A New Start: NREL Aquatic Species Program
by Lisa Gibson (Biomass Magazine) Ten years after NREL’s Aquatic Species Program was shut down, a similar initiative began and now is thriving in its algae research, which includes the evaluation of CO2 recycling.
The main difference between the new program and the ASP is the funding mechanism, as ASP was funded by the DOE. The research is now being funded by a collaboration of partners and agencies including Chevron, the DOE, the U.S. EPA, the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the International Energy Agency and NREL.
… 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. READ MORE
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- NREL and 3M Sign Agreement on Renewable Energy Research
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- How Algal Biofuels Lost a Decade in the Race to Replace Oil
- Louisiana’s Aquatic Energy Moving from Pilot to Demo with Algae-to-Energy without External CO2
- Algae Emerges as DOE Feedstock of Choice for Biofuel 2.0
