New Facility Uses Algae to Turn Coal Pollution Into Fuel
A coal fired power-plant in Oregon has started a pilot project to curb pollution by using algae to harvest greenhouse gases and make fuel and other useful products.
The power plant in Boardman, Oregon, is the state’s only coal-fired facility — and also the the state’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide. To deal with this problem, Portland General Electric and Columbia Energy Partners have started a pilot project to turn the otherwise nasty emissions into biodiesel, ethanol, and even livestock feed.
- » See also: Scientists Researching How Plants Can Make Petroleum
- » Get Gas 2.0 by RSS or sign up by email.
How does it work? Just like you and I breathe in oxygen to make energy, algae breathe in carbon dioxide to make energy. So, if you capture all that carbon dioxide and feed it to the algae, they grow. Algae are particularly oily little buggers so after they’ve matured they can be squeezed to make oil. The leftover algae carcasses can then be converted to ethanol and used as feed for livestock.
Right now, the project’s scale is so tiny that it’ll hardly scratch the surface of the 600-megawatt facility’s 5 million tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions. But project proponents are quick to point out that when the project goes full scale in 2½ years, it should reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 60% during daylight hours and produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel per year.
Posts Related to Algae, Biodiesel, and Ethanol:
- Bill Gates invests in The Great Green Hope - Algae Fuel
- Aquaflow Strikes Oil with “Green Crude” from Algae
- Taking Algae Biofuel to the Next Level: Solazyme Gets $45 Million in Funding to Reach Commercial Scale
- Different Algae for Different Strokes
- OriginOil Develops Portable Modular Round-the-Clock Algae Biodiesel System
- Cellulosic Ethanol Primer: Let’s Call it “Celluline”
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Source: The Oregonian
I sincerely think that this is one of the best ideas to curb our dependence on oil and that this new project of producing bio-diesel with algea and coal is the way of the future. Congratulations on this genius idea.
Simon Le Chene,
PS, How can we help and invest in this new project?
I hope this idea works, but if algae require an enriched CO2 environment to be cost effective, then we will continue to add CO2 to the air as we burn algaefuel in our cars.
Better yet . . .
Instead of burning algaefuel in mobile engines and releasing the CO2 to the air, the algae fuel should be be burned in the same power plant that produced the CO2 in the first place. The cellulosic waste should also be burned in the same facility. This might reduce processing costs.
Cars can be run on the electricity produced, without releasing carbon.
There’s still the question of the MERCURY which is carried along with the co2 in coal-burn emissions. How do we prevent the algae from taking THAT in and passing it to the biodiesel and animal feed (and then on to US)?