The word algae can mean different things to
different people and if you prefer to pronounce it 'Al-Jee' then, you know, there's example number
one. If you live somewhere in the world that happens to be next to the sea then you may well
consider the green slime that carpets the rocks and the smelly seaweed that washes up on the beach
to be nothing more than slightly annoying aspects of life by the seaside. And if you're somewhere
like coastal Florida then you'll no doubt be only too well aware of the surge of the red tides,
otherwise known as harmful algal blooms or HABs which are nasty toxic outbreaks that can destroy
marine habitats and kill fish and birds and even cause respiratory problems and eye irritation
in human beings that are unfortunate enough to swim through them. But that ability to proliferate
so rapidly is precisely what made algae one of the most successful organisms ever to exist in
nature. It played an absolutely fundamental role in creating a breathable atmosphere by absorbing
enormous quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen. Without that process
happening on a global scale hundreds of millions of years ago, life on land would never have got
going in the first place. In fact algae contain all the right stuff for organic life including
proteins, carbohydrates, nucleic acid and lipids, which are non-water-soluble fatty acids that
produce algae oil. And when those early primordial algal blooms died they sank to the bottom of the
oceans locking away all that carbon beneath the seabed, which over eons of geological time became
the vast deposits of oil that we humans have been busy plundering for the last 150 years or so. So
you could say it's quite ironic that an organism resulting in a substance that enabled human beings
to cause catastrophic changes to our climate might just turn out to be one of the key
materials to help us fix the problem! Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. Here's
a couple of fascinating facts about algae that you're welcome to use during your next
dinner date. A kilogram of algae absorbs 1.83 kilograms of carbon dioxide every day, essentially
to produce more algae. That's about 2.7 tonnes of CO2 per acre. A similar sized forest containing 25
year old maple trees sucks in about 2.2 kilograms of CO2 per day. That means you'd only need
about 1.2 kilos of algae to equal the carbon capture of an entire acre of forest. Algae grows
10 times more quickly than land-based plants too and it only needs a tenth of the space to produce
an equivalent amount of biomass, plus it uses 10 times less water than land crops and it can be
farmed in non-productive and non-arable regions which means it doesn't have to compete with other
crops or destroy existing ecosystems. Now all of that is very interesting and everything and would
definitely impress your dinner partner I reckon, but the question is - does any of it mean that
algae can actually be made into anything useful? And the answer appears to be a slightly
conditional 'yes potentially'. In fairness as more and more research is carried out the scientific
and commercial sectors are starting to realize just what an amazingly versatile resource algae
could be if the right focus and funding was thrown at it. Back in the oil crisis of the 1970s the
possibility of using algae to capture carbon and convert it into biomass and biofuels attracted
a lot of attention and by about 2015 or so as climate change was vaguely coming into view
for lawmakers around the world governments were throwing some serious funding into the industry
as they realized that deriving biofuel from algae would potentially displace far less agricultural
land than other existing fuel crops like corn and sugarcane. Biotech companies partnered
up with some of the biggest oil producers including Shell, Exxon and Chevron and it looked
like a genuine net zero carbon alternative to gasoline was on the horizon. It hasn't worked
out quite that triumphantly though sadly, at least not yet anyway. The trouble is the
research and development phase proved to be really very complicated indeed. It's not
just a matter of raking up a bit of seaweed, dissolving it in something nasty and siphoning
off the oil content. That'd be far too easy. It turns out there are upwards of 30,000 different
types of algae ranging from the tiny microalgae, better known as phytoplankton, which by the way
produce about 20 percent of the planet's oxygen, all the way up to huge kelp plants that can grow
to tens of meters long in certain parts of the ocean, and some estimates suggest there could be
as many as a million different species of algae on the planet. So the science bods have been taking
different strains of algae into their laboratories where they've been genetically modifying
them to see if they can come up with a new super-strain that can grow quickly enough
and contain sufficient quantities of the all important oil producing lipids to produce a viable
biofuel. It's a whole sphere of research known as bioprospecting and it's extremely expensive
and extremely time consuming. And even when the perfect strain is genetically derived, which
researchers reckon may be a few years away yet, then they still need to build facilities to
process it in large enough quantity and at low enough cost to make it commercially viable
against fossil fuels. Of the big oil giants who originally got involved with algae biofuels,
only Exxon has stuck with their research program, which is another irony given their track record
of climate denial and obfuscation! Since 2017 they've been working with a private firm called
Synthetic Genomics in Southern California to develop a process using CRISPR gene editing
technology to produce an optimized algal strain. Exxon haven't been shy in promoting what they call
their miniature science campaign on social media either which has led to some environmentalists
suggesting that a bit of green washing might be going on. Synthetic Genomics do have
a pretty impressive facility though which looks likely to hit Exxon's goal of producing 10,000
barrels of algae fuel per day by 2025, but you know when you set that against Exxon's current
daily production of 4 million barrels of crude oil it kind of puts the scaling problem into quite
stark context. Despite those daunting statistics, Joe Biden's administration is showing considerable
faith in the possibility of using algae fuel to offset at least some of the prodigious fossil fuel
consumption over in the states, with a particular leaning towards the aviation industry. In April
2021 the US Department of Energy committed $61.4 million to new biofuel research and are on track
to meet a commitment to demonstrate significant algae growth on a specified amount of land and to
scaling up production in outdoor ponds by 2025, with a 2050 goal of producing an algae strain
that can be genuinely cost competitive with fossil fuels on the energy market. But algae offers many
more low carbon commercial opportunities than just fuel oil. One of the most encouraging prospects
is bioplastics. Some algae contain a substance called polyhydroxybutyrate or PHB, which is a
polymer that can be used to replace polypropylene. The authors of this paper used what they
called metabolic engineering techniques to modify a strain of microalgae to increase
the proportion of PHB in its construction from 10 percent to 80 percent creating an almost
complete bioplastic just from this one process, and the great thing about this material is that
unlike polypropylene, which will be swimming around in our oceans for hundreds of years
causing damage wherever it goes, PHB breaks down in a normal household composter and if it did
make its way into the ocean then it'd dissolve within a year or so taking its carbon content down
to the seabed just like any other algae. And the really encouraging news is that there's already
a fairly well-established infrastructure in place for producing the material at scale. Algae
farms are widely used in many parts of the world to produce things like foods, medicines
and nutritional supplements like spirulina. One of the largest operations is run by a
company called iWi in the United States. They've got farms in Texas and New Mexico, each
consisting of 48 algae ponds the size of football fields. The processes required to obtain a
hundred grams of protein from beef create about 25 kilograms of CO2 equivalent emissions,
but according to another algae farm startup called SuSeWi in the UK, producing a hundred grams of
protein from algae actually removes 320 grams of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And it's
not like you'll have to make do with green slime for breakfast lunch and dinner. This isn't
the dystopian nightmare depicted in Charlton Heston's 1973 movie Soylent Green! The algae from
these farms will be converted into dried protein that will then be used as a constituent part of
other non-dairy alternatives SuSeWi founder Keith Coleman is planning to build a series of algae
ponds in Morocco that will cover 100 hectares, capable of producing 1700 tons of protein a year,
and he's even more ambitious than that. Apparently the next phase will be what he describes as
a full-scale farm covering 6,000 hectares of otherwise unusable land. That level of protein
production would compete with the world's largest chicken factories which churn out two million
chickens a week for human consumption using up about 100 million tons of water and emitting
a million tons of CO2 equivalent every year. But we do of course need to be realistic about how
we humans will respond to these new foodstuffs. For the foreseeable future at least, the reality
is that a large proportion of the human species will still insist on eating meat. But even here
algae's come up trumps. Scientists have discovered that a species of red algae called asparagopsis
taxiformis, which is found in tropical and warm temperate waters can be added to the feed of
ruminant animals to reduce their methane output. There are more than one and a half billion cows
in the world and combined with other livestock animals they currently produce methane at a
rate equivalent to more than three billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. But adding
just two percent of this red seaweed to the diets of those animals has been shown to reduce
their methane emissions by as much as 90 percent with nearly 99 effectiveness. The science bods are
still trying to identify precisely how it works but it appears that certain compounds in the algae
can somehow stop the production of methane in the animal's digestive system. The challenge,
as with everything we've looked at so far, is building enough algae farms and scaling
up production to meet demand, which arguably is where government incentives are so desperately
needed. But a startup called Simbrosia is already producing the feed additive at a sustainably
run facility in Hawaii. It's still very early days but the handful of small farms they're
currently working with have already avoided about four tons of CO2 equivalent emissions, and
Simbrosia are on the lookout for new partners to expand their operations as fast as possible. So
you know if you're a farmer or a smart investor then I would suggest you check them out. But
perhaps the easiest way to utilize algae for climate mitigation may be to grow very large
quantities of seaweed in ocean farms and sink it to the bottom of the deep sea where it'll
lock away its carbon content for good. That's essentially just mimicking exactly what nature
does but on a turbocharged scale. According to this 2019 study published in the online journal
Science Direct, there are about 48 million square kilometres of ocean that are suitable for this
kind of seaweed agriculture. The paper's authors calculated that if algae aquaculture was ramped
up from its current thousand square kilometres to about seven million square kilometres, or
about fifteen percent of the total suitable area, then that would be enough to completely
offset all the greenhouse gas emissions from current global agriculture. Now
that amount of seaweed would represent double the volume of all existing wild
species, so it's probably not a realistic rate of expansion. Plus any ocean farming of
algae would need extremely careful stewardship to ensure it didn't get out of control and start
killing off existing sea life and ecosystems. So perhaps we haven't found the elusive silver
bullet to fix the entire climate emergency here, but the paper suggests that targeted industrial
scale expansion of seaweed offset farms in high potential regions like Asia and the
Pacific coast of the United States could make a substantial impact on achieving the
IPCC goal of keeping global atmospheric warming to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial
levels. So it looks like there are some really very tangible solutions to be had from algae
if we can just convince commercial investors to grow some cojunes and speculate some of their
billions of hedge fund dollars. And get our law makers to grow some cojunes and put some
incentives in place to speed things up a bit. I'm sure you've got your own views on this one
so if you have then why not jump down to the comments section below and leave your thoughts
there. That's it for this week though. Before I go I just want to let you know about a podcast
I took part in recently with the folks at Spark Network. They're part of an organization called
iClima Earth who aim to redefine climate change investments by focusing on companies that can
genuinely enable the avoidance of CO2 emissions. And I'll leave a link to the podcast in
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