent Green, the 1973 sci-fi movie thriller that depicts human survival dependent upon on a green food ration made of “high protein plankton.”  Algae are a type of plankton.

SPOILER ALERT:  Do not read the next sentence if you’ve never seen this movie.   

But there was more to the content of Soylent Green.  Charlton Heston solves the riddle with a horrific warning:  Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Remember when I said algae are slimy?  There’s a reason for that.  If Charlton Heston was warning us, he’d exclaim: Algae is OIL!  Not exactly – but oil we use for our fuel today is actually made from ancient, ancient algae.

“Each algae contains up to 50% oil,” says University of Nebraska-Lincoln biologist George Oyler.  Over millions of years, billions of algae die, collect, and over time are chemically altered through pressure and heat that converts algae oil into “crude oil” which we seek and drill for to energize our world.  Finding a way to convert algae into oil faster than nature would create an almost endless supply of oil.  “We want to accelerate that process into a single year.” 

In 2009, a QUEST video Algae Power, surveyed algae biofuel as a grand experiment, “not ready for prime time.”  The problem was scaling up to industrial production.  Now, Sapphire Energy is leading the way towards industrial production.  It’s no longer a survey experiment.

The process begins as Sapphire technician Emma Valdez swipes a metal loop over an algae filled petri plate (culture dish) and transfers cells to a new plate. “Algae is one of the fastest growing plant on the planet.  This plate contains millions of algae cells.  I can take this plate and make multiple copies.”  Pointing to a stack of petri dishes, she explains that these plates are added to water to make a dense culture, giving rise to 20-liter glass carboy containers.  “I can grow this to scale in a little over a week.”

The carboy containers are then added to long oval test pools in a greenhouse, creating larger concentrations of promising algae species.

Growing algae outdoors is a huge challenge.  But that’s exactly Sapphire’s goal – creating algae farms.  But algae is a wild plant.  “No one’s taken a wild plant and just grown it to scale,” says Mike Mendez, Sapphire’s former VP of Technology (now a research professor at UC-San Diego).  “Algae isn’t an industry.  It’s a commodity, like corn.  We have to think like a farmer and grow algae as a crop.” 

But plants like corn haven’t become crops overnight.  Mendez says, “It took 7,000 years to get corn where it is today.  I’m gonna have to do whatever it takes to speed up the process.”  Sapphire wants to plant, harvest and process algae oil in real time.

Algae ponds at Sapphire Energy's test farm in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

So, Sapphire has created a 20-acre aquatic test farm in arid Las Cruces, New Mexico.  Why here?  New Mexico has an abundance of sunlight and a rich supply of salt water beneath the dry sands that can’t be used for farming or drinking, but is perfect for growing algae.  Nonetheless, the algae has to survive stress, disease, summer heat and winter freeze.  For two years, scientists and technicians have been successful in scaling up algae from the carboys to 40-foot, then 100-foot, and finally 300-foot oval ponds.

Once the algae mature in the ponds, it’s sent to an industrial centrifuge that separates the algae from the water, creating a thick algae paste. That paste is fed into a test pilot extractor that uses eco-friendly solvents to crack open the algae cells and release oil – green crude.

Sapphire will soon open a 300-acre in 2012.  It will be the largest algae biofuel test plant in the nation.  They expect to produce 1 million gallons of algae biofuel per year – an industry record.  Once Sapphire can create even larger quantities of green crude, they believe the cost of creating an algae fuel will begin approaching the cost of oil.  Stay tuned to see if their plan creates a viable renewable fuel for our future.

A woody grass called Miscanthus is one of the biofuel feedstocks being examined.

Despite all the buzz around biofuels, commercial production has been slow to scale up. As a result, the EPA scaled back its goals for advanced biofuels earlier this year. Still, some Bay Area scientists recently made a breakthrough that could move us one step closer to a day when our cars run on fuels from plants.

The idea behind biofuels is pretty simple. Plants take sunlight and use that energy to make sugars. The biofuels industry wants to transform those sugars into fuel. That requires some molecular rearranging, so they’re looking to microbes to do the job.

At the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville, e.coli is the microbe of choice. Researcher Greg Bokinsky shows me racks of glass tubes that are home to e.coli cultures that have been biologically engineered. They’ve created e.coli that munch on a woody plant called switchgrass.

If you’ve heard anything about biofuels, you’ve probably heard about ethanol that’s made from corn, which you can buy at gas stations today. But ethanol can’t be transported long distances because it corrodes pipelines. And using corn for fuel has also raised some concerns.

“Corn is used extensively to feed animals. Corn is also used for some food as well, human consumption. So we want to be very careful about using corn itself,” says Jay Keasling, CEO of JBEI.

Engineering Microbes

JBEI was founded 5 years ago with a $125 million grant from the Department of Energy. It’s a partnership between UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and other groups with the mission of creating biofuels from plants that aren’t used for food – also known as cellulosic biofuels.

“Switchgrass is one that gets mentioned a lot,” says Keasling. “Switchgrass is a native to much of the Midwest. It grows without a lot of water and fertilizer.”

But unlocking the energy inside switchgrass is no easy task. “Plants have evolved to be tough. There are beetles, there are fungi that want to attack them all the time and get access to those sugars. So they’ve evolved defense mechanisms,” he says.

The first line of defense is like a barbed wire fence. Plants protect their sugars with a tough material called lignin. Keasling’s team breaks through it using a liquid salt solution.

Once it’s gone, the sugars still have to be broken down further. Most companies use industrial enzymes to do that. But this is where Keasling’s engineered e.coli comes in.

“What we’ve done is we’ve gone to places like the rainforest in Puerto Rico and to compost piles. We’ve sequenced the organisms that are breaking down that biomass and then cloned those genes into e.coli,” Keasling says.

The e.coli break down the sugars for themselves, saving an expensive step in the process. Using the sugars, they produce fuels. “Really they’re pooping out fuels,” says Keasling. “And these are fuels that can be put directly into gasoline engines, diesel engines or jet engines.” These microbes are an exciting breakthrough for Keasling, since they could help bring down the cost of production.

Federal Goals Scale Back

The federal government was once excited about cellulosic biofuels, too. In 2006, former President George W Bush included them in his State of the Union address, saying “we'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within 6 years.”

Congress set up tax credits for cellulosic biofuels with a goal of seeing 500 million gallons produced in 2012. Since then, the industry has faced a harsh reality. The goal for next year has been cut back to just 12 million gallons.

“It was oversold. There was a lot of hype around it. It’s a tough problem. We can’t expect this to happen overnight,” says Keasling.

Keasling says if there’s anything that casts a shadow over biofuels, it’s the price of their biggest competitor. “If oil is under $100 a barrel, we’re not going to see many advanced biofuels on the market. They’re just not going to be able to compete. It’s virtually impossible,” he says.

Chris Somerville, director of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), agrees. “The costs are still not where we need them to be.” EBI is also run by UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, among other collaborators. It was started with a $500 million grant from BP.

Like JBEI, EBI’s mission is also engineering cellulosic biofuels. They’ve developed specially engineered yeast that eat feedstocks like miscanthus. “It’s going to be another 10 years before it really scales up. And it’s not because there’s a big problem. It’s just takes time to build and bring online big industrial facilities that are first of a kind.”

Companies, including BP, are now building commercial-scale biofuel plants. But the science is evolving so quickly, Somerville says it’s hard for companies to commit. “If you’re a company that has to lay down some hundreds of millions of dollars for a new facility and you look around and everyday, there’s new advances, you think, well maybe I’ll wait until next week and build a better facility.”

Although some in Congress are impatient over the progress of advanced biofuels, Somerville is confident that it’s just a matter of time before the industry scales up. “What we’re really trying to do is change the world. And we have this huge entrenched energy sector. And so there’s lots of entrenched players that don’t welcome change.”

And he says, if we care about addressing climate change, we won’t be able to do it without remaking the fuels that go in our cars.

The Rice Solar Energy Project will produce enough electricity to meet the demand of 60,000 households—about 150 megawatts—beginning in 2013. Click here for a full-size version of the diagram. Courtesy of SolarReserve.

In a world energy landscape dominated by coal, gas, oil, and nuclear, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar don’t stand a chance if we can’t find a way to store energy when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. In my last blog entry, I wrote about storing electric energy in a battery made of paper and nanotech ink (see The Paper Battery Chase). But it isn’t necessary to store electric energy. We can create hydrogen, using electricity generated from photovoltaic panels, and then use the hydrogen to fuel a fuel cell, which recreates the electricity. The Leaf Community in Italy is experimenting with this process. And energy changes forms in other ways. We can store heat from the sun and use it to create electricity in the dark. As in any energy storage and conversion process, if we can do it without losing too much energy in the process, we can add another tool to our renewable energy toolbox.

I add a little salt to the water when cooking spaghetti—it raises the boiling point so that you can cook the pasta more quickly, although I’m not sure it makes a big difference. Mostly I add salt to make the spaghetti taste better. The properties of a liquid salt—a mixture of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate—are a little different. This liquid salt will store heat up to a temperature of 1,000⁰F, which is much higher than the boiling point of water, 212⁰F at sea level. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company, (PG&E) has contracted with SolarReserve LLC to store energy using liquid salt. The Rice Solar Energy Project will produce enough electricity to meet the demand of 60,000 households—about 150 megawatts—beginning in 2013.

The Rice Project uses a large circular field of mirrors to reflect light onto a central tower. Liquid salt is circulated through the tower and, once heated, it is stored in an insulated tank. When the sun goes down the liquid salt will still be able to heat water well past the boiling point to create steam, which can be fed into a conventional steam turbine to produce—Walla—electricity. The liquid salt, now cooled, is stored in another tank and is ready to begin the process all over again.

Take that coal, gas, oil, and nuclear!

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When those fumes combine with sunlight, along with other emissions, they form ground-level ozone, an air pollutant which acts as a greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming much like carbon dioxide does.

Take a look at this nifty, infra-red video footage from the California Air Resources Board, showing how fumes disperse from the gas pump when they aren't properly collected.

Ground-level ozone is also a real problem for human health, especially for people with asthma and respiratory disease. Just this week, UC Berkeley released a study finding that people living in areas with high ozone levels, like Los Angeles and the Central Valley, have a 25-30% greater risk of dying from respiratory disease than those in less ozone-heavy parts of the state, like San Francisco.

By the way, if you're wondering what "ground-level ozone" has to do with that ozone hole we used to hear so much about, here's the short answer: Turns out ozone does different things, depending on where you find it. In the atmosphere, ozone's a good thing. It forms a protective layer that shields the Earth from the sun's radiation – a layer that's been steadily eroded by chlorofluorocarbons, found in aerosol sprays and other places. Here at ground level, ozone's much less likable: a toxic air pollutant, as I said above.

If every station in California installs the new, hi-tech "enhanced vapor recovery system" they'll collectively cut back statewide, ground-level ozone emissions by ten tons a day – that's roughly equivalent to taking 450,000 cars off the road, according to CARB.

Listen to the Changes at the Pump radio report online.

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