Mad Like Tesla

Underdog Inventors and their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy

Tyler Hamilton

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781770900738
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

An "illuminating and important" look at the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are working to save us from catastrophic climate change ( New York Journal of Books ). Nikola Tesla was considered a mad scientist by the society of his time for predicting global warming more than a hundred years ago. Today, we need visionaries like him to find sources of alternative energy and solutions to this looming threat. Mad Like Tesla takes an in-depth look at climate issues, introducing thinkers and inventors such as Louis Michaud, a retired refinery engineer who claims we can harness the energy of man-made tornadoes, and a professor and a businessman who are running a company that genetically modifies algae so it can secrete ethanol naturally. These individuals and their unorthodox methods are profiled through first-person interviews, exploring the social, economic, financial, and personal obstacles that they continue to face. Also covered is the existing state of green energy technologies—such as solar, wind, biofuels, smart grid, and energy storage—offering a ray of hope against a backdrop of dread. "Hamilton makes complex technologies comprehensible." — Library Journal

CHAPTER 5

Not Your Average Pond Scum

Making Fuel Refineries Out of Algae

“As a group, algae may be the only photosynthetic organism capable of producing enough biofuel to meet transportation fuel demands.”

— Dr. Timothy Devarenne, Texas A&M University

Tar balls and crude patties. That’s what came to mind while driving down a sunny stretch of road in West Palm Beach, Florida’s self-proclaimed “city of unsurpassed beauty.” It was June 22, 2010, and while my trip dropped me on the side of Florida left untouched by BP’s rapidly expanding oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, I knew that other parts of the Sunshine State weren’t so lucky. Still gushing after two devastating months, the spill that had left black gooey streaks and oil puddles along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama had begun to tarnish Florida’s northwest Panhandle. Pensacola Beach, usually bustling with tourists at this time of the year, was uncharacteristically sedate, a heartbreaking situation in a state already in the grips of a housing crisis.

Minutes from my destination, I turned onto a country road and drove for two or three kilometers before realizing I had gone too far. Throwing the rental car in reverse, I backed up 50 meters and finally spotted the driveway that took me to an inconspicuously located outdoor test facility operated by Algenol Biofuels. Long, narrow rows of knee-high greenhouse structures stood next to a cluster of office trailers, all of it hidden to the outside world by walls of wind-blown palm trees. Marine biologist Frank Jochem, director of the five-acre facility, met me at my car and we walked to a trailer where I was introduced to Harlan Miller, a photosynthesis expert who joined the company in 2008. As the three of us waited for Paul Woods, the Canadian-born founder and chief executive of Algenol, the BP oil spill that had occupied my mind during the drive became the topic of conversation. Jochem, speaking with a German accent, shook his head in obvious disgust. “I don’t know what’s worse, all of the leaked oil or the chemicals they’re using to fight the slick.”

Disturbing times, yes, but it makes their work at Algenol that much more meaningful. Jochem and Miller are part of a growing team that is pushing toward a future where feeding our fuel and chemical addictions doesn’t mean drilling deeper offshore or relying on sticky bitumen hastily extracted from the tarry sands of northern Alberta. The company has developed and patented a low-cost method for producing clean-burning ethanol fuel from genetically enhanced blue-green algae, otherwise known as cyanobacteria, a photosynthetic cousin of algae that most people would lump into the category of pond scum.1 That’s right, as strange as it sounds, within the next decade the car you drive could be powered by fuel made from the guts, sweat, or excrement of microscopic organisms that would rather be hanging out in your fish tank. The seed of Algenol’s creation was planted in the early 1980s when Woods, then a 22-year-old undergraduate studying genetics at the University of Western Ontario, learned that some species loosely labelled “microalgae” can naturally produce ethanol when subject to certain environmental conditions.2 Woods wondered if these organisms could be genetically engineered to maximize ethanol production and, after convincing himself they could, he pursued the idea with vigor.

Nearly three decades later, what began as a student’s curiosity — a “glorified hobby,” as Woods described it — is now a thriving startup with more than 100 employees, $100 million plus in financial backing and Fortune 500 partnerships that include chemical giant Dow Chemical, industrial gas supplier Linde Group, and oil-refiner Valero Energy. Getting from there to here wasn’t a straight line. There were many bends, bumps, and detours along Wood’s journey, which is still far from over and not likely to get any smoother. But if Algenol plays its cards right — and like all of the stories in this book that’s a big if — the company’s algae-fuel process could help make deep-sea drilling and other high-risk oil projects appear like foolish, uneconomic pursuits.

Recycling CO2

Let’s begin with a little primer on ethanol. Also known as grain alcohol, ethanol is a renewable fuel that has the potential to displace up to 85 percent of the gasoline used in North American passenger vehicles.3 It can also replace fossil fuels in the production of ethylene, the basic chemical feedstock for making many types of plastics. The reason ethanol is “renewable” is because we don’t make it from the skeletons locked away in Earth’s closet, like fossil fuels made up mostly of dead microorganisms that have accumulated over tens of millions of years. Instead, ethanol is made from plants that are part of a natural closed-loop cycle of growth, death, and decomposition on the Earth’s surface. Burning ethanol releases carbon dioxide but in a carbon-neutral way, meaning the carbon in the CO2 emitted during combustion is re-consumed by the growth of new plant life. In theory, at least, no new sources of carbon are introduced to the cycle; the carbon is essentially recycled. The release of CO2 from burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal, on the other hand, is carbon-positive because it adds carbon to the atmosphere that was previously held in deep storage within the Earth’s crust. The more we take from underground and burn at the surface, the higher the concentration of sun-trapping CO2 in the atmosphere and the greater the greenhouse-gas effect playing havoc with climate systems. “The bottom line is that atmospheric carbon dioxide acts as a thermostat in regulating the temperature of the Earth,” according to NASA climate scientist Andrew Lacis. “The rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to human industrial activity is therefore setting the course for continued global warming.”4 If we are to keep climate change under control, we must leave as much of that “ancient” carbon permanently underground. We need to keep the microscopic skeletons in Earth’s Paleozoic closet locked up, and we need to throw away the key.

But ethanol isn’t without controversy, which mostly concerns how it’s made and what’s used to make it. In North America, virtually all of the ethanol that’s produced is made by fermenting the starches in corn, a crop that is heavily subsidized and energy-intensive to grow. Most studies suggest that, based on the entire production lifecycle of corn-derived ethanol, the energy required to plant, grow, harvest, transport, and ultimately process the corn into ethanol is almost as much as the energy you get from the ethanol itself. With such a poor energy balance, and because the energy inputs are likely to be fossil fuel in origin, there are serious doubts in the scientific community about the emission-reduction benefits and sustainability of making ethanol from corn. Complicating matters is that corn is food for both humans and animals. As more of the world’s corn crops are used to make fuel, there is widespread concern, and already plenty of evidence, that food and animal feed prices will rise.5

Brazilians have been successful at making ethanol from sugarcane, using a process that returns several units of energy for every unit of energy put in. Sugarcane, however, is a tropical crop that for obvious reasons isn’t big business in North America. Besides, dense carbon-rich forests in Brazil are being clear-cut to make more room for sugarcane fields. This practice results in more greenhouse-gas emissions, not less, and defeats the purpose of transitioning to ethanol. To move beyond these controversies, U.S. and Canadian efforts at improving ethanol’s energy balance have focused largely on technologies that can convert a wider range of plant materials — industrial wood and paper waste, forest slash, agricultural residues such as corn stover and wheat straw, and dedicated crops such as switchgrass — into cellulosic ethanol, meaning no more dependence on food crops such as corn and sugarcane. Cellulose gives structure to the cell walls of plants and makes up the majority of all plant matter. Sometimes called roughage, it’s the fiber in plants that we find difficult to digest. But here’s the thing: cellulose has a lot of sugar locked up inside it; the challenge is getting it out. So those scientists making cellulosic ethanol must rely on the use of special enzymes, such as those found in the guts of termites or used by certain types of fungi, which have an easier time than humans in liberating the sugars in cellulose. Another approach is to use the right balance of heat, pressure, and oxygen to directly convert or “gasify” the biomass into synthetic gas, which is then fed to special microbes or some other catalyst that turns the gas into liquid ethanol.

Methods vary, as do results, but the return on energy is generally better. Making cellulosic ethanol from fast-growing switchgrass, for example, is believed to return 3.5 to 7 units of energy for every unit consumed. It can also lower greenhouse-gas emissions by 94 percent compared to gasoline.6 The overall goal with cellulosic ethanol is to not compete with food crops or for land that is ideal for growing food (or which is already heavily forested). The aim is to produce more fuel using less space, reduce reliance on fresh water, and constantly improve the energy output of the fuel relative to the energy inputs required to make it. The underlying problem is that cellulosic ethanol, compared to corn ethanol, remains expensive to make even after many years of research and demonstration. “Today’s cellulosic ethanol is competitive with the petrol it is supposed to displace, but only when the price of crude oil reaches $120 a barrel,” according to an October 2010 report in The Economist.

That’s where Algenol hopes to demonstrate a significant edge. It claims it can produce ethanol from blue-green algae that is competitive with oil priced as low as $30 a barrel and it has an energy return of 5 to 1. And Algenol can do it using marginal land, dramatically less space, and zero fresh water. All it needs is a steady supply of sunshine, carbon dioxide, and seawater — all of which are plentiful — and some nutrients (phosphorous and nitrogen) for the algae to munch on. Animal manure, for example, is nice snack food for most algae. In return, Algenol says it will produce a steady flow of renewable ethanol fuel for less than $1 per gallon that displaces the use of gasoline and petroleum-based chemicals. As an added bonus, the company says that for every gallon of ethanol it produces, it also produces a gallon of fresh water. That feature alone could prove compelling for regions, such as Australia or the U.S. Southwest, plagued by chronic drought, and in many African countries where freshwater supplies are limited.

Refinery in a Cell

In his 20s, Paul Woods was so passionate about the algae-to-ethanol concept he had thought up in university that he spent five years after graduation trying to build support for it. He was determined to be an entrepreneur, to not get trapped in a safe, nine-to-five job like his parents had during his middle-class upbringing. His dad was a computer engineer and his mom an insurance agent, and their advice to him emphasized carefulness and caution.7 His instincts, on the other hand, told him to take risks and trust his gut. Blinded by inspiration, he traveled around Canada during the mid-1980s meeting with officials from oil and gas companies in a gutsy yet naive effort to win them over. “Honest to god, I thought the merit of the idea was good enough, was so fantastic, so simple and elegant, that somebody out there would get it,” Woods, now in his late 40s, recalled while we sat huddled, along with Jochem and Miller, in an office trailer at the West Palm facility. “I went to companies such as Suncor, or Sunoco at the time, and everybody hated it. They just hated it. They thought I was out of my goddamn mind.” At the time, who wouldn’t?

Like PAX Scientific’s Jay Harman, Woods isn’t a suit. He showed up for our meeting in shorts, sandals, and a collared short-sleeve shirt with a funky paisley design. With red, nearly shoulder-length hair, he has a laid-back demeanor that suggests he could have been a party animal in university and may still be today. He’s professional but in a fun way, stern when he needs to be but willing (at least in my presence) to chat and joke as if sharing a drink with friends. At one point in the conversation, the chatter turns to hockey, a sure sign that two Canadians are in the room.

Looking back at his early attempts to woo the oil companies, Woods realized his timing couldn’t have been worse. Climate change was non-existent as a political issue, peak oil concerns remained at the fringe, and an oil glut following the 1970s energy crisis meant the price of crude in the mid-1980s was less than half of what it cost at the beginning of that decade. He might as well have been selling tofu to cattle ranchers. Woods turned to fine art through the latter half of the ’80s; he owned and operated a small art g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• More Bang for the Buck?
• Out of This World
• A New Spin on Energy
• Copying Nature’s Playbook
• Not Your Average Pond Scum
• Secrecy in Cedar Park
• Searching for Miracles
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author