Algae Used to Mitigate Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Greenshift Industrial Design Corporation (GIDC) has acquired technology that uses a blue-green algae that grows in the environment of hot flue gases found in smokestack.  The algae uses photosynthesis to combine water and the CO2 in the flue gas to grow additional algae and form oxygen and water vapor.  The organisms also absorb nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, which contribute to acid rain.

GDIC obtained a non-exclusive license from Ohio University for its patented bioreactor technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the smokestacks of fossil fueled power plants and exclusive rights to the technology for the air pollution control of exhaust gas streams from all other sources.

The reactor is composed of parabolic mirrors, fiber optic cables and slabs of acrylic plastic called "glow plates". The algae grow on membranes of woven fibers resembling window screens interspersed between the glow plates. Capillary action wicks water to the algae, fiber optic cables channel sunlight into the glow plates, and ducts bring in the hot flue gas. By growing the algae on the membranes a lot of surface area is created.  Thus only a small amount of water is needed.  When the algae grows to maturity it drops to the bottom of the chamber where it can be harvested for use as fuel, fertilizer or a soil stabilizer.

A prototype of the technology was built that is capable of handling 140 cubic meters of flue gas per minute, an amount equal to the exhaust from 50 cars or a 3 megawatt power plant. In Bayless's bioreactor, algae grow on 60 by 120-centimeter membranes of woven fibers.

Dr Bayliss, director of Ohio's Ohio Coal Research Center, had conducted earlier research funded through Oak Ridge National Laboratories which indicated that normal algae would not grow at temperatures required to withstand the high temperatures of flue gas and that it could grow in low light conditions.

He realized that for the reactor to work he needed a carbon-hungry photosynthetic organism that could withstand the blistering temperatures of flue gases. Bayliss got assistance from Keith Cooksey, a microbiologist at Montana State University to find algae which could survive in the hot temperatures.  Cooksey had been researching bacteria found in the mineral hot springs of Yellowstone National Park.  He took some of Bayless's screens and placed them in a hot stream just outside of Yellowstone.  Whatever grew on the screen was a likely candidate.  The best candidate was a newly discovered iron-loving cyanobacterium (blue-green algae), which he tentatively named Chroogloeocystis siderophila.

To take advantage of the algae's ability to grow in low light conditions, Bayless turned to the scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had developed a system using parabolic mirrors to collect sunlight and channel it along plastic fiber-optic cable. Ordinarily used to provide office or factory lighting, the Oak Ridge system was modified to use "glow plates," slabs of acrylic plastic that emit sunlight directly onto the bioreactor's algae screens. "The bacteria use only about 10 percent of full-strength sunlight," says Oak Ridge's Duncan Earl. "This enables us to take one square meter of sunlight and spread it out over 10 square meters of glow plates."

In some ways the technology resembles that used by GreenFuel, earlier post, that circulates algae through clear triangular plastic tubes to expose it to sunlight. Bayless likes his fiber-optic system better, however, because it has a smaller "footprint," needing only a tenth of the sunlight.  GDIC has a sister company Mean Green Biofuels that is building a biodiesel plant which could possibly use the algae to make biodiesel.

Resources:

Greenshift Acquires Rights to Patented Carbon Dioxide Reduction Technology, Press Release, December 12, 2005
Blue-Green Acres,  Patrick DiJusto, Sceintific American, August 29, 2005
Carbon Monoxide Mitigation through Controlled Photosynthesis, Ohio University,Department of Mechanical Engineering, Final report for period starting 09/01/1999 through 08/31/2000

More blogs about environment, algae, energy, technology

Comments

[Ecacofonix]

Thanks for the useful update. Oil from algae certainly appears to be an exciting area for the future...I found some more inputs on biodiesel & oil from algae @ http://www.oilgae.com

Let's hope algae can provide at least a partial solution to our energy needs

Ec

[Prof.Hans-Jürgen Franke & Prof. Pengcheng Fu]

ETHANOL-PRODUCTION WITH BLUE-GREEN-ALGAE
A SOLUTION AFTER PEAK-OIL AND OIL-CRASH

University of Hawai'i Professor Pengchen "Patrick" Fu developed an innovative technology, to produce high amounts of ethanol with modified cyanobacterias, as a new feedstock for ethanol, without entering in conflict with the food and feed-production .

Fu has developed strains of cyanobacteria — one of the components of pond scum — that feed on atmospheric carbon dioxide, and produce ethanol as a waste product.

He has done it both in his laboratory under fluorescent light and with sunlight on the roof of his building. Sunlight works better, he said.

It has a lot of appeal and potential. Turning waste into something useful is a good thing. And the blue-green-algae needs only sun and wast- recycled from the sugar-cane-industry, to grow and to produce directly more and more ethanol. With this solution, the sugarcane-based ethanol-industry in Brazil and other tropical regions will get a second way, to produce more biocombustible for the worldmarket.

The technique may need adjusting to increase how much ethanol it yields, but it may be a new technology-challenge in the near future.

The process was patented by Fu and UH in January, but there's still plenty of work to do to bring it to a commercial level. The team of Fu foundet just the start-up LA WAHIE BIOTECH INC. with headquarter in Hawaii and branch-office in Brazil.

PLAN FOR AN EXPERIMENTAL ETHANOL PLANT

Fu figures his team is two to three years from being able to build a full-scale
ethanol plant, and they are looking for investors or industry-partners (jointventure).

He is fine-tuning his research to find different strains of blue-green algae that will produce even more ethanol, and that are more tolerant of high levels of ethanol. The system permits, to "harvest" continuously ethanol – using a membrane-system- and to pump than the blue-green-algae-solution in the Photo-Bio-Reactor again.

Fu started out in chemical engineering, and then began the study of biology. He has studied in China, Australia, Japan and the United States, and came to UH in 2002 after a stint as scientist for a private company in California.

He is working also with NASA on the potential of cyanobacteria in future lunar and Mars colonization, and is also proceeding to take his ethanol technology into the marketplace. A business plan using his system, under the name La Wahie Biotech, won third place — and a $5,000 award — in the Business Plan Competition at UH's Shidler College of Business.
Daniel Dean and Donavan Kealoha, both UH law and business students, are Fu's partners. So they are in the process of turning the business plan into an operating business.

The production of ethanol for fuel is one of the nation's and the world's major initiatives, partly because its production takes as much carbon out of the atmosphere as it dumps into the atmosphere. That's different from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which take stored carbon out of the ground and release it into the atmosphere, for a net increase in greenhouse gas.
Most current and planned ethanol production methods depend on farming, and in the case of corn and sugar, take food crops and divert them into energy.

Fu said crop-based ethanol production is slow and resource-costly. He decided to work with cyanobacteria, some of which convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into their own food and release oxygen as a waste product.

Other scientists also are researching using cyanobacteria to make ethanol, using different strains, but Fu's technique is unique, he said. He inserted genetic material into one type of freshwater cyanobacterium, causing it to produce ethanol as its waste product. It works, and is an amazingly efficient system.

The technology is fairly simple. It involves a photobioreactor, which is a
fancy term for a clear glass or plastic container full of something alive, in which light promotes a biological reaction. Carbon dioxide gas is bubbled through the green mixture of water and cyanobacteria. The liquid is then passed through a specialized membrane that removes the
ethanol, allowing the water, nutrients and cyanobacteria to return to the
photobioreactor.

Solar energy drives the conversion of the carbon dioxide into ethanol. The partner of Prof. Fu in Brazil in the branch-office of La Wahie Biotech Inc. in Aracaju - Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke - is developing a low-cost photo-bio-reactor-system. Prof. Franke want´s soon creat a pilot-project with Prof. Fu in Brazil.

The benefit over other techniques of producing ethanol is that this is simple and quick—taking days rather than the months required to grow crops that can be converted to ethanol.

La Wahie Biotech Inc. believes it can be done for significantly less than the cost of gasoline and also less than the cost of ethanol produced through conventional methods.

Also, this system is not a net producer of carbon dioxide: Carbon dioxide released into the environment when ethanol is burned has been withdrawn from the environment during ethanol production. To get the carbon dioxide it needs, the system could even pull the gas out of the emissions of power plants or other carbon dioxide producers. That would prevent carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere, where it has been implicated as a
major cause of global warming.
Honolulo – Hawaii/USA and Aracaju – Sergipe/Brasil - 15/09/2008

Prof. Pengcheng Fu – E-Mail: [email protected]
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – E-Mail: [email protected]

Tel.: 00-55-79-3243-2209

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I especially like that the Hawaii professor clearly used a local waste product from the sugar cane. Here in LA the waste is so much less green that you only hope someone will find a way to screen out the products eligible for repair or reuse.

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So-called clean-coal technology is expensive and a long way off, as well as being potentially dangerous. The latest and greatest is the ”algal synthesiser”.

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