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Teen's Biofuel Invention Turns Algae Into Fuel

Posted by samzenpus on from the muck-in-the-truck dept.

Lasrick writes "Evie Sobczak won a trip to Jet Propulsion Lab for her biofuel invention: 'For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project that eventually would become her passion: She wanted to grow algae and turn it into biofuel.'"

17 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    to be a significant power sources without either destroying foodcrops or natural ecologicies, or get more than about 5% efficiency - less than a solar panel.

    Makes for a cute story though, as do all these biofuel stories. Keeps everyone hopeful, despite the complete silliness.

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    1. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by slashdime · · Score: 2

      It's time for you to grow old and die. Why don't you spend the rest of your years writing to all the science fairs held around the world warning them that all the projects students submit have been done before?

      Just because so far we have not does not mean that others will not learn something along the way to lead to new discovery. Don't you DARE presume that your limits are future generations' as well.

    2. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by strugk · · Score: 2

      5% is still much more [wikipedia.org] then most natural biomass achieve. Scalling up is also not always necesary. PV systems or wind turbines will never be the size of a nuclear power plant, but still they collectivly can be influential.

    3. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

      Sun? What the fuck is that?

      Signed,
      a Canadian.

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    4. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      to be a significant power sources without either destroying foodcrops or natural ecologicies

      Plenty of cropland is already used for biofuel. If we can do so more efficiently, then more area will be available for food and/or nature.

      or get more than about 5% efficiency - less than a solar panel.

      Comparing biofuels to solar panels in area efficiency is silly. Solar panels cost hundreds of dollars per sq meter. Cropland does not. The important metric is not watts/area but watts/dollar. Also biofuels are liquid and can be used as transportation fuel in affordable vehicles. Solar electricity cannot.

      Keeps everyone hopeful, despite the complete silliness.

      TFA is completely devoid of any technical information, so I don't think you don't have enough information to determine if her invention is silly or not.

    5. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

      East coast, nowhere near the freezing parts. We've had around 5 to 10C for the last three days or so. If it snowed I wouldn't even be surprised.

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    6. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Look, kid. I'm not trying to discourage this young woman. I *do* get irritated at repetitive, innumerate media stories which appear to be designed to quell a gullible populace rather than inform anyone about just what kind of an energy-deficit shitstorm is coming down in the pike at a much more rapid clip than I expected.

      Don't you DARE presume that your limits are future generations' as well.
      I'm pretty sure the laws of physics won't change in the medium term. :) There are answers, by the way. Thorium nuclear plus increased battery efficiency, or even just better batteries alone have at least a chance of saving our collective bacon long enough to get to sustainable fusion power. There's not much else on the horizon though. Seriously, most of the popsci junk regarding new energy breakthroughs is just that - junk.

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    7. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You, sir, are an ass.

      Algae can be grown in a desert, using raw sewage as input. Zero farmland is used up.

      Also, deserts can be filled with solar power to molten salt plants, a proven technology that generates electricity 24 hours a day.

    8. Re:Cute. Too bad it won't scale up... by adolf · · Score: 2

      As a retort to your first paragraph:

      Yes, desert ecosystems are worth something.

      So are all of the ecosystems that thrive on developed arable land, and forests, and swamps and marshes, and coastlines, and shorelines, and shallow water, and deep water, and brackish water, and...

      Every sperm is sacred.

      So what? Either we're more important than an existing ecosystem, or we're not, or we continue to burn fossil fuels and poison all of the ecosystems at the same time.

      As a retort to your second paragraph:

      There are lots other things that can be done with power other than immediately transmit it somewhere else, and there are plenty of deserts that are within shouting distance of populated cities.

      As a retort to your third paragraph:

      You just discredited everything you said by virtue of being deliberately insulting instead of helpful. Thanks, I guess, for letting us know that you're an asshole straight-away instead of saving it for later.

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  2. Re:LOL by SirGarlon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think all that means is she knows more about science than the local-newspaper reporter who wrote TFA.

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  3. Whew! That was close by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Funny

    One more invention, and she would have been disqualified from any further participation

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  4. Crap article. by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And by that, I mean both the Tamba Bay and the Slashdot article. There is nothing anywhere about how she got the biodiesel from algae, which at this point is the only interesting thing about the experiment. It mentions photoautotrophic cultivation, which just means that the algae use light to grow, which is a big no-shit-Sherlock. It mentions osmotic sonication, which is a fancy word for using sound waves and osmotic principles to get the detergent into the cell innards. Google searches turn up no indication of how the experiment was set up, what the actual results or anything of interest. The best thing I got was a list of who else won what other categories at the fair.

    So we have two utterly known principles being applied to biodiesel generation from algae, and somehow this makes news as a breakthrough. Yawn.

    Which leads me to my second rant: the insistence of news organizations to hail science fair winners as geniuses who solved a problem no one else could (I'm specifically looking at the stories about the kid arranging solar cells in a tree shape). It completely oversells the experiment, turns the kid into something they're not, and covers up the actual interesting item: that you can do cool science in your home that goes beyond baking powder volcanoes. It could even be science that is relevant to an existing topic of interest to actual scientists, which should put the kids on a good trajectory to actually solving the problem. But no, instead we are presented with kid geniuses who solve world hunger, and I get to fend off all kinds of dumb questions and comments about science, the state of technology and why we're not listening more to kids.

    Now get off my lawn.

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    1. Re:Crap article. by fermion · · Score: 2
      As in any science, the interesting thing is the process and data collected, not the end result. A young person is not generally going to post-graduate level work and actually create new knowledge. Unfortunately the press, which only understands endpoint and not the work it took to get there, is just rah rah rah around interesting people.

      In fact such transformation from algae to various energy products has been. Four years ago Dow partnered to do exactly this, and a year later it broke up the partnership.

      In fact producing a gallon of fuel from algae requires huge amount of resources, both water and nutrients. Of course I have not RTFA so I don't know if the innovation was the reduction in the use of fresh water, which in most of the US is very scarce, or the use of nutrients, which in the US are increasingly imported.

      Possibly the best research path is efficiently converting weeds such as switchgrass into ethanol. Right now it is possible to increase yields fourfold. In fact moving away from a corn economy to more of a grass economy may solve many of our problems. This is not to say that algae has no benefit. Algae grown in saltwater, which is plentiful, can be good protein source,and is much less destructive than meat production, or even soybean production. But this is going to have to wait until the environment is degraded enough to make the other options not viable.

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    2. Re:Crap article. by Kagato · · Score: 2

      I googled for her paper on the project. http://algaetooil.weebly.com/

          It's actually quite promising and her experiments are specifically geared at finding economical processes that scale. The first section of her experiments deal with increasing yields of the algae. Both in terms of the mass and the lipids that would convert to fuel. Basically she found that you could use Neon gas to filter natural light and controlling CO2 at various stages get a 20% bump over natural light.

      The next steps were to find alternative methods of extracting the lipids from the algae without the use of toxic chemicals. She used several processes at various points to archive this. All of which had a heavy focus on economic viability.

      The only concern I have about this is what happens to a freshman in college who thinks they can just run any old experiments they want in the lab. That's the biggest barrier to this research continuing.

  5. wood === biofuel by RichMan · · Score: 2

    Wood is a form of biofuel.
    See what I did there?

    Does "biofuel" still seem like a mysterious magical term.

    1. Re:wood === biofuel by Sique · · Score: 2

      Not exactly, biofuel refers mostly to gas or gasoil replacements. Except some very large diesel engines, which you can fuel with sawdust, it's not very easy to power a gas or gasoil engine with wood.

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  6. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In 5th grade, she figured out something obvious. In 7th grade, she figured out another something obvious. In 8th grade, she started thinking about something non-obvious, spent 4 years developing it and then used it to win an internationally renowned competition sponsored by Intel. The importance of the 5th/7th grade anecdotes is that interest and achievement in science isn't an immediate phenomenon...it has to be cultivated from an early age if you want to see results by high school or college.