Algae for Fuel - a QUEST Nebraska Feature [MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: As the world's gas tank fuels more and more cars, a trip to the pump raises a red flag for biologist Mike Mendez. He's convinced a fuel alternative is needed now. MIKE MENDEZ: It's overwhelming, the energy situation. We use 18 million barrels a day. Our whole economy, everything in life is based upon this liquid fuel. I have three boys. What's their future going to be like? GEORGE OYLER: It affects everyone in the world. There's no one that will not be impacted by the scarcity of oil. NARRATOR: University of Nebraska biologist George Oyler is collaborating with Mendez' company, Sapphire Energy, on a solution that they say can have real world impact. Algae as fuel. - The oil that we use from the ground right now is really algae that grew over vast oceans and over millions of years. That algae settled to the ground and became petroleum oil over a period of millions of years. We want to accelerate that process into a single year. NARRATOR: But can a microscopic one celled plant create gas on a commercial scale? GEORGE OYLER: All the energy that we burn right now comes from sunlight. Algae grows very quickly, makes single cells, and makes lots of oil instead of stems, roots, and the other components of plants. Each algae is up to 50% oil, and that allows us to make biofuels very quickly and very efficiently. So it really comes down to converting that sunlight into usable fuel. We have enough sunlight that's coming onto the Earth's surface every year to make an essentially endless supply of oil. We just need to learn how to convert the sunlight into algae and to oil more efficiently and economically than nature does it over millions and millions of years. What type of cell is that? NARRATOR: To do that, Oyler's team will first have to identify the best algae types. The challenge is that there may be 200,000 algae strains. GEORGE OYLER: We're trying to go from wild algae organisms that grow in ponds and lakes and streams around the world, but we're trying to find ones that grow well as a crop. You have to remember that corn started maybe 8,000 years ago as a simple weed, and it took 8,000 years to get to the high productivity corn that we have now. We're finding ones that produce oil well and will tolerate stress, variations in temperature, winter temperature, summer temperatures, and be disease resistant. NARRATOR: But can what works in a university lab operate at a massive industrial scale? MIKE MENDEZ: You can't think like an industry where you're making a high end product. This is not a high end product. This is a commodity. You have to start thinking like a farmer, and I think that that's the way that we needed to approach the problem. Think like a farmer. NARRATOR: But there's a catch. Algae isn't a farm crop. MIKE MENDEZ: It's a wild plant. No one's taking a wild plant and just throwing it and growing it to scale. You don't do that with corn. You don't do that with wheat. NARRATOR: Sapphire's challenge is to transform a microscopic plant into a new farm crop. EMMA VALDEZ: Algae is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet. A plate like this contains millions of cells on it. What I can do with this plate is take a loop full, make multiple copies. These plates will give rise to a flask of dense culture. That dense culture can give rise to a 20 liter container such as this one. And I can grow this to density in a little over a week. NARRATOR: At each stage, technicians increase the size and scope of algae production. At the lab, their last test uses mini ponds that mimic an outdoor aquatic farm. To launch a commercial algae crop, Mike's team ships algae species to their test farm. But it's not a location you'd expect for a crop that grows in water. MIKE MENDEZ: New Mexico has two of the things we need most. The amount of sunlight we get here is probably the best in the world, definitely within the United States. Underground there's a huge reservoir of salt water. You can't grow crops with it. You can't farm with it. And so it's not really used for anything. So these are two resources that's kind of unlimited here in the state. For us, this is the perfect place to grow algae. NARRATOR: But skeptics say that growing algae outdoors is unreliable. Predators could eat the algae, and cold weather would kill it. For two years, Sapphire has been nurturing algae year-round at 20 acres of ponds in Las Cruces. MIKE MENDEZ: When we scale from 40 foot to 100 foot to 300 foot, the amount of production that we're gaining is not only holding, but in a lot of cases we see improvement as we're scaling up. NARRATOR: Once the algae matures in ponds, it's separated from water by a centrifuge, creating a thick algae paste. And that paste gets fed into this test plant extractor that uses green solvents to crack open the algae cells and release oil. - There's already a technique for extracting algae. You take it directly from the soybean communities. It's more cost effective per kilogram than it would be to do what one gets for soybeans. NARRATOR: The result is green crude. But is it cost effective? Right now algae oil costs roughly $7 per gallon or $300 per barrel. Sapphire will open a new 300 acre test plant in 2012, the largest in the nation. By producing 1 million gallons per year, they expect the price to drop. - Our target really is about $80 a barrel. That's where we believe is a good entry point into the market. NARRATOR: What drives algae as an alternative to fossil fuel? An easy fit into our existing energy system. - Green crude can go through a refinery process and come out as a fuel that is what we call a drop in fuel. Essentially, chemically identical. That means it can go into the pump or go into a pipeline and into your engine as the engine is right now. And that's a huge advantage. So it's possible to make the same thing that we burn in our engines from algae with the processes we're developing. NARRATOR: But can Sapphire reach its million gallon production goal in just two years? MIKE MENDEZ: You know, it took 7,000 years for us to get corn to where it is today. We don't have 7,000 years to do this. I don't have 7,000 days. I'm going to have to do whatever it takes to speed up the process and get algae to the same kind of framework as corn is. You plant it, you harvest if, you know exactly what you're going to get per acre every year. It has to be a real commodity, not an experiment anymore. NARRATOR: Continue exploring the science in our lives at netnebraska.org/quest. [MUSIC PLAYING]