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Montana State University researchers have discovered that baking soda, the
same ingredient that causes cookies to rise in the oven. Can dramatically
increase algae's production for oil for biodiesel.
In the last couple of years the
idea for biofuels has come back
and this time I don't think it's going to go away cause we have some very big players.
All the big oil companies are involved,
the airline's, and most importantly the the Department of Defense. They're the
biggest energy users in the world
and they're already using algal biofuel
in some of their facilities.
If you look at the logistics of producing oil from algae,
they require about a tenth or even less land to grow in ponds
than say palm oil.
And palm oil is the best producer
it may be,
I don't remember the exact numbers but it may be
ten times as efficient as corn.
In other words corn is very inefficient to make oil.
It's also food we don't really want to interfere with the fruit system of the
country or even the world.
Scientists have been searching for nearly twenty years for the elusive chemical trigger to boost oil production in algae.
Well baking soda is the common name for a
compound called sodium bicarbonate.
It's a source of carbon dioxide which algae use to grow.
Of course all plants, and algae are plants
utilize carbon dioxide.
That's the other big advantage over using crude oil,
when you burn crude oil
you release carbon dioxide.
When you burn algal oil
you still release carbon dioxide but you have already fixed that carbon dioxide so
what you're doing is recycling.
It's not going to clean up the atmosphere but it won't make it any
worse.
Our graduate student
Rob Gardner, has been
investigating
what we did twenty years ago.
Twenty years ago we missed the timing
and adding the bicarbonate or baking soda as we'd like to call it
at a particular time
stimulates the algae to accumulate
oil. If you add it too soon they don't accumulate it. If you add it to late they don't accumulate it.
You have to add it at the particular time and twenty years ago we just missed
that,
now we found it. When I was able to come across our
trigger for making the algae accumulate oil
it was a very happy day. We'd
fought this for a long time and
took a lot of thought going into this and trial and error and finally we stumbled
across the right answer. And I guess that happens a lot in science but that was a really good day.
I think it's really important that everybody realized
that if algae is going to be successful and be feasible to be used as a
alternative fuel source.
We need to
minimize how long it takes to grow the cultures
and maximize how much oil they can make.
If you could do things twice as quickly,
you have a bigger through put, you have a bigger profit. I've been surprised
quite a bit. The algae are,
they're just like any other living organisms. Sometimes they're
picky and sometimes they're
difficult to manage but
if you can make them happy they can make you happy.