Blatant Reality

In a recent Cambridge study, researchers have found that algae holds some promise in UK, espcially when grown in raceway ponds.

Elena Kazamia, a PhD researcher at Cambridge University is the co-author of a study that assessed the potential for algal biodiesel to be grown in the UK, using flue gas from a gas-fired power station as a source of the carbon needed for the plant’s growth. Two methods of growing were considered — one in a closed “bioreactor” where there was no interaction with the outside world, and one using more traditional methods — in a shallow pool of water, known as a “raceway pond” due to its distinctive shape, out in the open air.

“Algae is very understudied compared to other plants for use in biofuels,” Kazamia told me. “We don’t have thousands of years of agricultural history to draw knowledge from.” However, that hasn’t stopped her team from determining that traditional raceway cultivation is significantly more environmentally sustainable than cultivation within the more modern tubular bioreactors.

In fact, it turns out that while growing algae in tubes for biodiesel might seem like a sustainable way of extracting energy, if grown in Britain then it actually has a significantly greater impact on the earth’s climate than an equivalent amount of traditional diesel pumped out of the ground, thanks to the need to build specialist facilities to grow the algae.

In contrast, the team found that it’d be possible to generate 40 tons of Chlorella Vulgaris algae per hectare of ground every year by building raceways and only use up about 80 percent of the energy that it’d take to extract an equivalent amount of normal diesel from the earth.

Read more: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-06/30/algae-biodiesel