Biofuel buffs look to algae for answers
 |
| Shawn Clubb photo/ Cindy Duhigg examines a jar in which she has placed algae collected from the River Des Peres. She wants a hardy strain that can replicate itself multiple times, so she seeks it in places where plant matter has to be strong to grow. |
|
Cindy Duhigg is banking on algae - at least for now.
The Princeton Heights resident, who works for Pfizer, makes her own biodiesel as a hobby. She uses it in her 1984 Mercedes Turbo diesel.Duhigg, a member of the St. Louis Biofuels Club, recently became part of a cooperative that will soon make its own biodiesel for members by processing used cooking oil. However, she is looking ahead to algae.
Many biodiesel hobbyist look to algae as the next frontier to fuel their cars. Duhigg said she has heard estimates that it could produce 1,000 times as much oil as corn or soybeans.
Maud Essen, president of the St. Louis Biofuels Club, said one of the other benefits would be algae is not a food crop.
"It can be grown in situations that don't lend themselves to another type of agriculture," said Essen, noting that time is needed to figure out which of the thousands of strains of algae will be most effective for producing oil. "We don't have the idea that we're going to be able to make biofuel out of algae on a practical level any time soon."
Duhigg anticipates it will take her a year try about a 100 strains of algae found locally. She plans a total of two years before she has the algae replicating at a rate good enough to sustain production for use in her own car.
"I already got to the gallon size. It's an incremental scale up," she said. "I had one culture that had gone four or five generations. Then it died."
Duhigg works with local strains because she wants to find algae that will be tolerant to the environment here and thrive in the local conditions. She wants hardy strains, so she often collects samples from the River Des Peres which is fed from run-off and the combined sanitary-storm sewer system.
Once Duhigg has identified a good culture of algae, she said the algae cells just need three to four hours of sunlight per day. If they can be kept circulating in a vat or pond, more cells will get sunlight and it will have greater potential to replicate.
"I wish I could make it sound romantic, but it's not. It's like farming," Duhigg said.
Within four or five years, Duhigg said, algae-based biodiesel should be commercially available to run in any car with a diesel engine. However, she sees the technology as a stop-gap measure. She said the nation's energy needs to come completely from technologies like solar and wind within the next few decades.
"I totally expect within 20-30 years we will be weened off carbon-based fuels," she said.
