"The World Needs Drastic Action to Meet Paris Climate Goals"
Jennifer Kite-Powell Contributor
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* According to Bill Liao, General Partner, SOSV, and Founder, RebelBio.co, microalgae are finally yielding their secrets for efficiently turning light and water into useful materials and foods.
* "If I had one silver bullet for the future of sustainable food, it would be green and loaded with algae," added Holm.
A Qualitas Health farm in Columbus, New Mexico contains more than 48 1.1 ponds of 52.8 acres of algae.Tom Richard, 2018, for Qualitas Health
Correction: This post has been updated since it was published on June 15, 2018, to reflect how Royal Dutch Shell and Department of Energy grant was used, the attributes of algae and the uses of algae through those studies.
Charles Greene is a climate scientist who looks at the impact of climate on marine ecosystems. He's a Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University and member of the Marine Algae Industrialization Consortium (MAGIC) which has a grant from the Department of Energy to look into the commercial viability of algal biofuels.
In February 2018, Greene presented his views on how algae could provide solutions to the grand global challenges of the 21st century (energy, climate, and food security) at the American Geophysical Union’s biannual ocean sciences meeting, in Portland, Oregon.
What's so great about algae? It grows 10 times more rapidly than terrestrial plants, and less than a tenth of the land is needed to produce an equivalent amount of biomass. It grows on non-productive and non-arable land, so it doesn't compete with other crops for land. Because it doesn't require fresh water, it can be fertilized more efficiently than land crops, and you can avoid the intensive water usage, wasteful fertilizer runoff, and downstream eutrophication associated with modern agriculture.
The Future of Energy? It May Come From Where You Least Expect
PAID FOR AND POSTED BY ExxonMobil
"The World Needs Drastic Action to Meet Paris Climate Goals [...] No matter how cool it is that some dude flew a solar powered plane .. http://www.wired.com/2015/07/solar-impulse-2-surprising-zen-of-a-5-day-flight-over-the-pacific/ .. over the Pacific, sunshine ain’t gonna get you to Tahiti any time soon. “The aviation industry is ultimately looking at biofuels,” says Jacobs. This is touchy, because growing corn or whatever for fuel takes up ag land. “The risk is that basically the demand for developed world transport will outweigh the developing world’s demand for food,” he says. Scientists are working on tank-grown algae for biofuels, but as of yet no formula is ready for business class."
How scientists are tapping algae and plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.
Cloudy days don’t come often to Calipatria, Calif. This small town, nestled in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, sees only three inches of rain each year. Sunlight beats onto its parched beige soil, pushing temperatures past 100 degrees. Yet just above Calipatria’s northern border, a cluster of manmade ponds offers a rare sight: bright green water, an oasis in an otherwise arid landscape.
The water isn’t for drinking. It’s salty, warm and thick with microscopic algae: tiny organisms that might be the future of green energy. In a world that relies on oil, fuels made from these organisms could offer a lower-carbon alternative to diesel, providing cleaner energy for trucks, planes, boats and pretty much anything else with a diesel fuel tank.
“We’re working to decrease our overall carbon footprint,” says Kelsey McNeely, who leads ExxonMobil’s biofuels research and development. “I think that’s why we recognize fuels made from algae and plant-based sources could be part of the solution.”
‘We’re working to decrease our overall carbon footprint.’ KELSEY MCNEELY – Lead scientist at ExxonMobil’s biofuels research and development program
McNeely is helping the company create the next generation of biofuels: energy sources that are sustainable and environmentally friendly. It’s a major challenge. There’s plenty of energy to be extracted from plant sources, she says, but today’s methods can be complicated and inefficient.
Right now one of the main renewable biofuels — known as “biodiesel,” which can be made from a wide variety of vegetable and waste oils — is often derived from oil-rich crops such as soybeans and palm fruit. The catch? Most of the plants used to make biodiesel are grown on land that could instead be used to produce crops for food and animal feed. Those acres are competing for freshwater and farmland, vital resources needed to feed an expanding global population.
To grow fuel in a wide range of environments that won’t compete with food production, scientists are exploring the huge potential of single-cell organisms such as algae and bacteria. Saltwater algae, for instance, can produce oil directly. And bacteria have the potential to unlock energy bound up in plant waste — so its growth isn’t competing with food — such as cornhusks or even sawdust.
[...]
‘We're aiming to have the technical ability to produce 10,000 barrels of algae-based biofuel a day by 2025.’ ROB BROWN – Vice President, Phototrophic Systems at Synthetic Genomics
Farming algae on a large scale isn’t easy. Those contained ponds in Calipatria can each grow billions upon billions of algae cells, but maximizing production takes a bit of a green thumb — albeit a wet one. Every cell in the pond — not just those at the surface — needs equal amounts of sunlight, nutrients and carbon dioxide.
Brown and his team, in collaboration with ExxonMobil engineers, are currently fine-tuning their farming methods using natural species of algae, but in the near future, they hope to test lab-enhanced strains in the field, as well. SGI is working with appropriate regulatory authorities to establish proper protocols for this program.
Elliott Negin, senior writer | July 31, 2018, 9:15 am EST
ExxonMobil executives just had another opportunity to convince skeptics that their support for a carbon tax is genuine.
They blew it.
On July 23, Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo introduced a bill that would place a $24 per ton tax on carbon emissions and dedicate 70 percent of the revenue to rebuilding U.S. infrastructure.
ExxonMobil’s reluctance to seriously engage, however, should not come as a surprise.
Yes, the company has consistently paid lip service to a carbon tax since 2009. And yes, it is a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council .. https://www.clcouncil.org/ — which supports a $40 per ton carbon tax—and it recently endorsed Americans for Carbon Dividends, a new bipartisan lobby group promoting a carbon tax that would return revenues to taxpayers.
But more telling is the fact that the oil giant has never publicly supported a carbon tax bill and consistently funds members of Congress who oppose a carbon tax.
How does that square with the company’s avowed position?
It doesn’t.
Just say no
Curbelo’s bill is hardly the first carbon tax legislation that ExxonMobil has snubbed. When California Rep. Ted Lieu asked ExxonMobil lobbyists to support a carbon tax bill in 2015, they refused. And when Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii introduced the “American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act” in 2016, the company would not endorse their bill or lobby on its behalf.
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