FORT COLLINS, COLORADO — At the
start of his career in 1974, Jim Sears was a long-haired hippie who
went straight to work developing diving equipment for the Navy
Seals. “Nothing worse will ever happen to you in
nature,” the jovial, silver-haired inventor from Boulder,
Colo., now says with a belly laugh. “They tried to drown me
99 different ways.”
Sears spent years inventing new
equipment, including an underwater speech unscrambler and a
hand-held mine detector. During that time, he says, he learned a
lot about water and aquaculture. But one particular vision —
of glowing phosphorescent algae seen on a night dive off Panama
City, Fla. — would change his life.
Decades later,
as Sears pondered global warming and diminishing oil in his
Colorado garage/office/science lab, he remembered the tiny daggers
of light that had swirled past his face mask. He started
contemplating the energy potential of algae. His research led him
to a National Renewable Energy Laboratory report detailing 18 years
of algae-to-biodiesel research.
Today, Sears is one of a
handful of sustainable energy entrepreneurs and researchers, from
M.I.T. to Colorado State, who say algae might be the next answer to
oil. They’re picking up where the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory left off when it abandoned algae-to-biodiesel research
in 1996. (Cheap oil and Department of Energy budget cuts killed the
program.)
If you pick the right algae, place it well and
grow it using an efficient reactor, an acre yields about 10,000
gallons of biodiesel per year. That compares to a mere 50 gallons
from an acre of soy. Adding to the enticement, lipid-rich species
of algae require a concentrated source of CO2 that can be gleaned
from heavy emitters like breweries and power plants.
Imagine miles of algae farms surrounding rural coal-fired power
plants, sucking up Earth-warming CO2 straight from the stack.
Picture them in places like Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and
Nevada. Algae farms need warm, sunny, flat land with a low
population density and a slew of CO2-emitters. That means,
researchers say, that the Southwest has the potential to be
America’s new green belt — for algae farms, that is.
Algae requires far less fertilizer than soy or corn.
Unlike corn, which recently hit record-breaking prices due to
competition for ethanol plant feedstock, it doesn’t create a
food-versus-fuel conflict. Algae farms can use agriculturally
undesirable land. And with Sears’ technology, algae uses less
than one percent of the water it takes per acre to grow soy.
“This is the future — somehow,” Sears
says.
The National Renewable Energy Lab had been growing
algae in open ponds in Roswell, N.M., a scheme that strategic
energy analyst John Sheehan says worked OK for small-scale
research, but not as a perpetual and consistent source of algae.
Open ponds invited invasive algae, evaporation and too many
environmental variables. Sears figured the only way that algae
would ever reach its potential would be through closed bio-reactor
systems.
Sears designed a model bio-reactor that he calls
Mercury One. It’s basically a giant waterbed, consisting of
two 70-foot-long, 4-foot-wide plastic bags filled with a foot of
nutrient-rich water and algae, and a thermal blanket to regulate
temperature. Once the algae grows dense enough, it’s removed
from the reactor to process into biodiesel. After the algae is
removed from the reactor, it is spun dry and separated into lipids
(fats), carbohydrates, protein and other components. The lipids are
brewed into biodiesel through the same kind of chemical separation
process used for soybean oil or french-fry grease. As a bonus,
leftover carbohydrates from the algae can be fermented for
bioethanol, and the protein can be fed to livestock. This reactor
is still at one-fifth scale; at full scale, Sears envisions a
viable fuels system that is cheap enough to use in places like
India, China and sub-Saharan Africa.
Sears’
company, Solix Biofuels, has found a home in an abandoned Fort
Collins power plant along the banks of the Cache La Poudre River.
Here, he’s joined forces with Bryan Willson of Colorado State
Univer-sity’s Engines & Energy Conserva-tion Lab.
Willson, Sears and a team of designers are still tweaking the
bio-reactor technology. Sometime next year, they will build their
first full-scale reactors on the east side of Fort Collins’
New Belgium Brewery — CO2 emissions from beer fermentation
will fuel the algae. Solix’s petite Ukrainian chief
biologist, Anna Ettinger, is helping the company hone in on the
right species of high-lipid pond scum.
Despite promising
lab results from around the country, not everyone is sold on the
technology. Biofuels skeptic Tad Patzek, professor of civil and
environmental engineering at the University of California,
Berkeley, says algae is undoubtedly efficient, but computer
modeling makes him doubt that any plant-based system can
significantly slake the world’s growing thirst for energy.
He’s still working on a mathematical analysis, but he
doesn’t hesitate to point out the hurdles: diseases that
plague concentrated marine life, constraints on desert water
supplies, land-use controversies and the challenges of sustaining
massive-scale outdoor operations (easily 15 to 20 square miles of
algae reactors around a 1,000 megawatt plant).
In
Colorado, Xcel Energy, which produces about 3,000 megawatts of
coal-fired power for the state, says it’s always interested
in ways to cut carbon emissions, but a project like Solix’s
algae reactors is probably a long way out. Xcel tends to own a few
acres, not several square miles, around its power plants. If a
CO2-capturing algae farm were to be built near any of its rural
plants, the land would have to be bought or leased from nearby
ranchers.
Despite the promise of algae farming, everyone
from environmentalists to bankers will have to weigh in before
great green fields of algae spread across the Southwest.
“It’s a noble task,” says Ettinger as she swirls
a beaker full of pale green algae. Having lived through the 1986
meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, she sees great hope
in the future of clean algae fuel. Last year, she turned down three
jobs with plush offices, stunning mountain views and more money to
join Solix. “You come here to do something good for this
world,” she says.
The author writes from Steamboat
Springs, Colorado.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Powered by pond scum.
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