Bullet Points: Can Algae Replace Petroleum as a Clean, Low Carbon, Homegrown Fuel for our Military and More?

Can Algae Replace Petroleum as a Clean, Low Carbon, Homegrown Fuel for our Military and More?

CHRIS TINDAL: 

• U.S. petroleum consumption is 2 percent U.S. government
  • Department of Defense is 93 percent of the total U.S. government
  • Navy is 26 percent of DOD.
    • on the blue Navy side – maritime is 52 percent, aviation 41, and shore 6 percent 
• In FY’08, the blue Navy used 29 million barrels of fuel 

SECNAV energy goals include:

• Sailing a green strike group in local operations by 2012 and then sail and
  deploy the “great green fleet” by 2016, made up mainly of nuclear
  ships, surface combatants that use hybrid electric along with biofuels
• Aircraft will be flying on biofuels
• Reducing petroleum in non-tactical vehicles, including flex-fuel vehicles
• By 2020, 50 percent of total DON energy consumption will come from
  alternative sources:  solar, wind, geothermal – with alternative fuels
  running our generators too 
• The Navy conducted a static test on a Hornet engine on October 13th at Pax River using camelina-based biofuel
• It is possible to grow more algae-based biofuel than you can camelina-based biofuel per acre
  • Only limited production is currently available. 
• The Navy has an actual 100-percent renewable platform in our fleet - the USS Constitution is still a commissioned vessel

WILLIAM HARRISON: 

Secretary Wynne led us in the Air Force towards some broad goals:

• To test an alternative fuel in a manned aircraft, and we did that in 2007 in a B-52
• Certify our entire fleet by 2011 and acquire 50 percent of our fuel from a greener source by 2016
• One of the things that he fostered in the Air Force was to develop a
  standardized process. Mil Handbook 510 looks at the entire Air Force
  enterprise and issues related to how do you certify fuel. 
• 19 platforms that are FAA-certified when they finish their certification in August of this year
• Fischer-Tropsch is a technology that can make fuels from natural gas
  • most of the flight tests we did were on fuels made from natural gas
• All the aircraft in and out of Johannesburg will get about a 30-percent coal-derived fuel
• Hunter-Basun (ph) cellulosic biomass to Fischer-Tropsch shows the lowest carbon footprint of the fuels we’ve seen so far 
• Since these fuels are all hydrocarbons, they have a higher hydrogen content
  than typical petroleum fuels, they inherently per gallon have a lower
  CO2 footprint, about 3 percent – 3.5 percent
• Also, the fuel has zero sulfur, so we reduce SOx emissions 
• Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI) includes groups like the ATA
  • Shell recently flew a 50/50 percent Fischer-Tropsch fuel to Doha to London,
    the first commercially paying passenger flight of using the 50/50
    Fischer-Tropsch
  • Section 526 of the Energy and Security Act of
    2007 says that Defense cannot buy alternative fuel unless it has a
    greenhouse gas footprint equal to or less than petroleum
  • What makes sense environmentally is to take CO2 from a coal-fired power plant and use that to grow the algae
  • We started with the Fischer-Tropsch at a 50/50 blend, and are moving to being fully certified with those in our fleet

ROY MINSON: 

• Today we’re pumping seven-and-a-half million gallons of water a day,
  producing about two metric tons of algae out of a, if you will, dirty
  lake of a lake that’s impaired, which we would call pollution, and
  processing that and delivering clean water
• And then what we’re doing is looking at harvesting the algae and cleaning the water
  • So again, from an integrated sustainability standpoint, we’re using the environment in the correct manner
  • In the next decade or so we can be up to about 400 million gallons of
    biofuel a year in the state of Hawaii as well as thousands of gigawatts
    of electricity, burning the byproducts

JONATHAN TRENT: 

• If we map the last 12,000 years, and we realize that up to this time there
  have been very few people on the planet until we see that in about
  1830, over a course of about 10,000 years, we had this very low number
  of people on the planet
  • It took us that much time to reach 1 billion people; it took us that much time to get 5 billion more people on the planet
• The world population has increased at an exponential rate
• How many people can the Earth sustain? 
  • This is really the crux of the problem. 
• The other part of the problem is that the U.S. represents less than 5
  percent of the world’s population, but we’re using over 25 percent of
  the world’s energy resources
• If China and India decide they need to live like we do, we’re going to need five Planet Earth’s to sustain that lifestyle
• Alternatives have to be sustainable in the face of resource limitations
• Conventional oil production has exceeded discoveries since 1984
• Biofuels have to be feasible, affordable, scalable, sustainable:
  • In 2007, 75 million more people were predicted by the Food and
    Agricultural Organization to have gone into the undernourished category
    because of biofuels
  • 923 million people are undernourished because of the redirecting of food towards biofuels
  • Greenhouse gas output in kilograms of CO2 produced per megajoule of energy –
    that’s all the different components:  growing, harvesting, refining and
    burning the fuel – gas is a number of 94 kilograms per megajoule and
    corn is not so much better and it uses a load of water, fertilizer,
    pesticide and high energy 
  • Energy back for the amount of energy invested may be as high as 1.7 above the energy input; it may be
    as low as 0.7 depending on how you calculate it
• Sugarcane is a bit better in terms of the amount of land you need:
  • Sugarcane only requires the use about half the land, but it takes a lot of water and fertilizer
• Switchgrass has a negative CO2:
  • that is, it takes up more CO2 than you need to produce in terms of
    megajoules and uses a medium to large amount of water, and a lot of
    fertilizer depending on how tall the plants you want to grow, and
    pesticides may be required
• To grow enough corn to produce one liter of ethanol requires about 2,130 liters
  • Soybean require 14,000 liters of water to produce one liter of oil
  • Rapeseed is what they use in Europe and the number there isn’t much better
  • Jatropha, which is an arid plant and grows in what seem to be very low water
    conditions, actually uses a lot of water when you take everything into
    consideration
• Soybeans also require a huge amount of our crop land, 200 percent to grow half of our needs as is the case with corn
• But the reason people before me in this panel have talked about algae is because algae looks good on the face of it:
  • It’s a good green.  It takes a lot of negative greenhouse.  It grows very
    fast.  It’s a small plant.  It’s been around for a long time.  It
    doesn’t use very much fertilizer
• The amount of area to grow algae is very low when considering the gallons per acre per
  year of biodiesel produced, or biofuels produced from soy, it’s about
  50 gallons per acre per year.
• If you compare that to sunflower, it’s about 100 gallons per acre per year
• Canola or rapeseed is about 160
• Jatropha, which is an oily seed, is about 200
• Palm oil is the best at about 600 gallons per acre per year 
• Algae in comparison is between 2,000 and 5,000 gallons per acre per year
• So what’s the problem with algae?
  • So part of the problem is that when we go to try to grow algae, we have
    two dominant methods that everybody is talking about:  growing them in
    open circulating ponds or closed bioreactors
• Open circulating pounds have been around for about 50 years.  It’s a great idea.  It’s very inexpensive
• In Japan, they grow lots of algae for food.  They’re also growing algae in Australia
• Algae can only cope with salt in certain concentrations – you have to replenish the water and that still uses a lot of water
• There are other problems, like how do you get the nutrients there?  How do
  you get the algae out of there?  What do you deal with weed species,
  and so and so on? 
• The solution to those problems is to do
  everything in a closed photobioreactor at about 10 cents a kilogram to
  be able to make it into a fuel
• So what about the oceans?  
  • Algae grow in the ocean.  They’re dominant in the ocean.  Why don’t we just
    go into the ocean and collect the algae that are existing in the
    ocean? 
• Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing
  Algae (OMEGA) concept takes advantage of the fact that the United
  States is dumping somewhere between 35 and 40 billion gallons of
  wastewater into the ocean every day:
  • So that’s 35 to 40 billion gallons a day of wastewater that looks sort of like this in some
    places.  And so this is wastewater for us but very high nutrients for
    growing algae
  • Take wastewater which is treated enough to be
    dumped into the ocean - the algae would grow on the nutrients.  We
    would harvest those algae and make biofuels and bring fertilizer back
    to land and make biochar.  It’s 3.5 percent salt - dewater the algae by
    osmosis
  • Algae collects solar energy and treats the wastewater
    and the nutrients, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as they pull
    CO2 out of the atmosphere
  • They’re mixed by wave energy because they’re just made of lightweight plastic.  Unlike the bioreactors on
    land, which have to hold water inside and have air outside, these have
    water inside and water outside so they don’t have to be so robust.  And
    the temperature’s controlled by the surrounding ocean
• OMEGA is doing tertiary water treatment, which prevents big algae blooms from
  occurring in the natural weed species and we have the algae bloom
  happening in a container so that we don’t cause what are called dead
  zones
• The economics of the OMEGA system are wastewater
  treatment and nutrient reclamation and environmental remediation;
  nothing about algae yet.  There’s some CO2 sequestration because we’ve
  measured the amount of carbon dioxide we’re sequestering
  • The city of Los Angeles, for example, has a pipe that goes five miles
    offshore and pumps 350 million gallons a day into the Santa Monica
    Bay.  The infrastructure is already there.  It’s a 12-foot diameter
    pipe.  And so, that part of it is sort of already done 
• There are other good things about having these things in the ocean and that
  is we could also use them to generate electricity from wave power 
• Using OMEGA, offshore membrane enclosures for growing algae are a way to
  treat wastewater and gather the nutrients that are now being wasted in
  the ocean, bring them into algae that we bring back on shore and
  dewater these algae which is one of the most expensive things we need
  to do to harvest the algae by a process called forward osmosis where
  the ocean is the beneficiary because clean water will be released into
  the ocean
• Humanity has this population issue and an affluence –
  that we are very, very proud and blessed by having this affluence that
  we’re living with, but we have also responsibility to the species we
  share this planet with, and we have the capacity technically to do what
  we need to do
• One of the founders of OPEC, Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, was asked, “What’s going to happen when we run out of oil?” 
  And he answered that, “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of
  stones.” 
  • The Stone Age ended because we found better technology.  We found technology that made the stones obsolete 
• The fossil fuel age is not going to end unless we figure out a technology
  that’s going to make it unnecessary for us to continue to burn fossil
  oil 
• President Truman said, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” 
• So I submit to you a challenge, a challenge and a call to action to think
  about problems such as we’re confronting and all of us, particularly
  the people in this room, who have various levels of responsibility to
  society in ways that are significant, have children or know people who
  have children who are going to have to live with the legacy of our
  lifestyle

File Attachment: 

111609 bullets.pdf