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♪ KU choral chant ♪
Griffin: My name is Griffin Roberts.
I'm originally from a small town
called Argenta, Illinois.
I'm a graduate student in the Ph.D.
program here at the University of Kansas in
chemical engineering.
Our nation is facing significant challenges today as far as
energy independence, national security, stimulating a
deflated economy as well as environmental mediation.
I believe that we can achieve each of these through achieving
all of them together.
My work here at the University of Kansas is part of a
multi-disciplinary team called "Feedstock to Tailpipe."
The goal of the initiative is to take a systematic approach to
creating fuels from algae spanning cultivation, conversion,
fuel testing, and emission analysis.
We're able to actually cultivate the algae, algae that's been
grown at the Lawrence, Kansas Municipal Waste Water
Treatment Plant before discharging the effluent which allows
us to utilize these nutrients to grow biomass which we can
then convert to a fuel.
To do this I use a process called hydrothermal liquefaction
which uses hot compressed water to convert whole algal cells
to what's called a biocrude that's very similar to petroleum
crude as far as the energy content, elemental, and
molecular composition.
Biocrude can actually be mixed directly with normal
petroleum crude and be introduced at the beginning stages of
refinery with little to no retrofitting of that refinery.
After our conversion process, where we result in a large
amounts of what we call biochar.
Biochar can be burned directly, used as a coal supplement.
It can also be used as a solid fertilizer.
Through the "Feedstock to Tailpipe", we have a lot of expertise
in all the areas of cultivation, conversion,
fuel testing, emission analysis that really makes us very
unique as far as any other research group
around the country or the world.