Fuel From Pond Scum - Update

By Ron Beasley

A few months ago I reported on efforts to make biofuels from algae.

You can get about 370 gallons of ethanol per year per acre [of corn]. The ethanol economy of Brazil is based on sugar cane which will produce about 900 gallons per acre per year; better but still not a great use of arable land.

But what if you could get six to ten thousand gallons of ethanol per acre per year and use a green house gas to do it. Well it looks like that is possible.

Well my local electric utility, Portland General Electric,  is going to give it a try.

PGE aims to turn Boardman coal-plant pollution into biofuel

In the energy equivalent of turning a pig's ear into a silk purse -- and a very green one, at that -- Portland General Electric is testing how to use pollutants from its Boardman coal plant to grow algae for biofuel production.

PGE and renewable energy developer Columbia Energy Partners announced Thursday that they had begun a pilot project for the algae venture at the utility's Boardman facility in Morrow County.

The experiment siphons off some of the coal plant's CO2 emissions and feeds them to six 12-foot-long tubs of algae sitting on a nearby flatbed truck.

During photo synthesis, the algae gobble up the CO2 and release oxygen into the air. Oil is squeezed out of the mature algae and used to produce a clean-burning biodiesel.

The residue -- a starchy goo -- is turned into ethanol, an alternative to gasoline, and livestock feed.

"This is an opportunity to make a real meaningful difference," said Steve Corson, a PGE spokesman.

He emphasized, however, that the pilot project is "tiny" and that more tests must be conducted before determining whether a full-blown production facility is feasible.

The 600-megawatt Boardman facility, about 150 miles east of Portland, is Oregon's only coal plant. It generates about one-fifth of PGE's power and is the state's largest stationary source of CO2, a major contributor to climate change.

The plant has come under fire not only for its CO2 emissions, but also for haze-causing pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. A study released early this year concluded that the plant is responsible for more than half the haze in the eastern Columbia River Gorge at certain times in the winter.

Jon Norling, vice president of Columbia Energy, said he approached PGE more than two years ago about using Boardman's CO2 emissions to grow algae. Norling owns Portland Biodiesel and said he was quick to recognize algae as a potentially valuable biodiesel feedstock.

Algae's attraction to CO2 is a natural, Norling said. "It needs it," he said. "It really likes it."

The pilot project won't make much of a dent in Boardman's CO2 emissions, which total about 5 million tons a year. But, a full-scale plant -- at least 21/2 years away -- could use up to 60 percent of the emissions during daylight hours and produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel annually, Norling said.

As was pointed out in the original post the power plant connection is vital.

Trying to grow concentrations of the finicky organism is a bit like trying to balance the water in a fish tank. It’s also expensive. The water needs to be just the right temperature for algae to proliferate, and even then open ponds can become choked with invasive species. Atmospheric levels of CO₂ also aren’t high enough to spur exponential growth.

Solix addresses these problems by containing the algae in closed “photobioreactors”—triangular chambers made from sheets of polyethylene plastic (similar to a painter’s dropcloth)—and bubbling supplemental carbon dioxide through the system. Eventually, the source of the CO₂ will be exhaust from power plants and other industrial processes, providing the added benefit of capturing a potent greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere.

See Fuel From Pond Scum for the details of the process.

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[PROF. HANS-JÜRGEN FRANKE E PROF. PENGCHENG FU]

ETHANOL-PRODUCTION WITH BLUE-GREEN-ALGAE
PROPOSAL FOR AN ALTERNATIVE FUEL AFTER THE 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: pengchen2008@gmail.com
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – E-Mail: lawahiebiotech.brasil@gmail.com

Telefon: 00-55-79-3243-2209

[Ron Beasley]

Is there a link for this?