Wash U. and Danforth Center receive DOE funds for Algae Research
I wrote about St. Louis receiving funds for algae research in April but now we have a little more information about how much and what the money will be going towards.
Researchers at two centers in St. Louis are gearing up to launch five-year research programs on algae, backed by U.S. DOE grants. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center received $15 million and Washington University $20 million from the DOE’s fund for Energy Frontier Research Centers. A total of 46 centers were funded from a pool of some 260 applications.
Danforth’s Center for Advanced Biofuels Systems will be led by Richard Sayre, who also serves as director of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Institute for Renewable Fuels. Sayre said the new team of researchers will be studying the conversion of energy captured from photosynthesis in the single cell algae and how it is channeled into oil. With algae oil production ranging from 5 percent to 70 percent lipids, the researchers will be working to identify ways to increase oil production. “We’ll take apart the system step by step and develop mechanisms to work around the bottlenecks,” he explained. The researchers hope to identify catalysts and enzymes that could be engineered into the organism to improve oil yields.
Robert Blankenship, professor of biology and chemistry, will direct the Washington University Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center which will use its DOE support to delve into the science of photosynthesis and how light energy is harvested using algae as the model. Blankenship will be coordinating the efforts of 16 other principal investigators from around the world. The Washington University project will focus on the biophysics of light while the Danforth Center project focuses on biochemical conversion of that light into oil. Both programs are hiring personnel and organizing to officially launch the programs in August.
So, if I am understanding this right, the Danforth Center will looking at how oil is created and how to maximize production while Wash U will be looking at how light is captured and how to maximize that.
I am in the process of contacting both research teams so hopefully I will be able to bring you some firsthand accounts on what exactly they are doing and what they are accomplishing.
When you contact the researchers – ask how many economist are on the project. Ask to see how they arrived at attacking these two problem categories on an economic sensitivity basis. Apparently, their are no economist because they aren’t attacking the problems by their economic sensitivity priorities. Oil yields are not a high priority hurdle in preventing economic feasibility. The costs associated with cellular oil extraction, separation/filtration, drying, and stabilizing the oils are. These groups primary purpose is to suck up more gov. grants and perhaps hit on something that will lead to a proprietary technology position for themselves.
Examining the photo chemical processes of lipid production is pretty well understood. Accomplishing it economically is the hurdle. If developers are going to continue to ignore the economic hurdles in algae fuel production – they are going to continue to research low priority problems and the economic barriers are going to remain in place for commercial algae oil development.