Algae Power! (The Future is Green … and Salty)

The following commentary by Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was adapted from a speech he made at WorldFuture 2008, the annual conference of the World Future Society, publisher of the magazine The FUTURIST, a frequent contributor to the Britannica Blog. 

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Algae and bacteria are the two most important biofuel technologies of the 21st century. As a replacement for oil, algae is extremely practical, utilizes mostly cheap and abundant resources like saltwater and wasteland, and has the potential to reduce global carbon-dioxide output tremendously. Unlike corn or even sugar ethanol, halophyte algae (algae that grow in saltwater) do not compete with food stocks for freshwater. Agriculturalists are told to think of salt as bad, but people living on the shores of India have had a saline-based agricultural system for hundreds of years. For halophyte algae, salt is good.

A number of countries already have seawater agriculture projects under way. The Chinese are producing genetically modified corn and rice in saltwater marshes. There’s no reason similar techniques couldn’t be used to raise algae in the energy-hungry United States. The Great Salt Lake could conceivably be turned into an algae pond to produce something on the order of $250 billion a year in biofuels.

People are looking at turning parts of the Pacific Ocean off of South America into algae ponds. Many deserts are near coasts, and these underutilized areas naturally lend themselves to algae cultivation. Irrigating desert terrain with saltwater would constitute an enormous and —many would argue— expensive public works project for whatever nation or nations took it on.

But such a project need not be exorbitantly expensive.

Indeed, when the cost of pumping ocean water into so-called “wasteland” regions such as the Sahara is factored in, the cost of halophytic algae biofuel is less than the cost of petroleum trading at $70 per barrel or higher. Because desert areas receive a lot of sunlight, halophyte algae farmers could use solar-powered pumps to move water up from sea level or even up from underground aquifers such as the Nubian sandstone aquifer system that sits beneath desolate regions of Libya, Chad, and Sudan. Suddenly, “wastelands” in western Australia, the Middle East, eastern Africa, the American southwest, and west Texas become valuable, productive real estate.

Algae require a lot of nitrogen, a mineral that is missing in most seawater. But genetic mapping of halophyte algae — a task already occupying geneticists around the globe — could lead to entirely new algae species that would derive their nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Biofuel from algae could be a direct petroleum replacement and is an extremely practical fuel source from a production standpoint. The refining process for algae is much simpler and less expensive than the current process for refining oil. Algae are lipids, comprising 30%–60% oil. With a mere olive press you can get a burnable fuel. Can we use biofuels in aircraft? In space? At NASA, we have looked into the question. The answer, emphatically, is yes. A global transition from oil to algae wouldn’t require the construction of an expensive, complicated new infrastructure, as a transition to a hydrogen economy would.

Halophytic algae, cultivated correctly, could lessen the world’s food and water shortages as well. Some 68% of the freshwater that is now tied up in conventional agriculture could instead go to thirsty populations rather than irrigating freshwater dependent crops. There exist more than 10,000 natural halophyte plant species, and some 250 of those are usable as staple food crops. You can get a great deal more fuel per acre with algae than you can with ethanol crops like corn, and you can use halophytes as a petrochemical to make plastic or as a feedstock for animals. Most importantly, algae are a renewable and CO2-neutral power source.

Halophytes and algae are only part of the overall solution space. We’ll use many approaches to combat global warming. However, the potential of this fuel can’t be stated forcefully enough. If humanity were to plow a portion of the Sahara Desert, irrigate it with saltwater from the Mediterranean, and then grow biomass such as algae, we could replace all the fossil carbon fuel that our species uses currently and provide food for a growing global population at low cost.

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