On November 2, The World Science Festival, Columbia University and NOVA hosted a screening of What is Space? to coincide with the NOVA: Fabric of the Cosmos series premiere. The screening took place at Columbia's Miller theatre and was immediately followed by a live-streamed webcast, hosted by acclaimed physicist Dr. Brian Greene. The webcast allowed the in-theatre and digital audiences to further explore the program’s rich material in direct conversation with Dr. Greene — the series' host and best-selling author — as well as other featured program participants, including Saul Perlmutter, our local Lawrence Berkeley Lab astrophysicist and winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

An image of a bioreactor being developed by OriginOil scientists.

Today’s episode of QUEST features our 10-minute TV story about efforts to produce biofuels from algae. In 1996, when the U.S. Department of Energy concluded its 25-year research project into the potential of algae as biofuels, its report concluded that the most cost-effective way to grow algae was in open ponds. With climate change and geopolitics prompting new research into the algae-as-fuel question, some companies are pursuing the open pond route, while others are looking into closed systems such as bioreactors. In our TV story we profile OriginOil, a Los Angeles-based company developing a bioreactor that looks like a miniature Christmas tree, complete with bright, colored lights. And we interview the CEO of Aurora Biofuels, a company based in the Bay Area city of Alameda, which is re-imagining open ponds, as well as trying to create strains of algae that are ideal for fuel production. Before becoming the CEO of Aurora Biofuels, Bob Walsh worked at the oil company Shell for 25 years. Here’s an excerpt of QUEST’s March, 2009, interview with Walsh, most of which didn't make it into the TV segment.

QUEST: What excited you about algae?

BOB WALSH: I ran oil products businesses for many years and understand the cost-competitiveness and the commodity basis of it. And what excited me about algae was, A, it’s renewable. B, you're using a feed stock of carbon dioxide, which is basically free. And finally, what excited me about this company, Aurora Biofuels, was the aspect of solving it end to end, not just the biotech (end of things), but also the engineering aspects.

Q: What has algae been grown for in ponds in the past?

WALSH: Algae’s been grown in open ponds for decades. And typically it’s been done with nutraceuticals – spirulina, which many people use as a protein pill. That is grown in open ponds, but not very cost-effectively because they haven’t had to be very cost-effective. They can charge $10 per pound.

Q: What would be the difference that you would be looking for in terms of cost-effectiveness, compared to what’s been done already?

WALSH: Historically, algae were just grown in an open pond and captured carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and the sun. What we’re actually doing is injecting the CO2 we recover from a steel mill or power plant, to give the algae food. And we’ve engineered it to get better mixing, so it grows more quickly. And then finally, rather than drying the algae out, we actually do a wet extraction of the oil, which is much more cost-effective than drying it as they have historically done for proteins.

Q: So what price would you be aiming for, and what price can the algae be grown for now?

WALSH: Oil today has been around $50 per barrel. We believe we need to be competitive in the $50-60 range. And that’s what our final target is. I think oil will be $60-100 over the next 10 to 15 years.

Q: What would the algae biofuels facility of the future look like?

WALSH: You’ll situate it very close to a CO2 source – a steel mill or a power plant. It will encompass several thousand acres of barren land – because you want dry, barren land – and use salt water. And it would produce roughly 120 million gallons a year of useable fuel into the existing infrastructure.

Q: Can algae fuel actually make a contribution to our transportation needs?

WALSH: Algae can be a player. It’s going to take a lot of different solutions because of the different climates and things that you need for it. It’s also a trillion-gallon market. And so it’s not going to happen tomorrow. But certainly algae can be a 5- to 10-percent player in ten years, in the marketplace.

Watch the Algae Power television story online.

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The Crab Nebula as seen through Chabot Space & Science Center’s 8-inch refracting telescope, Leah. Image: Conrad Jung, Chabot Space & Science Center

What's the Crab Nebula? Astronomy enthusiasts are very familiar with this celestial object, or at least become so very quickly after entering the world of space. It's a supernova remnant—a torn and tortured cloud of gases expanding outward into space, the aftermath of a supernova explosion that happened almost a thousand years ago in the constellation Taurus. In fact, as I write this blog, the age of the Crab Nebula is exactly 955 years and 40 days.

How do we know with such precision when this former star went supernova? The answer, as always in science, is careful observation! The explosion of the star was witnessed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers—and possibly sky watchers of the American Southwest—who carefully observed and recorded the event. The explosion took place on July 4th, 1054 CE.

Seven hundred years later, a century after the invention of the telescope, the Crab Nebula was discovered in the same spot—first in 1731 by John Bevis, then again by Charles Messier in 1758 (August 28, in fact—the date of this blog posting!). Messier ran across it while searching for Halley's Comet, and at first mistook it for a comet. This was the reason that he began compiling his famous Messier catalog of "fuzzy" objects: a wall of mug shots of unusual suspects that resembled, but were imposters of, comets. He began his catalog with Messier 1 (M1), the Crab Nebula.

Messier 1 got its nickname of the Crab from a drawing made by observer Lord Rosse in 1844.
Today, the Crab Nebula is an expanding cloud of gas and some dust spanning 10 light years, or 60 trillion miles. The cloud is still expanding at a speed of about 1,800 kilometers per second—a speed that would get you to the Moon in just under 4 minutes! At its center is the collapsed remnant of the dead star's core, which has become the incredibly small and dense object known as a neutron star.

So why did the Crab Nebula spark my interest in astronomy? I have a specific memory of being at a summer camp and engaging in a craft activity where we cut out the pictures from a bunch of astronomy calendars and made frames and matting to display them in. I selected a few of my favorite images, which included the Dumbbell Nebula (a planetary nebula), the Veil Nebula (another supernova remnant), and, of course, the Crab. Of all these stunning astrophotos, it was the Crab that stuck the longest in my mind and on my bedroom wall, and impelled me to get my first subscription to Astronomy Magazine, and eventually my first telescope. Sometimes, our lives are guided by stars….

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