Jonathan Trent: Energy from floating algae pods

Some years ago, I set out to try to understand if there was a possibility to develop biofuels on a scale
that would actually compete with fossil fuels but not compete with agriculture for water, fertilizer or
land.

So here's what I came up with. Imagine that we build an enclosure where we put it just underwater, and
we fill it with wastewater and some form of microalgae that produces oil, and we make it out of some
kind of flexible material that moves with waves underwater, and the system that we're going to build, of
course, will use solar energy to grow the algae, and they use CO2, which is good, and they produce
oxygen as they grow. The algae that grow are in a container that distributes the heat to the surrounding
water, and you can harvest them and make biofuels and cosmetics and fertilizer and animal feed, and of
course you'd have to make a large area of this, so you'd have to worry about other stakeholders like
fishermen and ships and such things, but hey, we're talking about biofuels, and we know the importance
of potentially getting an alternative liquid fuel.

Why are we talking about microalgae? Here you see a graph showing you the different types of crops
that are being considered for making biofuels, so you can see some things like soybean, which makes 50
gallons per acre per year, or sunflower or canola or jatropha or palm, and that tall graph there shows
what microalgae can contribute. That is to say, microalgae contributes between 2,000 and 5,000 gallons
per acre per year, compared to the 50 gallons per acre per year from soy.

So what are microalgae? Microalgae are micro -- that is, they're extremely small, as you can see here a
picture of those single-celled organisms compared to a human hair. Those small organisms have been
around for millions of years and there's thousands of different species of microalgae in the world, some
of which are the fastest-growing plants on the planet, and produce, as I just showed you, lots and lots of
oil.

Now, why do we want to do this offshore? Well, the reason we're doing this offshore is because if you
look at our coastal cities, there isn't a choice, because we're going to use waste water, as I suggested,
and if you look at where most of the waste water treatment plants are, they're embedded in the cities.
This is the city of San Francisco, which has 900 miles of sewer pipes under the city already, and it
releases its waste water offshore. So different cities around the world treat their waste water
differently. Some cities process it. Some cities just release the water. But in all cases, the water that's
released is perfectly adequate for growing microalgae. So let's envision what the system might look like.
We call it OMEGA, which is an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae. At NASA,

you have to have good acronyms.

So how does it work? I sort of showed you how it works already. We put waste water and some source
of CO2 into our floating structure, and the waste water provides nutrients for the algae to grow, and
they sequester CO2 that would otherwise go off into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. They of
course use solar energy to grow, and the wave energy on the surface provides energy for mixing the
algae, and the temperature is controlled by the surrounding water temperature. The algae that grow
produce oxygen, as I've mentioned, and they also produce biofuels and fertilizer and food and other
bi-algal products of interest.

And the system is contained. What do I mean by that? It's modular. Let's say something happens that's
totally unexpected to one of the modules. It leaks. It's struck by lightning. The waste water that leaks
out is water that already now goes into that coastal environment, and the algae that leak out are
biodegradable, and because they're living in waste water, they're fresh water algae, which means they
can't live in salt water, so they die. The plastic we'll build it out of is some kind of well-known plastic that
we have good experience with, and we'll rebuild our modules to be able to reuse them again.

So we may be able to go beyond that when thinking about this system that I'm showing you, and that is
to say we need to think in terms of the water, the fresh water, which is also going to be an issue in the
future, and we're working on methods now for recovering the waste water.

The other thing to consider is the structure itself. It provides a surface for things in the ocean, and this
surface, which is covered by seaweeds and other organisms in the ocean, will become enhanced marine
habitat so it increases biodiversity. And finally, because it's an offshore structure, we can think in terms
of how it might contribute to an aquaculture activity offshore.

So you're probably thinking, "Gee, this sounds like a good idea. What can we do to try to see if it's real?"
Well, I set up laboratories in Santa Cruz at the California Fish and Game facility, and that facility allowed
us to have big seawater tanks to test some of these ideas. We also set up experiments in San Francisco
at one of the three waste water treatment plants, again a facility to test ideas. And finally, we wanted to
see where we could look at what the impact of this structure would be in the marine environment, and
we set up a field site at a place called Moss Landing Marine Lab in Monterey Bay, where we worked in a
harbor to see what impact this would have on marine organisms.

The laboratory that we set up in Santa Cruz was our skunkworks. It was a place where we were growing
algae and welding plastic and building tools and making a lot of mistakes, or, as Edison said, we were
finding the 10,000 ways that the system wouldn't work. Now, we grew algae in waste water, and we
built tools that allowed us to get into the lives of algae so that we could monitor the way they grow,
what makes them happy, how do we make sure that we're going to have a culture that will survive and
thrive. So the most important feature that we needed to develop were these so-called
photobioreactors, or PBRs. These were the structures that would be floating at the surface made out of
some inexpensive plastic material that'll allow the algae to grow, and we had built lots and lots of
designs, most of which were horrible failures, and when we finally got to a design that worked, at about
30 gallons, we scaled it up to 450 gallons in San Francisco.

So let me show you how the system works. We basically take waste water with algae of our choice in it,
and we circulate it through this floating structure, this tubular, flexible plastic structure, and it circulates
through this thing, and there's sunlight of course, it's at the surface, and the algae grow on the
nutrients.

But this is a bit like putting your head in a plastic bag. The algae are not going to suffocate because of
CO2, as we would. They suffocate because they produce oxygen, and they don't really suffocate, but the
oxygen that they produce is problematic, and they use up all the CO2. So the next thing we had to figure
out was how we could remove the oxygen, which we did by building this column which circulated some
of the water, and put back CO2, which we did by bubbling the system before we recirculated the water.
And what you see here is the prototype, which was the first attempt at building this type of column. The
larger column that we then installed in San Francisco in the installed system.

So the column actually had another very nice feature, and that is the algae settle in the column, and this
allowed us to accumulate the algal biomass in a context where we could easily harvest it. So we would
remove the algaes that concentrated in the bottom of this column, and then we could harvest that by a
procedure where you float the algae to the surface and can skim it off with a net.

So we wanted to also investigate what would be the impact of this system in the marine environment,
and I mentioned we set up this experiment at a field site in Moss Landing Marine Lab. Well, we found of
course that this material became overgrown with algae, and we needed then to develop a cleaning
procedure, and we also looked at how seabirds and marine mammals interacted, and in fact you see
here a sea otter that found this incredibly interesting, and would periodically work its way across this
little floating water bed, and we wanted to hire this guy or train him to be able to clean the surface of
these things, but that's for the future.

Now really what we were doing, we were working in four areas. Our research covered the biology of the
system, which included studying the way algae grew, but also what eats the algae, and what kills the
algae. We did engineering to understand what we would need to be able to do to build this structure,
not only on the small scale, but how we would build it on this enormous scale that will ultimately be
required. I mentioned we looked at birds and marine mammals and looked at basically the
environmental impact of the system, and finally we looked at the economics, and what I mean by
economics is, what is the energy required to run the system? Do you get more energy out of the system
than you have to put into the system to be able to make the system run? And what about operating
costs? And what about capital costs? And what about, just, the whole economic structure?

So let me tell you that it's not going to be easy, and there's lots more work to do in all four of those
areas to be able to really make the system work. But we don't have a lot of time, and I'd like to show
you the artist's conception of how this system might look if we find ourselves in a protected bay
somewhere in the world, and we have in the background in this image, the waste water treatment plant
and a source of flue gas for the CO2, but when you do the economics of this system, you find that in fact
it will be difficult to make it work. Unless you look at the system as a way to treat waste water,
sequester carbon, and potentially for photovoltaic panels or wave energy or even wind energy, and if
you start thinking in terms of integrating all of these different activities, you could also include in such a
facility aquaculture. So we would have under this system a shellfish aquaculture where we're growing
mussels or scallops. We'd be growing oysters and things that would be producing high value products
and food, and this would be a market driver as we build the system to larger and larger scales so that it
becomes, ultimately, competitive with the idea of doing it for fuels.

So there's always a big question that comes up, because plastic in the ocean has got a really bad
reputation right now, and so we've been thinking cradle to cradle. What are we going to do with all this
plastic that we're going to need to use in our marine environment? Well, I don't know if you know about
this, but in California, there's a huge amount of plastic that's used in fields right now as plastic mulch,
and this is plastic that's making these tiny little greenhouses right along the surface of the soil, and this
provides warming the soil to increase the growing season, it allows us to control weeds, and, of course,
it makes the watering much more efficient. So the OMEGA system will be part of this type of an
outcome, and that when we're finished using it in the marine environment, we'll be using it, hopefully,
on fields.

Where are we going to put this, and what will it look like offshore? Here's an image of what we could do
in San Francisco Bay. San Francisco produces 65 million gallons a day of waste water. If we imagine a
five-day retention time for this system, we'd need 325 million gallons to accomodate, and that would be

about 1,280 acres of these OMEGA modules floating in San Francisco Bay. Well, that's less than one
percent of the surface area of the bay. It would produce, at 2,000 gallons per acre per year, it would
produce over 2 million gallons of fuel, which is about 20 percent of the biodiesel, or of the diesel that
would be required in San Francisco, and that's without doing anything about efficiency.

Where else could we potentially put this system? There's lots of possibilities. There's, of course, San
Francisco Bay, as I mentioned. San Diego Bay is another example, Mobile Bay or Chesapeake Bay, but
the reality is, as sea level rises, there's going to be lots and lots of new opportunities to consider.
(Laughter)

So what I'm telling you about is a system of integrated activities. Biofuels production is integrated with
alternative energy is integrated with aquaculture.

I set out to find a pathway to innovative production of sustainable biofuels, and en route I discovered
that what's really required for sustainability is integration more than innovation.

Long term, I have great faith in our collective and connected ingenuity. I think there is almost no limit to
what we can accomplish if we are radically open and we don't care who gets the credit. Sustainable
solutions for our future problems are going to be diverse and are going to be many. I think we need to
consider everything, everything from alpha to OMEGA. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris
Anderson: Just a quick question for you, Jonathan. Can this project continue to move forward within
NASA or do you need some very ambitious green energy fund to come and take it by the throat?
Jonathan Trent: So it's really gotten to a stage now in NASA where they would like to spin it out into
something which would go offshore, and there are a lot of issues with doing it in the United States
because of limited permitting issues and the time required to get permits to do things offshore. It really
requires, at this point, people on the outside, and we're being radically open with this technology in
which we're going to launch it out there for anybody and everybody who's interested to take it on and
try to make it real. CA: So that's interesting. You're not patenting it. You're publishing it. JT: Absolutely.
CA: All right. Thank you so much. JT: Thank you. (Applause)