UNH Researchers Look at Using Algae to Produce Biodiesel

1137 ( :10 I’m standing here on top of the unit we have for making biodiesel)

UNH chemical engineering professor Ihab Farag climbs up scaffolding to demonstrate a processor that turns waste oil from the university’s cafeteria into biodiesel.
Biodiesel is made primarily from plant oils – soybean, canola, rapeseed – that Farag says is more environmentally-friendly than diesel.
1127 :48 it’s coming from vegetable oil, so it’s cleaner, you don’t get the sulfurs in it, you don’t get acid rain issues, it doesn’t give particulates which are suspect to be cancer-causing

And without any modifications almost any diesel engine built in the last 15 years can use biodiesel …
(bus sound) currently buses on UNH’s campus run on it.
And for the last five years, biodiesel has also fueled city vehicles in Keene.
But Farag says there’s a major drawback – it takes an acre of most crops to produce only 100 gallons of biodiesel per year.
1118 :58 it has been estimated that if we are using just something like soybean and want to produce biodiesel for the whole country, we need almost an area of land that’s about two and a half to three times the area of Texas

That would be an environmental nightmare.
So Farag and Master Chemical Engineering student Justin Ferrentino are looking at a plant that’s capable of producing much more oil :algae.
Inside the university’s biodiesel lab, Ferrentino holds up a glass jar filled with a sea-green powder.
(1115 this is freeze dried cells that we’ve grown in our photo-bioreactor..)
He’s testing different ways of extracting oil from these single-celled algae plants to produce the most biodiesel.
1118 ..people have projected with microalgae you can grow between five and 15-thousand gallons per acre per year, so it’s a big difference.

Ferrentino has built two four foot fiberglass tanks, surrounded by florescent lights and a milar sheet to reflect the light.
The contraption is called a photo-bioreactor – with the right amount of light the algae here grows rapidly.
1133 2:45 when I fill these with growth medium and then add the cells to them and they just multiply, they divide, they double every ten to 15 hours, when they’re growing exponentially

The more cells, the more oil, and the more biodiesel.
Ferrentino’s photo-bioreactor is small –producing only a tenth of a gram of biodiesel.
But build one on a larger scale where there’s lots of sunlight, like the desert southwest, and it could potentially produce thousands of gallons on just an acre of land.
And Farag says because carbon is needed to fertilize algae growth – the potential exists to remove greenhouse gases while simultaneously producing biodiesel.
1122 :33 if we can connect it with a wastewater treatment plant where they have a lot of waste coming in with lots of carbon in it then you can consumer the carbon to grow the algae and at the same time clean up the wastewater.

But skeptics say one of the biggest challenges is making algae production economical.
Unlike other biodiesel production which requires tilling land, high algae production requires building expensive photo-bioreactors.
Commercial production would initially yield fuel that could cost between 20 and 50 dollars a gallon.
Ferrentino recognizes the drawbacks, but says their research is worth pursuing.
1136 1:14 I think that our energy needs are not necessarily going to be solved with a magic bullet, but I think this is certainly one part of it, being that you don’t need arable land you have the added benefit of maybe being able to use the carbon from flue gases from power plants, maybe being able to treat wastewater. It has some significant added benefits so it could be one piece of the energy picture.

For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.