For Algae's Next Trick, It Will Clean Up The World

If you've been at the bottom of the food chain for millions of years, you'd better have a few tricks up your sleeve. Algae, the tiny green plants without which the world would be a mess, may just save the world, says Reuters:

In the distant past, algae helped turn the earth's then inhospitable atmosphere into one that could support modern life through photosynthesis, which plants use to turn carbon dioxide and sunlight into sugars and oxygen.

The race is now on to find economic ways to turn algae, one of the planet's oldest life forms, into vegetable oil that can be made into biodiesel, jet fuel, other fuels and plastic products.

"So we are harvesting sunshine directly using algae, then we are extracting that stored energy in the form of oil from the alga and then using that to make fuels and other non-petroleum based products," Skill said.

(See also: Reuters video on algae-based fuel with lots of labcoats and vials of green stuff.)

And sure, algae can do all of that. In fact, people have been working on it for a long time. The US Air Force wants to use algae-based fuels. Farms are springing up to make "biocrude" from algae.

It's just that right now, the technology isn't up to snuff. But that's what R&D is for.

Related:

::5 Things You Didn't Know Were Biofuels
::Algae: Biofuel, Cooking Oil, Health Supplement

Comments

[RTIII]

What's needed here is a combination of bacteria, like algae, and some good ole 'Merican technology - genetic engineering - to make it work. PROBABLY, we need some help from some specie we don't even know of right now that exists in some ecological niche and is about to go extinct as the biological source of the nucleotide sequence that we'll then use genetic engineering to add to algae to then create, more or less, gasoline / jet fuel / bio-diesel from sunlight.

We know it _can_ happen. We now just need to find the right chemical mastery that likely already exists before we make it extinct! This will probably be easier / faster / more likely of success than our engineering it from scratch...

TIME is our shortest resource.
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[RTIII]

P.S. This will have the added advantage of providing a "short cycle" trip for the carbon:

atmosphere --> algae --> fuel --> combustion --> atmosphere

Thus, if we can only then add a technology that helps us _sequester_ carbon from the atmosphere a bit faster than mere trees falling in the forests (a damned good method of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, by the way!) we might actually be able to _recover_ the disastrous situation we now find ourselves in!

THIS is the real hope we need to become reality. And, while not achieved yet, we know it's possible - we just need some good luck finding the right genetics already existing out there and some time to put it together... ... and we SHURE haven't much time!
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[Greenguy25]

Algae has many possible functions in the future, green economy, but lets get past the "idea stage" before we start overblowing its potential.

Just like Fuel Cells at the end of 90's, way to much press, good and bad. I think all the negative press about how long it will actually take for the technology to be commercialized did more harm to the industry and the promising technology than anything else.

http://www.mygreenscene.com

[RTIII]

None of its potential is overblown. What's missing is merely finding the actual genetic sequence - nucleotides - to be added. That could come at any moment - only a researcher in the field actually working on the problem right now might be able to provide some insight on timing... ...But that's all this is is a timing question. Everyone with the right training knows this is _possible._ Nobody as yet, so far as we know, has yet found the right genetic gymnastics that help complete the puzzle...

BTW, this is both like and dislike "fuel cells." Don't over-draw the analogy. Truth is; we simply don't know when either technology will have an insight that makes it a success.
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[jacobomorales]

Great news, lots of jobs will come of this...

[ChiProgressive]

Where's the news?

[KillTheMessenger]

Algae's only trick, for now, is Green Juice. Tasty, but pretty unimportant. Somehow the green stuff seems to fascinate the headline writers, no matter how little it does in real life.

[RTIII]

It needs HUGE funding - get LOTS of minds working on it. Get lots of people doing genetic surveys of target genetic sources for the nucleotide sequences needed... This should be done like the moon-shots of the 1960s. We KNOW it's doable. We just need to reach to our potential and achieve it.
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