Algae-To-Biofuel Technology Developed By High Schoolers
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Environment, Money, ScienceA new way to help solve our global addiction?
Holly Jacobson and Tessa Churchill, seniors at Greely High School in Cumberland, are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, explaining how they would use fast-growing algae to help solve the energy crisis.In a nutshell, the young women may have found a way to produce more biodiesel fuel while consuming fewer organic resources.
The project got its start two years ago when Jacobson and Churchill began examining natural oils stored in fatty acids — called lipids — in various forms of marine algae. Recently, they identified a strain of algae that produces more oil for a given mass.
Intriguing stuff.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 and is filed under Environment, Money, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 6th, 2006 at 12:04 am
Did ya know that you can make ethanol out of almost any bio-mass?
November 6th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Bacteria definitely show a lot of promise for processing various materials into biofuels, or even in creating electricity directly from processing waste. The main difficulty is that bacterial processes generally are slow and inefficient compared to chemical ones, and are difficult to ramp up to commercially useable scales.
Genetically alteration (or even forced evolution) of such bacteria to improve efficiency and speed may make them more commercially viable.
We seriously need to drop the food-to-fuel (corn or soy) biofuels programs though, since the energy return is truly pathetic, especially for corn. Switch grass and other non-food crops are far more economically and ecologically viable as biofuel production materials.
And lastly, biofuels are merely a temporary stopgap measure helping with the foreign oil issue, not any sort of “green energy” answer to global warming. For that, we need to seriously invest in solar, wind, water, wave, and/or geothermal energies – a vital shift that will never occur under oil and energy company dominated politics.
November 22nd, 2006 at 5:08 am
Sleipner, regarding this, “biofuels are merely a temporary stopgap measure helping with the foreign oil issue, not any sort of “green energyâ€Â? answer to global warming”, you may be right, but if an efficient process for turning CO2 exhaust into biofuels using algae is found, there’s enough energy that could be produced to completely replace all of our current petroleum use, or the equivalent in coal/nat gas use.
So while it would be nice to see solar, wind, wave and geothermal carry their weight, the 800 pound gorilla of renewable energy is algae.
June 16th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Our organization has been funding and developing new technology for over 30 years and we are familiar with the potentials of algea as a superior source of feedstock for biofuels. Methods to grow and harvest on a commercial scale have been developed, but faster growing species would be helpful. Do you have any ideas in this regard or would you like to discuss if our technology may suppliment or compliment yours. This could be the fuel of the future.
Email me your phone number if you wish to discuss and tell me the best time to contact you. Likewise, I can provide you with my phone number.
Regards, Irving Backman
August 7th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Please give us some tips to produce biodsiesel from marine algae. We want to know a cost effective system.