The word algae can mean different things to different people and if you prefer to pronounce
it 'Al-Jee' then, you know, there's example number one. If you live somewhere in the world that
happens to be next to the sea then you may well consider the green slime that carpets the rocks
and the smelly seaweed that washes up on the beach to be nothing more than slightly annoying aspects
of life by the seaside. And if you're somewhere like coastal Florida then you'll no doubt be only
too well aware of the surge of the red tides, otherwise known as harmful algal blooms or HABs
which are nasty toxic outbreaks that can destroy marine habitats and kill fish and birds and
even cause respiratory problems and eye irritation in human beings that are unfortunate enough to
swim through them. But that ability to proliferate so rapidly is precisely what made algae one of
the most successful organisms ever to exist in nature. It played an absolutely fundamental role
in creating a breathable atmosphere by absorbing enormous quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide
and replacing it with oxygen. Without that process happening on a global scale hundreds of millions
of years ago, life on land would never have got going in the first place. In fact algae contain
all the right stuff for organic life including proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acid and lipids,
which are non-water-soluble fatty acids that produce algae oil. And when those early primordial
algal blooms died they sank to the bottom of the oceans locking away all that carbon beneath the
seabed, which over eons of geological time became the vast deposits of oil that we humans have been
busy plundering for the last 150 years or so. So you could say it's quite ironic that an organism
resulting in a substance that enabled human beings to cause catastrophic changes to our climate
might just turn out to be one of the key materials to help us fix the problem!
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. Here's a couple of fascinating facts about algae
that you're welcome to use during your next dinner date. A kilogram of algae absorbs 1.83
kilograms of carbon dioxide every day, essentially to produce more algae. That's about 2.7 tonnes of
CO2 per acre. A similar sized forest containing 25 year old maple trees sucks in about 2.2 kilograms
of CO2 per day. That means you'd only need about 1.2 kilos of algae to equal the carbon
capture of an entire acre of forest. Algae grows 10 times more quickly than land-based plants too
and it only needs a tenth of the space to produce an equivalent amount of biomass, plus it uses 10
times less water than land crops and it can be farmed in non-productive and non-arable regions
which means it doesn't have to compete with other crops or destroy existing ecosystems. Now all of
that is very interesting and everything and would definitely impress your dinner partner I reckon,
but the question is - does any of it mean that algae can actually be made into anything useful?
And the answer appears to be a slightly conditional 'yes potentially'. In fairness as more
and more research is carried out the scientific and commercial sectors are starting to realize
just what an amazingly versatile resource algae could be if the right focus and funding was thrown
at it. Back in the oil crisis of the 1970s the possibility of using algae to capture carbon and
convert it into biomass and biofuels attracted a lot of attention and by about 2015 or so
as climate change was vaguely coming into view for lawmakers around the world governments were
throwing some serious funding into the industry as they realized that deriving biofuel from algae
would potentially displace far less agricultural land than other existing fuel crops like corn
and sugarcane. Biotech companies partnered up with some of the biggest oil producers
including Shell, Exxon and Chevron and it looked like a genuine net zero carbon alternative to
gasoline was on the horizon. It hasn't worked out quite that triumphantly though sadly,
at least not yet anyway. The trouble is the research and development phase proved to be
really very complicated indeed. It's not just a matter of raking up a bit of seaweed,
dissolving it in something nasty and siphoning off the oil content. That'd be far too easy.
It turns out there are upwards of 30,000 different types of algae ranging from the tiny microalgae,
better known as phytoplankton, which by the way produce about 20 percent of the planet's oxygen,
all the way up to huge kelp plants that can grow to tens of meters long in certain parts of the
ocean, and some estimates suggest there could be as many as a million different species of algae on
the planet. So the science bods have been taking different strains of algae into their laboratories
where they've been genetically modifying them to see if they can come up with a new
super-strain that can grow quickly enough and contain sufficient quantities of the all
important oil producing lipids to produce a viable biofuel. It's a whole sphere of research known as
bioprospecting and it's extremely expensive and extremely time consuming. And even when
the perfect strain is genetically derived, which researchers reckon may be a few years away yet,
then they still need to build facilities to process it in large enough quantity and at
low enough cost to make it commercially viable against fossil fuels. Of the big oil giants
who originally got involved with algae biofuels, only Exxon has stuck with their research program,
which is another irony given their track record of climate denial and obfuscation! Since 2017
they've been working with a private firm called Synthetic Genomics in Southern California
to develop a process using CRISPR gene editing technology to produce an optimized algal strain.
Exxon haven't been shy in promoting what they call their miniature science campaign on social media
either which has led to some environmentalists suggesting that a bit of green washing
might be going on. Synthetic Genomics do have a pretty impressive facility though which looks
likely to hit Exxon's goal of producing 10,000 barrels of algae fuel per day by 2025, but you
know when you set that against Exxon's current daily production of 4 million barrels of crude
oil it kind of puts the scaling problem into quite stark context. Despite those daunting statistics,
Joe Biden's administration is showing considerable faith in the possibility of using algae fuel to
offset at least some of the prodigious fossil fuel consumption over in the states, with a particular
leaning towards the aviation industry. In April 2021 the US Department of Energy committed $61.4
million to new biofuel research and are on track to meet a commitment to demonstrate significant
algae growth on a specified amount of land and to scaling up production in outdoor ponds by 2025,
with a 2050 goal of producing an algae strain that can be genuinely cost competitive with fossil
fuels on the energy market. But algae offers many more low carbon commercial opportunities than just
fuel oil. One of the most encouraging prospects is bioplastics. Some algae contain a substance
called polyhydroxybutyrate or PHB, which is a polymer that can be used to replace polypropylene.
The authors of this paper used what they called metabolic engineering techniques
to modify a strain of microalgae to increase the proportion of PHB in its construction
from 10 percent to 80 percent creating an almost complete bioplastic just from this one process,
and the great thing about this material is that unlike polypropylene, which will be swimming
around in our oceans for hundreds of years causing damage wherever it goes, PHB breaks down
in a normal household composter and if it did make its way into the ocean then it'd dissolve
within a year or so taking its carbon content down to the seabed just like any other algae. And the
really encouraging news is that there's already a fairly well-established infrastructure in place
for producing the material at scale. Algae farms are widely used in many parts of the world
to produce things like foods, medicines and nutritional supplements like spirulina.
One of the largest operations is run by a company called iWi in the United States.
They've got farms in Texas and New Mexico, each consisting of 48 algae ponds the size of football
fields. The processes required to obtain a hundred grams of protein from beef create
about 25 kilograms of CO2 equivalent emissions, but according to another algae farm startup called
SuSeWi in the UK, producing a hundred grams of protein from algae actually removes 320 grams
of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And it's not like you'll have to make do with green slime
for breakfast lunch and dinner. This isn't the dystopian nightmare depicted in Charlton
Heston's 1973 movie Soylent Green! The algae from these farms will be converted into dried protein
that will then be used as a constituent part of other non-dairy alternatives SuSeWi founder Keith
Coleman is planning to build a series of algae ponds in Morocco that will cover 100 hectares,
capable of producing 1700 tons of protein a year, and he's even more ambitious than that. Apparently
the next phase will be what he describes as a full-scale farm covering 6,000 hectares
of otherwise unusable land. That level of protein production would compete with the world's largest
chicken factories which churn out two million chickens a week for human consumption using up
about 100 million tons of water and emitting a million tons of CO2 equivalent every year.
But we do of course need to be realistic about how we humans will respond to these new foodstuffs.
For the foreseeable future at least, the reality is that a large proportion of the human species
will still insist on eating meat. But even here algae's come up trumps. Scientists have discovered
that a species of red algae called asparagopsis taxiformis, which is found in tropical and warm
temperate waters can be added to the feed of ruminant animals to reduce their methane output.
There are more than one and a half billion cows in the world and combined with other livestock
animals they currently produce methane at a rate equivalent to more than three billion
tons of carbon dioxide every year. But adding just two percent of this red seaweed to the
diets of those animals has been shown to reduce their methane emissions by as much as 90 percent
with nearly 99 effectiveness. The science bods are still trying to identify precisely how it works
but it appears that certain compounds in the algae can somehow stop the production of methane in the
animal's digestive system. The challenge, as with everything we've looked at so far,
is building enough algae farms and scaling up production to meet demand, which arguably
is where government incentives are so desperately needed. But a startup called Simbrosia is already
producing the feed additive at a sustainably run facility in Hawaii. It's still very early
days but the handful of small farms they're currently working with have already avoided
about four tons of CO2 equivalent emissions, and Simbrosia are on the lookout for new partners to
expand their operations as fast as possible. So you know if you're a farmer or a smart investor
then I would suggest you check them out. But perhaps the easiest way to utilize algae for
climate mitigation may be to grow very large quantities of seaweed in ocean farms and sink
it to the bottom of the deep sea where it'll lock away its carbon content for good. That's
essentially just mimicking exactly what nature does but on a turbocharged scale. According to
this 2019 study published in the online journal Science Direct, there are about 48 million square
kilometres of ocean that are suitable for this kind of seaweed agriculture. The paper's authors
calculated that if algae aquaculture was ramped up from its current thousand square kilometres
to about seven million square kilometres, or about fifteen percent of the total suitable area,
then that would be enough to completely offset all the greenhouse gas emissions
from current global agriculture. Now that amount of seaweed would represent
double the volume of all existing wild species, so it's probably not a realistic
rate of expansion. Plus any ocean farming of algae would need extremely careful stewardship
to ensure it didn't get out of control and start killing off existing sea life and ecosystems.
So perhaps we haven't found the elusive silver bullet to fix the entire climate emergency here,
but the paper suggests that targeted industrial scale expansion of seaweed offset farms in high
potential regions like Asia and the Pacific coast of the United States
could make a substantial impact on achieving the IPCC goal of keeping global atmospheric warming to
less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. So it looks like there are some really
very tangible solutions to be had from algae if we can just convince commercial investors to
grow some cojunes and speculate some of their billions of hedge fund dollars. And get our
law makers to grow some cojunes and put some incentives in place to speed things up a bit.
I'm sure you've got your own views on this one so if you have then why not jump down to the
comments section below and leave your thoughts there. That's it for this week though. Before I
go I just want to let you know about a podcast I took part in recently with the folks at Spark
Network. They're part of an organization called iClima Earth who aim to redefine climate change
investments by focusing on companies that can genuinely enable the avoidance of CO2 emissions.
And I'll leave a link to the podcast in the description section of this video.
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