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Richard Sayre: The upside of renewable fuels is that they're sustainable, they reduce the
environmental impact, and they can help potentially mitigate climate change. We particularly like
algae as biomass or biofuel feedstock, algae grow about two to ten times faster than the
best terrestrial crop plants, they often will store oils as an energy reserve product. And
oils that come out of these algae we found, can be directly converted into fuels using
preexisting technologies.
Jose Olivares: So the laboratory is interested in this area because we have a mission around
energy security, providing new technologies for energy for the nation. The big problem,
the big challenge is how to get that whole process to be economically and energetically
efficient.
Sayre: To make algobiofuels economically viable, there are two very important factors that
we have to improve. And that's the biomass productivity per unit land area, or the yield,
and the other very important factor that we need to improve is reducing the costs of harvesting
the algae from the pond.
Olivares: The laboratory is actually developing some nice technologies in a number of different
areas, transforming algae so that it can produce more lipids, more biomass, overall better
productivity, under better conditions.
Peter Lammers: You've seen how we transfer the algae from the lab, from colonies on a
petri dish to larger cultures. We bring them out here, adapt them to the outdoors and the
sunshine. We begin to scale them up, pretty soon we'll have algae at hundreds of acres,
if not thousands of acres.
Sayre: Another important concern is water. How much water are we going to use? And, to
address those issues, we're now focusing on developing heat-tolerant strains of algae
that can be grown in ponds that are covered with plastic to reduce the evaporation. We've
figured out how to engineer algae so they can use light more efficiently than normal
algae do. we've seen up to a two-fold increase in growth. We've also figured out how to engineer
algae to make more oil. So, at the time that we want to harvest the algae, we'll induce
the expression of a gene that will cause all the algae to stick to each other, settle out
of the pond, and then we pick them up. Maybe the last reason that immediately comes to
mind why we like algae is that we can recycle the nutrients that are in waste waters.
Lammers: Algae can do waste water treatment better than conventional systems. So why not
take an energy-intensive expensive process and turn it into an energy-generating system
where you're getting clean water and liquid fuels as your two products, and do that in
a way that generates revenue.