University of Hawai’i Professor Pengchen “Patrick” Fu developed an innovative technology, to produce high amounts of ethanol with modified cyanobacterias, as a new feedstock for ethanol, without entering in conflict with the food and feed-production .

Fu has developed strains of cyanobacteria — one of the components of pond scum — that feed on atmospheric carbon dioxide, and produce ethanol as a waste product.

He has done it both in his laboratory under fluorescent light and with sunlight on the roof of his building. Sunlight works better, he said.

It has a lot of appeal and potential. Turning waste into something useful is a good thing. And the blue-green-algae needs only sun and wast- recycled from the sugar-cane-industry, to grow and to produce directly more and more ethanol. With this solution, the sugarcane-based ethanol-industry in Brazil and other tropical regions will get a second way, to produce more biocombustible for the worldmarket.

The technique may need adjusting to increase how much ethanol it yields, but it may be a new technology-challenge in the near future.

The process was patented by Fu and UH in January, but there’s still plenty of work to do to bring it to a commercial level. The team of Fu foundet just the start-up LA WAHIE BIOTECH INC. with headquarter in Hawaii and branch-office in Brazil.

PLAN FOR AN EXPERIMENTAL ETHANOL PLANT

Fu figures his team is two to three years from being able to build a full-scale
ethanol plant, and they are looking for investors or industry-partners (jointventure).

He is fine-tuning his research to find different strains of blue-green algae that will produce even more ethanol, and that are more tolerant of high levels of ethanol. The system permits, to “harvest” continuously ethanol – using a membrane-system- and to pump than the blue-green-algae-solution in the Photo-Bio-Reactor again.

Fu started out in chemical engineering, and then began the study of biology. He has studied in China, Australia, Japan and the United States, and came to UH in 2002 after a stint as scientist for a private company in California.

He is working also with NASA on the potential of cyanobacteria in future lunar and Mars colonization, and is also proceeding to take his ethanol technology into the marketplace. A business plan using his system, under the name La Wahie Biotech, won third place — and a $5,000 award — in the Business Plan Competition at UH’s Shidler College of Business.
Daniel Dean and Donavan Kealoha, both UH law and business students, are Fu’s partners. So they are in the process of turning the business plan into an operating business.

The production of ethanol for fuel is one of the nation’s and the world’s major initiatives, partly because its production takes as much carbon out of the atmosphere as it dumps into the atmosphere. That’s different from fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which take stored carbon out of the ground and release it into the atmosphere, for a net increase in greenhouse gas.
Most current and planned ethanol production methods depend on farming, and in the case of corn and sugar, take food crops and divert them into energy.

Fu said crop-based ethanol production is slow and resource-costly. He decided to work with cyanobacteria, some of which convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into their own food and release oxygen as a waste product.

Other scientists also are researching using cyanobacteria to make ethanol, using different strains, but Fu’s technique is unique, he said. He inserted genetic material into one type of freshwater cyanobacterium, causing it to produce ethanol as its waste product. It works, and is an amazingly efficient system.

The technology is fairly simple. It involves a photobioreactor, which is a
fancy term for a clear glass or plastic container full of something alive, in which light promotes a biological reaction. Carbon dioxide gas is bubbled through the green mixture of water and cyanobacteria. The liquid is then passed through a specialized membrane that removes the
ethanol, allowing the water, nutrients and cyanobacteria to return to the
photobioreactor.

Solar energy drives the conversion of the carbon dioxide into ethanol. The partner of Prof. Fu in Brazil in the branch-office of La Wahie Biotech Inc. in Aracaju – Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – is developing a low-cost photo-bio-reactor-system. Prof. Franke want´s soon creat a pilot-project with Prof. Fu in Brazil.

The benefit over other techniques of producing ethanol is that this is simple and quick—taking days rather than the months required to grow crops that can be converted to ethanol.

La Wahie Biotech Inc. believes it can be done for significantly less than the cost of gasoline and also less than the cost of ethanol produced through conventional methods.

Also, this system is not a net producer of carbon dioxide: Carbon dioxide released into the environment when ethanol is burned has been withdrawn from the environment during ethanol production. To get the carbon dioxide it needs, the system could even pull the gas out of the emissions of power plants or other carbon dioxide producers. That would prevent carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere, where it has been implicated as a
major cause of global warming.
Honolulo – Hawaii/USA and Aracaju – Sergipe/Brasil – 15/09/2008

Prof. Pengcheng Fu – E-Mail: pengchen2008@gmail.com
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Franke – E-Mail: lawahiebiotech.brasil@gmail.com

Tel.: 00-55-79-3243-2209

Found this from a MIT guy at http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fsb/0806/gallery.plot_save_planet.fsb/4.html

For his part, Berzin calculates that just one 1,000 megawatt power plant using his system could produce more than 40 million gallons of biodiesel and 50 million gallons of ethanol a year. That would require a 2,000-acre “farm” of algae-filled tubes near the power plant. There are nearly 1,000 power plants nationwide with enough space nearby for a few hundred to a few thousand acres to grow algae and make a good profit, he says.

Still would require 10+ coal fired plants. Doesn’t say what the cost/power requirements the coal plants would loose to get the flue gas ready for the plants

My guess is that commercial-scale Algae farms will have efficiencies far below 1% when a complete energy budget is properly carried out on a commercial scale design. At 5 kWhr/m^2/day average insolation in sunny Florida (from NREL website), which from personal experience is an excellent location for growing all types of Algae, a 1% efficient algae farm would produce 50 Whr/m^2/day of energy in the form of fuel. That is 0.18 MJ/m^2/day. At 34 MJ/liter for biofuel (from an earlier post), that is 5.3 ml (about 100 drops!) of fuel per m^2 per day. An acre is 4047 m^2. So we get 21.5 Liters of fuel per acre per day, or 7830 Liters per acre per year, or 2066 Gallons per acre per year. Even at an impossibly high 8% efficiency, its 16,500 Gallons per acre per year, nowhere near 100,000 Gallons per acre per year claimed in the CNN report.
For a backyard system covering 1,000 square feet, you could produce (at 1% efficiency) about 1 Gallon per week.

Still, at $4/gallon, thats an incoming revenue stream of $8K (or more) per acre per year. The next question is how that compares with total production costs.

The fundamental reason is that their process is still experimental. There’s no guarantee it will work on a commercial scale. And they’re reluctant to give it a shot if there is doubt they’ll have access to large amounts of shale in the event that it works. But if it works it brings up other serious concerns — namely, it could be destructive to the environment and stress water reserves in areas that don’t have a lot of water reserves. And that’s the fundamental reason for the impasse.

To my mind there is reason to be concerned. As this article explains, Shell’s process involves sinking a series of pipes into the ground and installing heaters to heat the shale to about 700 degrees for a period of about 3 years. Then they can pump the oil from an extraction well in the center. Apparently that process requires shooting hot water into the field to stimulate flow. To prevent contamination of the surrounding area they further intend to sink another series of pipes around the perimeter and creating freeze wall. Obviously, the process is rather energy intensive. And to obtain that energy Shell proposes to build a series of very large coal-fired power plants.

Now that you know what the process entails, can you understand why some people might be a little concerned? Personally, I’m all for going after our domestic resources, but not in ways that could create havoc.

Yes, I’m alone & a family prb’ly couldn’t cut usage that much. But I’ve found I can do without hot water almost completely, other than showers.

PS. I tried turning it off completely (just turning on an hour or two before showering every couple days), but iron bacteria in the well-water grew like gangbusters in the heater, so I have to warm it once a day to keep the well-water “sterilized”.

Ben Flurie

“At some point (2005?) Realclimate actually had a post where they claimed to be able to use isotopes of Carbon 12 and Carbon 13 to tell the difference between “new” Carbon and “old” Carbon. (Let us hope we are not required to only use the “new” Carbon.)”

Carbon 12 and Carbon 13 are both stable isotopes (unlike Carbon 14), as a result they cannot be used as time markers (radiocarbon dating is based on the change of the ratio of C14 over time due to its rate of decay being precisely know; C13 is not radioactive, so its concentration in a sample does not change with time in any predictable way). The C12/C13 ratio could be used as a plant-origin marker since plants find it easier to absorb C12 over C13 in photosynthesis (someone has used that as an ocean temperature marker by detecting the C12/C13 ratio in ocean sediments, I believe), but since Oil (“old” Carbon?) and wood (“new” Carbon?) are both of plant origin (according to most theories) the C12/C13 ratio cannot be used to distinguish between CO2 from burning Oil and CO2 from a forest fire. The C12/C13 ratio could be used to distiguish volcanic from plant origin, though.
Still, are the radiative properties of (C12)O2 and (C13)O2 different enough for it to matter?

As for your primitivist impulses towards mon-and-pop energy production, you are welcomed to them; just make sure you do not dare make me pay for them (subsidies) or interfere (regulation) with my economies-of-scale more efficient energy generation; otherwise we will have a problem…

Well, why hasn’t anyone started drilling on the outer continental shelf or in ANWR!!! In spite of the rhetoric currently emanating from the Hot Air Capital of the US, Congress has them BLOCKED!!!!!

http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/06/news/economy/birger_shale.fortune/?postversion=2008060617

Basically the Democratic party wants to shut down use of non-renewable, Carbon based energy.

For all the algae comments about problems with ponds:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/01/algae.oil/

Vertical stands are most efficient and allow the best control of the growing environment and extraction of the algae for processing. It is also the most efficient use of the solar and land resources compared to horizontal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollarding