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Filed: Country: Philippines
Timeline
Posted

Mark Shaffer

The Arizona Republic

WINTERSBURG - For most Valley residents, it's nothing more than a slimy green annoyance that clings to the side of their pools.

Even the thought of it spreading rapidly would send them marching to the store for more chemicals.

But algae growing exponentially and absorbing vast quantities of carbon dioxide from smokestacks at Arizona Public Service Co.'s Redhawk electric plant is being billed as an answer for greenhouse gases and a source for biodiesel and ethanol.

A yearlong experiment in finding just the right strand of the microscopic single-celled plant and watching it multiply in huge, bubbling test tubes beneath the hot Arizona sun has been so successful that it's about to expand into greenhouses on the plant grounds.

In time, says APS senior engineer Ray Hobbs, he hopes that so much algae will be grown and converted to fuel that it will replace more than one-third of the natural gas used to power the Redhawk plant.

The idea is the brainchild of Isaac Berzin, a rocket scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Berzin was experimenting with growing algae on the International Space Station three years ago when he came up with the idea of using it to clean up power-plant exhausts.

Algae ingests carbon dioxide and releases oxygen in the photosynthesis process. Algae is laden with oils that can be used to produce biodiesel, starches that can be transformed into ethanol and protein that could have a market niche in cattle and fish feed.

As good foresight would have it, Berzin also had a mechanism in place to back his idea, a company he founded called GreenFuel Technologies of Cambridge, Mass.

Buoyed by more than $10 million of venture capital, GreenFuel representatives came quickly to the blowtorch desert west of Phoenix after the company struck a deal with APS to conduct a demo project beginning last year, said Cary Bullock, GreenFuel's CEO.

"There is lots of sunshine, plenty of land, and since algae doesn't need potable water to proliferate, we were in business," Bullock said.

But there are also plenty of problems to resolve before it can be produced on a mass scale.

Like how to give it enough light to maximize its growth. Algae thrives on the surface of water and other moist surfaces, but the growth rate slows considerably at more than a centimeter beneath the surface.

Also, how to get the carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of electric generation, into the water rapidly enough to spur maximum growth. GreenFuel estimates that 80 percent of carbon dioxide emissions can be absorbed by the algae during daytime hours at power plants.

Qiang Hu, an assistant professor of applied biological sciences at Arizona State University, has been down this road before. Qiang worked for two years on what Japanese scientists had hoped would be an algae-to-energy project in the late 1990s.

"I wish GreenFuel all the best," Qiang said. "But there were many technical problems in Japan, the most serious of which being that the algae would attach to the microfibers that were necessary to produce more light for growth inside the growth containers.

"Also, the microfibers were taking up too much space needed to grow the algae, and the energy conversion turned out to be less than 15 percent, which was far less than the expectation was. Much more energy was wasted and it turned out that the costs were just too great."

Bullock said he thinks those problems have been worked out during the past year of experiments at Redhawk. But he said he couldn't discuss "trade secrets" about providing sufficient light beneath the surface for the algae.

Construction is about to begin on a series of greenhouselike buildings which will total 30 feet wide by 500 feet long next to the Redhawk station. The algae will be grown at the floor level of the structures, Bullock said.

One algae cell can produce seven others within a 24-hour period in optimum growing conditions, Qiang said, which explains much of the optimism of using it as an alternative fuel source.

"Our scientists think that we can get maybe even 200 tons of algae per acre annually during mass production," Bullock said, adding that commercial production is expected to begin in 2008 in Arizona and other sites in Australia and South Africa that the company has targeted.

Hobbs, APS' engineer, said he has been impressed with what he has seen thus far.

"The challenge is getting it to reproduce so fast that it will be the dominant culture rapidly against its predators," Hobbs said.

"It's a tough nut to crack, making the complete cycle from our CO2 waste back to a power source for the plant but we are committed to the process," Hobbs said, adding that APS has spent $1 for every $10 that GreenFuel has invested in the experiment.

John Sheehan of Denver, who led a research project for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the early 1990s examining smokestack emissions for algae production, said he's a true believer in focusing those efforts in the Arizona desert.

"We got put on the shelf in 1996 when Clinton was balancing the budget and cut way back on renewable energy because diesel was so cheap then," Sheehan said. "The desert Southwest is prime land for this kind of technology and just a fraction of the Sonoran Desert could produce enough algae to take care of nearly all of the nation's diesel needs."

Sheehan said that the country could produce only 4 percent to 5 percent of its total diesel needs in soybean oil.

"Algae is a tremendously large resource base compared to that and other vegetable oils because you don't have to worry about a growing season," Sheehan said. "And getting a major utility like APS to invest in this is impressive because it means this technology is now in the spotlight."

Posted

cool stuff

Peace to All creatures great and small............................................

But when we turn to the Hebrew literature, we do not find such jokes about the donkey. Rather the animal is known for its strength and its loyalty to its master (Genesis 49:14; Numbers 22:30).

Peppi_drinking_beer.jpg

my burro, bosco ..enjoying a beer in almaty

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/index.ph...st&id=10835

Filed: Citizen (apr) Country: Morocco
Timeline
Posted

Interesting. It's basically a biological solar energy system.

Me -.us Her -.ma

------------------------

I-129F NOA1: 8 Dec 2003

Interview Date: 13 July 2004 Approved!

US Arrival: 04 Oct 2004 We're here!

Wedding: 15 November 2004, Maui

AOS & EAD Sent: 23 Dec 2004

AOS approved!: 12 July 2005

Residency card received!: 4 Aug 2005

I-751 NOA1 dated 02 May 2007

I-751 biometrics appt. 29 May 2007

10 year green card received! 11 June 2007

Our son Michael is born!: 18 Aug 2007

Apply for US Citizenship: 14 July 2008

N-400 NOA1: 15 July 2008

Check cashed: 17 July 2008

Our son Michael is one year old!: 18 Aug 2008

N-400 biometrics: 19 Aug 2008

N-400 interview: 18 Nov 2008 Passed!

Our daughter Emmy is born!: 23 Dec 2008

Oath ceremony: 29 Jan 2009 Complete! Woo-hoo no more USCIS!

 

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