David Nobles
People have been doing it for a long time. You know, it's a process of brewing. Anybody that's home-brewed or anybody that's done that
knows that you can take sugars and you can give it to yeast and they will ferment it and you get ethanol.
The thing we're concerned with is where are the sugars coming from?
Malcolm Brown
to produce enough ethanol to supply our transportation fuels, some 210 billion gallons a year.
Well, obviously, we can't use that. That's more than all the agriculture crops in the United States.
David Nobles
It requires a lot of fertilizer, such that, you know, if the energy input is 1, you only get 1.3 out.
Cyanobacteria are bacteria that are able to do photosynthesis in the same way that plants do photosynthesis.
You take carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and water and you combine sunlight with that,
and they're able to use the sun's energy to make sugars, just like plants do.
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Unlike sugar cane or corn, we don't actually have to harvest the cells and break it open to get the sugars out.
We can make them sort of give the sugars to us.
Here we have some that we've sort of tinkered with, genetically, and this is one that actually now makes a cellulose and that secretes glucose.
This is a nitrogen-fixing strain that secretes sucrose.
For production of ethanol from corn, it requires a fairly large amount of nitrate or ammonium fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make.
So using corn, for instance, as a biofuel, is a biofuel that's eternally tied still to petroleum and the cost of petroleum.
Malcolm Brown
That is they can take N2 gas out of the atmosphere and through different enzymes can convert that into nitrate and ammonia fertilizer.
Basically, these algae, especially the cyanobacteria that we study, can be grown virtually everywhere on earth.
It's found in fresh water, salt water, in fact, even the north of the Texas tower, before they got the limestone cleaned up, was all black.
That's because it had cyanobacteria growing on it.
David Nobles
And put these on non-arable desert sorts of lands, and grow them in salt water.
Malcolm Brown
We're also using a land that has not been used for anything very much.
David Nobles
We can use those to grow foods as we should be growing food on them, and that we can eliminate the use of a lot of fresh water.
Malcolm Brown
And for corn, as you can see, it's more than 800,000 square miles.
For switchgrass, it's quite a bit less. It's about 234,000 square miles.
If you used cyanobacteria here, you would require an area of only about 5,000 square miles.
I can envision the day, when in fact, if you ever take your first trip into space...
You can look down on the earth, and you'll see these little, green squares that will be the major source of all of the energy for all of our biofuels.
David Nobles
they're really the only game in town. There's nothing else that can do that.
Malcolm Brown
mostly by human activities over these many generations.
Now we have a chance to suck some of that back out, using microorganisms that are very efficient in fixing CO2 into biofuels as well as to biomass.
David Nobles
You have a chance to create a CO2 neutral energy source, and that's what we would intend to do with cyanobacteria.