RESEARCH traction, harvesting and conversion to fuel is greatly diminished by the lack of infrastructure here,” he laments. If funding opportunities or a partner for infrastructure expansion were to present itself, Pienkos and the collaboration would consider working on the construction of that infrastructure, but the program has not had success in finding the necessary money thus far. “But we’re pretty ambitious,” he says. “If the opportunity arises, we’ll jump on it.” Ultimately, though, the researchers see a need to prioritize. “We are aware of the fact that you can’t do everything and it’s better to specialize, especially in an area of limited support.” So for now, the team is focusing on research of the laboratory algal strain Chlorella vulgaris. Pienkos says the strain has better production potential than the commonly usedchlamydomonasreinhardtii.Italsogrows well, produces significant fatty acids, and
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has a large-scale cultivation history for use in dietary supplements. “We feel this is an excellent strain to work with and so we’ve put together a number of small projects funded by a number of different agencies, including internal funding from NREL, to try to build a comprehensive program with Chlorella,” Pienkos says. Chlorella vulgaris is a freshwater strain, however, which is fine when conducting research in Colorado, but working with saltwater strains is preferable when considering large-scale deployment. “So Chlorella won’t necessarily fit the bill for that,” Pienkos explains. Chlorella presents other challenges, too, including small cells with tough cell walls, making it difficult to harvest, break and extract. “That’s a disadvantage certainly for making progress, but it’s an advantage assuming that we’re successful in some of our efforts because if we can do it with Chlorella, we can probably do it with other
strains as well,” Pienkos explains, adding that the new algae program’s charter is to accelerate commercialization through translational research. Eventually, the program will facilitate development of a national algae test bed Pienkos describes as a reasonably scaled production facility with all of the necessary unit operations. With DOE support, NREL has established such pilot test centers for terrestrial biomass in the past and has extensive experience in both thermochemical and biochemical conversion of lignocellulosic material. “We have a dream of building something like that for algae,” Pienkos says.
Capitalizing on Carbon In the meantime, NREL’s new algae research collaboration is focusing on a plethora of projects, some using industrial flue gas as a carbon source for algae cultivation. “We have a number of things in our pipeline that involve that,” Pienkos says. “It removes some of the uncertainty that you might have if you can use real flue gas or CO2 from other emitters rather than bottled CO2.” A partnership project with the National Research Council Canada’s Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is another one of those flue gas projects. The NRC team is working now on the first phase of the research, collecting water samples from areas in Nova Scotia, Alberta, southern Ontario and the Northern U.S. and hoping to come up with algae isolates that can tolerate all the pollutants in the flue gas, while producing large amounts of lipids. Without that tolerance, flue gas will need to be fractioned and cleaned, an expensive process, in order to separate the carbon dioxide from the mix of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitric oxide and other pollutants that can impede algae growth. “Many of the strains that produce copious amounts of lipids are not very robust and wouldn’t tolerate gassing with an industrial flue gas,” says Stephen O’Leary, leading research officer with the NRC’s algae biofuels program. “So we have to do