Algae farm develops algae fuel

Unusual research facil­ity oper­ates with W.Va company

By MAURICIO ESPINOZA

OSU Exten­sion 

The algae grown in Yebo Li’s lab serves as the seed for algae pro­duc­tion in Touchstone’s research ponds. (Photo by Ken Chamberlain)

WOOSTER — Right next to a com­mer­cial nurs­ery and green­house oper­a­tion on the out­skirts of Wooster, pad­dle­wheels keep water con­stantly mov­ing in four 30-by-200-foot ponds shaped like auto­mo­tive race­way cir­cuits. The water is deep green and murky.

That’s just how Phil Lane likes it.

Lane is a pro­gram man­ager for Touch­stone Research Lab­o­ra­tory, a West Virginia-based com­pany that oper­ates this unusual facil­ity on a stretch of farm­land where the rem­nants of corn and soy­bean fields are now buried under snow.

And the stuff mak­ing the ponds green is another type of crop that could one day grow along­side the more tra­di­tional fare occu­py­ing Ohio fields: algae.

“Algae can be grown just about any­where, so we are not com­pet­ing with farm­land for grow­ing food crops,” said Lane, who man­ages the Wooster algae pilot facil­ity. “Algae can add value to mar­ginal lands, gen­er­at­ing a crop that can be turned into bio­fuel and a vari­ety of bioproducts.”

Algae farm­ing is expand­ing across the United States and around the world, show­ing great promise as a fast-growing and effi­cient source of nat­ural oil for renew­able trans­porta­tion fuel, bio-plastics, food sup­ple­ments and many other products.

Grow­ing algae in places like Ohio may sound like a strange propo­si­tion, espe­cially in the mid­dle of win­ter. After all, most large-scale algae oper­a­tions are found in warmer cli­mates with lots of sun­shine, as these con­di­tions allow for year-round pro­duc­tion. How­ever, the project in Wooster is seek­ing to change that.

Built in late 2011 at Cedar Lane Farms, the two indoor and two out­door race­way ponds host col­lab­o­ra­tive research between Touch­stone and Ohio State University’s Ohio Agri­cul­tural Research and Devel­op­ment Cen­ter (OARDC), whose Wooster cam­pus is located just a few miles from this site.

OARDC is the research arm of Ohio State’s Col­lege of Food, Agri­cul­tural, and Envi­ron­men­tal Sciences.

Funded by close to $7 mil­lion in grants from the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy and the Ohio Coal Devel­op­ment Office, this research involves test­ing of three inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies that seek to make algae farm­ing viable, more cost-effective and sus­tain­able in a wider vari­ety of cli­mates and locations.

The first tech­nol­ogy, pre­vi­ously devel­oped by Touch­stone exclu­sively for algae pro­duc­tion, is a phase-changing mate­r­ial that cov­ers a major­ity of the pond sur­face. This mate­r­ial reg­u­lates daily tem­per­a­ture, help­ing the algae grow dur­ing colder peri­ods; con­trols the infil­tra­tion of inva­sive species; and reduces water evap­o­ra­tion, which is a big prob­lem with open-pond algae systems.

“We are test­ing this tech­nol­ogy at both the indoor and out­door ponds,” Lane explained. “For each pair, one pond will be cov­ered by the phase-change mate­r­ial while the other pond will have no pro­tec­tion and serve as the control.

“We are see­ing up to 90 per­cent reduc­tion in evap­o­ra­tion with this mate­r­ial. We are also look­ing at the impact of this mate­r­ial on other vari­ables, for exam­ple, if algae growth increases, if lipid (oil) con­tent goes up.”

The sec­ond tech­nol­ogy serves an envi­ron­men­tal pur­pose. It involves pump­ing car­bon diox­ide from Cedar Lane Farms’ advanced coal-burning sys­tem into the ponds. Like all plants, algae needs CO2 to grow. And since algae grows very fast — dou­bling its mass in 24–48 hours depend­ing on the type — it can use a lot of the green­house gas.

How much? Lane said the goal for the four ponds at Cedar Lane Farms is to keep up to 60 per­cent flue gas CO2 gen­er­ated by the facility’s coal-burning sys­tem from being released into the environment.

The third tech­nol­ogy involves research con­ducted by OARDC biosys­tems engi­neer and OSU Exten­sion spe­cial­ist Yebo Li. As an alter­na­tive to using com­mer­cial fer­til­iz­ers to feed the algae, Li is test­ing a liq­uid waste (called “efflu­ent”) that comes out of anaer­o­bic digesters — sys­tems that pro­duce bio­gas from organic matter.

“The efflu­ent is rich in nitro­gen and phos­pho­rous, two nutri­ents that algae needs to grow,” said Li, who obtains this efflu­ent from quasar energy group, an OARDC research part­ner that oper­ates an anaer­o­bic digester on the Wooster campus.

In an effort to make this algae-growing sys­tem as sus­tain­able as pos­si­ble, Li is using the bio­mass left over after extract­ing oil from algae as a feed­stock for anaer­o­bic digesters. Doing this takes care of the algae bio­mass and also helps pro­duce more clean energy, which in turn leads to more efflu­ent fer­til­izer avail­able. In other words, it’s an inte­grated sys­tem in which noth­ing is wasted.

“Algae bio­mass is rich in pro­teins and car­bo­hy­drates and works very well for anaer­o­bic diges­tion,” Li said. “Algae con­tains about 40 per­cent lipids and 60 per­cent bio­mass, so future large-scale algae farm­ing would gen­er­ate a lot of bio­mass residues that can be used as a fer­til­izer or for mak­ing energy.”

Li’s lab­o­ra­tory also tests and grows the seed algae that is later added to the ponds to mul­ti­ply. With these three tech­nolo­gies com­bined, the four ponds at Cedar Lane Farms can pro­duce some 2,000 gal­lons of oil per year — approx­i­mately 10 times more oil than what soy­beans could yield on the same area of land.

“Tests at his pilot plant will help us deter­mine the oper­at­ing costs and yields from this tech­nol­ogy,” Lane said. “We hope the pilot plant will attract investors to license this tech­nol­ogy to oth­ers in the algae indus­try and that the pro­duc­tion process will be adopted to pro­vide energy sav­ings and to reduce water usage.

“Ulti­mately, the aim is to reduce costs enough to make the algae indus­try com­pet­i­tive with petro­leum fuels.”

Brian Joseph, pres­i­dent of Touch­stone, said Ohio is a good place for algae farm­ing because it has a high water table that makes it easy to set up ponds, as well as a large sup­ply of waste heat avail­able. The oppor­tu­nity to work with Ohio State is another impor­tant asset.

“Hav­ing Ohio State as a part­ner is great,” Joseph said. “They have great depth of exper­tise in every part of the bio­log­i­cal spec­trum that you can think of.”

Posted by Tina Murdock on Feb 24 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.