Forget switchgrass, apparently there is a movement to turn algae into fuel. Now I know that there have been a few smaller companies working on this research, but now there's a joint project between Boeing, Virgin Airlines, and GE to test different blends of algae based biofuel in one of the airline's 747-400 aircraft.

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/04/26/213517/boeing-looks-to-algae-as-alternative-aviation-fuel.html
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/05/01/213549/virgin-joins-boeing-ge-in-biofuels-trials.html

When you have three of the industry's heavyweights publicly throwing in for a research project like this, you know there's real substance and potential momentum behind this. Especially for a vehicle like a 747-400 where you must be extremely cautious as any error will be both very costly, very tragic, and very public.

The double bonus in terms of biofuels is that algae is a big consumer of CO2, and they're talking about either using waste water or coal power plant waste to grow the algae. So you get a double whammy: both the CO2 savings in terms of reduced fossil fuels and the savings in terms of cultivating more algae to fuel the world's jetcraft. Mind you, they'll probably have to blend it with kerosene (the current aircraft fuel of choice) for a while, but this is a big step forward.

5/10/2007 3:30:16 PM

I was doing cutting edge research and experiments on this idea years ago.

Way to copy my shit, Boeing.

5/10/2007 3:45:47 PM

whammy's are usually bad things

5/10/2007 3:49:59 PM

WHHHHUHUHUHAAMMMY!!!!!!!!!

but seriously, that's cool that they are going to run airplanes off of my fish tanks

5/10/2007 3:52:29 PM

^^^ Hahaha, well, they're probably citing your paper on this for what it's worth. Or perhaps your former advisor is milking a multi-million dollar grant for the very subject as we speak.

Seriously though, must be a weird feeling seeing the cutting edge research you laid the groundwork for actually giving birth to a potentially real product.

[Edited on May 10, 2007 at 4:04 PM. Reason : Wrong number of arrows.]

5/10/2007 4:03:07 PM

Boeing is full of hippies. they probably hate our freedoms and want to start a fetus factory for stem cells too

5/10/2007 5:26:39 PM

yeah, a bunch of hippies that are part of the military-industrial complex

5/10/2007 7:05:49 PM

I work for a business strat consulting firm and just finished a bio-fuels project last month - we talked about this idea, but couldn't figure out how this could ever be scaleable. I mean, to make a substantial amount of alcohols from algae would take a shit ton of algae, which would require a shit ton of surface area, right? Where do you put these big algae farms? Why not just ferment some sugarcane?

And don't get me started on the butanol thing.

5/10/2007 10:06:25 PM

whammys are usually bad

5/11/2007 12:21:16 AM

^^They aren't talking about using alcohols from the algae. They are creating a kerosene-like fuel from the triglycerides that comprise up to 90% of some algae species. To process this you have to break the triglycerides down into glycerol and then add an alcohol such as methanol to create fatty acid methyl esters.

Algae is incredibly prolific when given an abundant supply of sunlight, CO2 and iron. You wouldn't need much space to create a shit-ton of biomass. The problem is that while certain species of algae are very good for creating biofuels, most common species are not. Given an open-air tank such as a dirty swimming pool, these common species will quickly overtake the specialized algae.

5/11/2007 12:45:34 AM

How tight would the control need to be to grow these specialized algae while preventing contamination? Does it require a tightly controlled environment equivalent to a NASA clean room, or something as simple as a cheap filtration system and a clear roof to let in some sun?

I'm curious for cost and scalability reasons.

5/11/2007 2:56:48 PM

I didn't get that far into my research to give you a definitive answer. A lot of guys involved with biodiesel are experimenting on this idea. The government recently gave out a 25 million dollar grant to a company promising to create biodiesel from algae by pumping CO2-rich flume gases from natural gas power plants into a "photo-bioreactor", which is just a large pool with glass on top.

I always thought that a pipeline or enclosed channel would be more efficient than a giant pool, because it would allow for continuous flow-thru processing as opposed to batch processing.

[Edited on May 11, 2007 at 3:14 PM. Reason : 2]

5/11/2007 3:09:45 PM

my dad is one of the thousands of employees that Boeing has, I'll be sure to ask him. He'll def know...

5/11/2007 4:05:34 PM

Quote :

"Significant advances have already been made in the science of manipulating the metabolism of algae and the engineering of microalgae algae systems to produce large amounts of oil while absorbing equally impressive quantities of carbon dioxide."

theoretically you can manipulate a organism to ingest just about anything and biochemically manipulate it....


so you could get a pretty pure fuel if it's done correctly.

5/15/2007 3:36:40 PM

One of the senior design projects in ChE was about this.

5/16/2007 11:55:30 AM