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Algae That Cleans Emissions and Produces Fuel

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the nature-already-efficient-enough-for-production dept.

**$tarDu$t** writes "Isaac Berzin, a rocket scientist at MIT has come up with an idea for using algae to clean up power-plant exhaust. His research began 3 years ago in an experiment for growing algae on the International Space Station. His idea consists of building algae farms near power plants to provide a means to reduce CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions. Emissions are filtered through the algae. Then the CO2 saturated algae is harvested and squeezed to produce a combustible vegetable oil (biodiesel) and a dried green substance that can be further processed into ethanol."

3 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Cheap Solar Power? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1. Fuel -> Power Plant -> Emissions
    2. Emissions -> Algea -> Fuel
    3. Profit!

  2. covered on PBS by LEPP · · Score: 5, Informative

    They had a Scientific American segment on this. Here is the segment transcript. It was quite interesting.

    LEPP

  3. How does this really help? by Bob_Villa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From reading the article, the algae suck up the CO2 and the Nitrogen Oxides from the power plant emissions. That's obviously a good thing. The algae are then used to create methanol and biodiesel. What happens when you burn the methanol and biodiesel? Doesn't that just release the stored CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides back into the atmosphere, or am I missing something here?

    Also, if these algae are so great, why don't we fill up thousands of acres with them, not just 15,000, and suck the CO2 and Nitrogen Oxides out of the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gasses. Maybe the algae could then be dumped into the deep ocean, creating a carbon sink.

    Does it take less pollution to create methanol and biodiesel this way, versus drilling them from the earth?