Nigel Quinn

Nigel Quinn:

As a Biofuel, What’s It All About, Algae?

When water resources engineer Nigel Quinn attended his first algae biomass summit in San Francisco in 2007, he estimates about 600 people showed up. Last month, he attended the second summit in Seattle, and the place was bursting with more than 1,200 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, industry representatives, home-grown researchers, and scientists like Quinn, who were there to find out what’s all the buzz about turning single-celled organisms into biofuels.

“There’s a lot of energy out there,” Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Quinn said, no pun intended, of the algae biomass movement. “It’s very easy to grow – all you need is sunlight and water. But with fuel from algae, it’s all about the economics. In order to cultivate and convert algae to oil, you need huge systems.” Right now, he noted, algael biofuel can probably be made for a non-competitive $9 or $10 a gallon.

Therein lies the challenge – to overcome the technological and space limitations so that algae can become a player in the clean alternative-fuels market. That is why Quinn has been supported by EBI to make “A Realistic Technology and Engineering Assessment of Algae Biofuel Production,” the title of his one-year project.

“We want to define the area and look at the issues,” said Quinn, whose plan is to invite a half-dozen world algae experts to a three-day panel discussion and then “extract good information like an algael press.”

Ironically, one of the earliest ideas for processing fuel from algae came from legendary environmental engineer William J. Oswald at UC Berkeley. A wastewater treatment specialist who died three years ago, Oswald developed the water treatment technology that uses algae photosynthesis in open integrated ponds – a system that now treats unsanitary water in countries throughout the world. Quinn said Oswald became interested in possible biofuel applications in the 1960s, but with the low cost of gasoline at the time, few were interested in an optional fuel.

When Oswald’s research group ended its campus work, Quinn absorbed several of the remaining scientists in his Berkeley Lab program, one of which was Tryg Lundquist, who had worked with Oswald for over 10 years. Together, the two wastewater specialists proposed to EBI that they do a literature search to determine the state of the algael art.

Quinn describes algae as a ubiquitous organism. For years a staple of health supplements in the pharmaceutical and nutriceutical worlds, algae now has the potential to offer a bio-alternative to fossil fuels. Quinn sees the possibility of the CO2-absorbing algae growing next to power plants as a way of giving carbon credits to the industry. Others are touting ocean farming as an answer to the land-use challenge. Ideas abound, but algae oil production to date has mainly been inside laboratories.

“We hope to provide Chris (Somerville, EBI Director) with some thoughts about where we’d like the EBI to go in this area,” Quinn said.