Algae and the oil sands: solution to an eco-disaster?
Most algae-to-biofuel ventures or projects I’ve seen in the past have been focused on areas in the U.S. south where the warmer climate is favourable to algae growth. Canada, from what I’ve been told, isn’t an ideal place to conduct such projects.
Turns out that’s more assumption than fact, at least according to the Alberta Research Council and a research consortium looking into CO2-to-algae-to-biofuel processes as a way of cleaning up the oil sands. “Most people felt you can’t grow algae to any great extent in higher latitudes, but in fact we’ve demonstrated it’s tangibly not true,” says John McDougall, CEO of the Alberta Research Council. “There’s a million plus species of algae that grow in Canada today, and if you choose the right ones you can grow them very well here.”
McDougall says they’ve also learned that growing algae in higher latitudes has some advantages. “We’ve learned that in very intense sunlight environments that algae actually turn off their functions and take a rest. In northern climates people don’t take siestas, and neither do algae.”
Still, we’ve got Canadian winters to deal with. McDougall says the consortium has ruled out the use of bioreactors to grow algae, simply because of the volume needed for a typical fossil fuel plant or oil sands operation. At the same time, the open pond route doesn’t work so well in colder weather. So they’ve determined that a covered pond system will work best, with the idea being that the heat already in flu gas will be enough to keep the pond warm. Their base test case is a pond where the algae consumes up to 30 per cent of the CO2 emitted from the smokestack of a 300-megawatt coal plant. “We’ve just come through a feasibility study that’s given us some design parameters,” says McDougall. “The next two years we get to the point where we’re dealing with practical issues.” He expects a commercial-scale project is about three to five years away, and so far there are no insurmountable barriers to reaching that goal.
As far as the oil sands are concerned, he envisions algae ponds that do more than just capture CO2. The plan is to grow the algae on toxic tailing ponds that have attracted much scrutiny in the oil sands. The algae doesn’t just consume CO2, they also love some heavy metals, nitrogen and residual hydrocarbons. If the approach could be made to work — including the required management of algae growth, handling and harvesting — the algae could be used to produce biofuels and a number of other products as they suck up CO2 and clean up other chemicals. “Industry is incredibly interested in this, because they can see it has a potential to take a cost burden out of the equation and turn it into a revenue-generating device, which is huge,” says McDougall, adding that he sees a new industry spawning from this research. “I’m really quite excited about this. There aren’t that many things that have the right buttons on them, but this one seems to have them.”
Carbon capture and geological sequestration. Char production and biosequestration. Turning CO2 into baking soda and other usable materials. Growing CO2-sucking algae to make biofuels and clean up toxic pools. Certainly we’ve got options — and we’re going to need them all.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
May 4th, 2008 at 8:00 am
If the algae absorbs the heavy metals from the tailing pond where do the heavy metals end up when the algae is used to create biofuel? Also where does the CO2 end up when you create biofuel and use it. The end result is still CO2 and heavy metal release into the environment just delayed. This is not a solution for the oil sands green house gas emissions problem.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
This sounds like another reason to just do “business as usual” at the good old tar sands and another excuse to keep coal plants running.
As the previous reader noted, this isn’t sequestering the carbon either – its simply deferring it slightly, as it will be released in it’s ‘new and improved’ forms. This biofuel would hardly be considered green either as it’s a byproduct from the oil and gas industry and is NOT coming from, a natural source.. not to mention only 30% of the carbon is being captured with the technology right now. 70% is still contributing to global warming and thats a LARGE amount when talking about the overall scale of emissions at the tar sands and our coal fired plants.
May 6th, 2008 at 10:27 am
I agree with the other two commenters. Using the carbon twice–this sounds like an argument for decreasing CO2 intensity, which is fine, but doesn’t sequester one ounce of carbon. Like most intensity arguments, this one misses the point entirely of having to achieve absolute reductions.
May 6th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
While you search for your perfect solution, coal will continue to be burned, and tar sands will still be mined.
This is a good CO2 mitigation measure, and will have spill-over effects for other new technologies. One day algae may turn into a good source of energy without the concentrated CO2 input, taking from the atmosphere instead.
In the meantime it might displace some hydrocarbon fuel use, thus reducing the total amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.
October 17th, 2008 at 12:03 am
There would be a very tangible advantage to producing some type of biofuel from the algae. Certainly it is not permanently sequestering the carbon dioxide if you convert to biofuel, though I would argue that it would be energetically favorable to shoot the algae down a hole, rather than liquified CO2 (which requires very high presures, so high energy expenditures).
With biofuels taking a larger market share you essentially defer the use of a proportionate amount of fossil fuel. Whereas the starting point for fossil fuel is long-ago sequestered carbon (which we now dump directly into the atmosphere) biofuels essentially recycle current CO2 because the starting point is the carbon already in the air. By recycling you have essentially reduced/reused the current CO2 rather than introducing NEW CO2.
Unfortunately the CO2 levels in the air are too low to be effectively used by algae. So this plan hooks them up to an emitting tailpipe, thereby scrubbing the flu-gases before they polute the air. If Canada gets this right, we could sell this to nearly ANY high intensity industry
– fertilizer plants (1 billion people would starve without them)
– steel smelters (automakers in Ontario)
– electrolytic plants (aluminum anyone? makes lighter cars you know)
March 14th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Starry-eyed optimism is good for inspiring bright inventive minds to conjure up some workable ideas, but for every solution there is a problem.
Important to sift the rhetoric from the facts.
Our problem is not “How to fuel our cars”, but how to stop using our cars.
Global warming will not be solved by biodiesel nor ecologically considerate gasoline production.
Automobiles are extremely inneficient modes of transportation and that is where the real problem lies.
Andrew Knight
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:34 pm
I enjoy the idea for phytoremediation purposes, an because I use algae in my research to clean up heavy metals (in academia, not for big oil) I think this sounds viable. I am also aware of scientific literature and studies that would support that increasing CO2 levels helps to increase metal sequestration (and obviously algal growth), so the entire schematic is well-thought out.
My only point would be that you could not use these algae for biofuels. Aside from the fact that I think there are way cleaner alternatives than biofuel (Watch “who killed the electric car”), this particular source would contain massively high levels of metal (remember the days before unleaded?) causing the most toxic smog upon combustion.
Therefore, we would be making a fuel that is dirtier than the dirt we cleaned in the first place with the algae. The main goal of the ponds in the oil sands is remediation, and I assume that the algae will be allowed to sediment to the bottom of the pond, effectively removing the dissolved, toxic metals with it at is goes, turning into some far-off generations’ mineral, bitumen or fuel.