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Transcription of interview with Jonathan Trent on January 21, 2013.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Jonathan Trent is at the NASA Ames Research Center.
He is also an adjunct professor in biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Trent on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: I know youíve developed a system called OMEGA.
Could you tell us what this is all about?
Jonathan Trent: OMEGA is an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosure for Growing Algae.
Basically, itís a plastic tube made of flexible plastic like polyethylene, the plastic that
we have very commonly and itís meant to grow a kind of algae which are microscopic elbow
strains that produce oil.
In fact, microalgae, these tiny single-celled organisms are the best producers of oil on
the planet.
Most of the oil that we get from dippers right now or under the ocean comes from these microscopic
algae that live millions and millions of years ago, but there are still species of them alive
that produce lots of oil.
Between 80 and 90 percent of oil came from microscopic algae that live in shallow seas
in the presenozoic kind of period and they settled to the bottom and they get celled
to the bottom and they got buried under the sediments and they get crushed and heated
and so on and their oil oozes out and formed these pockets that we now harvest
These algae still live now in the oceans and in freshwater as well and they grow using
solar energy so they use sunlight, water and CO2 to grow and they produce oil.
Some species produce like 50% oil by weight.
These are organisms that are producing basically vegetable oil and we can grow them in these
plastic enclosures and the issue is first we put the enclosures because weíre going
to have to grow a lot of them to be able to do biofuels out of them.
One possibility is to put them on land but the problem with putting them on land is that
you have to cool them somehow especially in a place like Israel which is pretty warm.
One way you could cool them is put them in the water and so you donít have a lot of
extra water in Israel, but you have the Mediterranean and you have a little of access to the Red
Sea.
The good news is that these microalgae grow on wastewater.
In Israel, you recycle a lot of your wastewater which is really good but in the United States,
we have very limited wastewater recycling.
So our wastewater from our coastal cities is just pumped out shore and thatís filled
with nutrients and it causes this algae blooms in the ocean, but the ocean is pretty huge
relative to the volume of water weíre putting offshore and even from our major cities.
The concept of OMEGA though is to capture this freshwater which is our waste water before
it goes into the seawater in these floating plastic enclosures and grow freshwater algae
that make oil that we can make into fuel and the algae clean the wastewater at the same
time that theyíre producing whatís called algae biomass.
Theyíre capturing CO2 that would go into the atmosphere.
Theyíre removing nutrients from this waste water and theyíre growing and making oil
and we can harvest them.
They
float just below the surface so there would probably some kind of infrastructure built
to support them as well and we can talk more about how we might envision doing this, but
the way we think of it is to have a kind of floating duct system that would be offshore
and that this plastic enclosures would be just below the surface and having water from
our offshore wastewater outfalls directed through these tubes and circulating through
them and the algae are growing inside them.
You
could make the vegetable oil directly into diesel very easily by transesterification.
In fact, when Rudolf Diesel designed the diesel motor, he designed it to run on vegetable
oil so itís not a big deal to make vegetable oil into
a diesel fuel.
Douglas Goldstein: What are the possibilities?
Is this just sort of a science fiction at this stage or is there some real application
where we might see some change in the near term?
Jonathan Trent: This was a project that originated because of the trajectory weíre on as a globe.
The project actually started with a proposal that was supported by the two founders of
Google, Larry and Sergey, and the project was called Sustainable Energy for Spaceship
Earth.
It was really a response to the discussions in 2008 that were going on about in the United
States about ìWe need an Apollo mission for energy, a way to really transition, make a
revolution in our use of energy.î The reason being that weíre discovering lots of sources
of fossil oil, but the more fossil oil and natural gas that we burn from this ancient
sources, the more carbon dioxide is accumulating in our atmosphere and the consequences are
going to be that we melt the poles, but that is to say certainly the arctic ice [inaudible
00:07:52] and once that starts to happen, the sea level is going to rise and there are
going to be a lot of consequences as the oceans also acidify and species go extinct.
A lot of the predictions of scientists are coming up with as the basis of changing our
climate because of the release of CO2 was really what was the underlying motivation,
can we find an alternative to a fossil oil.
We place fossil oil within a significant volume and still use oil then which is derived from
solar energy but this case from a sustainable source, a recyclable source.
Douglas Goldstein: Is this something that weíre talking about a level where you could
really produce the millions or billions of gallons that people need?
Jonathan Trent: Yes, in Israel, itís about 300,000 barrels a day that youíre using and
where does Israel get its oil?
It doesnít have very friendly neighbors where most of the oil is being produced.
Douglas Goldstein: Would these plastic bags offshore be able to produce a significant
number of barrels of oil?
Jonathan Trent: That was the whole motivation because we know how to grow microalgae.
In fact, [inaudible 00:09:07] in Israel in symbiotics has got a very effective way to
grow algae in Israel in these big ponds and they feed them CO2 from tanks and they grow
them in these open channels that are circulated, but you canít really expand that very much.
If you grow them in an open pond then you have problems with water evaporating and waters
that are premium in Israel so the idea is to put them into an enclosed container so
thereís not a problem with evaporation but if you put them in enclosed container and
you have a closed container on land then you have a problem with heat because the closed
container is like a solar thermal collector so then you have to cool it.
Cooling takes a lot of energy so letís put them offshore and now if you think of them
being offshore, all the sudden, what are the limits to how far you could expand that and
thereís clearly huge amounts of potential area if you could engineer them to cope with
the conditions that exist offshore.
There are a lot of advantages to being offshore because there are already dump wastewater
offshore, it controls the temperature and the algae which are freshwater algae living
in wastewater in this case, if they escape into the saltwater, they die so they donít
come invasive species and if sea level rises then we also have a new relationship to the
ocean in our coastlines and this is starting to think about how we would use sea level
rise to our advantage.
What I mean is that if coastal areas are starting to be flooded, we would already know what
we might do with the flooded area.
We might actually direct flooding into some areas where we now take advantage of the fact
that we have seawater intruding into our coastal lowlands but to answer your question directly,
is there a sufficient area to grow enough algae to produce fuels at the scale that weíre
currently using them, the answer is a kind of cautionary yes, there are certainly plenty
area.
Thereís not enough wastewater produced right now to make the levels of fuel that weíre
making although there are lots of ways that we might cleverly be able to direct additional
nutrients that wonít require wastewater for nutrients.
Douglas Goldstein: We canít assume that if an Apollo mission as you described it of setting
up algae-based energy took off then 10 years, we would be able to be mostly dependent on
this new form as opposed to traditional fossil fuels?
Jonathan Trent: The OMEGA project was conceived in 2008 and my goal in putting this project
together was to take some of the notions from NASAís life support systems where everything
is very parsimoniously used and recycled and carefully considered and do a demonstration
project and do it as an open source so everybody can see look, this is how we might solve the
problem of cleaning our wastewater and by the way making a fuel that will be expendable
without using up land or competing for water or fertilizer.
Hereís a demonstration of its feasibility in terms of how it might look and it was meant
to be open source.
It was not meant to be that Iím going to spin off a business.
It was meant to be that people in Israel or people all over the world would see that maybe
we could do that technologically given our specific conditions and they would develop
it in parallel.
It was a kind of idea that we would do by crowd sourcing and it was the idea that rather
than do traditional business model which says youíre going to stealth mode for a while
and you develop a technology and then you rolled it out and everybody is impressed instead
put it all out there.
In the context of saying the world is on a very precarious trajectory right now given
whatís happening with CO2 and the amount of fossil fuel and where we get it and how
much we could pay for it and what the impact on the economy will be.
Until it
becomes so problematic that that world starts impinging back on us.
I mean the worldís population right now is 7 billion people and it is set to get to 9
billion people by the year 2050, 40% increase and if you do the numbers and calculate how
much land of land is cultivatable, you really start thinking we have to start thinking about
alternatives that are sustainable.
The OMEGA project while the economics of doing algae into fuel or even algae to wastewater
treatment to fuel, the economic still donít pencil out very well but if you start thinking
in terms of weíre building this big aquaculture infrastructure offshore, letís start producing
shellfish offshore and maybe seaweeds that are edible and letís recycle the water as
clean water and all of those technologies have been part of what the OMEGA project has
been designed to do and weíre just advertising this.
Weíre writing scientific papers, weíre writing popular papers, Iím having interviews mostly
to motivate other people and start thinking along these lines because itís a kind of
project thatís a legacy project more than a business venture.
Douglas Goldstein: Could you just tell everyone, how can they follow your work?
Jonathan Trent: Probably the best way to understand what weíre doing is to have a look at my
TED Global talk which was put up in September and you could find it by just Googling TED
Global Trent interview or TED Global Trent video and youíll be able to get a link either
to YouTube or to the TED site and you could watch what weíve accomplished in two years
using grants from the California Energy Commission and from NASA to do a feasibility study.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
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