Coal Dust and Algae Can Help Meet Future Energy Needs

Algae/Other Aquatic Organisms/Seaweed, Business News/Analysis, Feedstocks, South Africa

December 16, 2015

Print This Article Share it With Friends

by Heather Dugmore (Business Day Live) A new fuel, Coalgae, produced from a combination of waste coal dust and algae, could save SA up to 40% of its crude oil imports.

Ben Zeelie and his team at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) combined coal dust with algae to form neat, clean-burning briquettes. When heated up, they produce high-quality crude oil — an invention that is science at its best.

“The trigger that led us to Coalgae was completely accidental,” says Prof Zeelie, who heads a research-and-development institute at NMMU in Port Elizabeth, called InnoVenton.

“We were experimenting with growing algae in plastic bags, when we noticed that some of it had leaked out the bags and formed a concentrated algae cake. It got us thinking and we figured that if we bind the algae cake with coal dust, we could come up with a new fuel.”

…

“In coal mining you lose up to 30% of the coal as dust,” Prof (Ben) Zeelie explains. “The dust is conventionally a waste product that needs to be buried because otherwise the wind would blow it away. We’re not talking small amounts, we’re talking 50-million to 60-million tonnes of coal dust waste every year that needs to buried. This is both a huge economic loss and a huge environmental problem as it releases acid water and other chemicals into the soils over time.”

The team discovered, after they started experimenting with algae cake and coal dust, that the algae binds beautifully with the dust. The bacteria in the algae are able to change the complex structure of coal. READ MORE

Comments are closed.

Advanced BioFuels USA