Author: Jennifer Kite-Powell / Source: Forbes
Charles Greene is a climate scientist who looks at the impact of climate on marine life. He’s a Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University and member of the Marine Algo Industrialization Consortium (MAGIC) which has a grant from the Department of Energy to look into the usability of biofuels.
In February 2018, Greene presented his views on how algae could provide the solution to the grand global challenges of the 21st century, energy, climate and food security at the American Geophysical Union’s biannual ocean sciences meeting, in Portland, Oregon.
What’s so great about algae? It grows 10 times more rapidly than terrestrial plants, and you need less than a tenth of the land to produce it. It grows on in non-productive and non-arable land, it doesn’t compete with other crops for land, you can use a variety of water sources, and there’s no fertilizer runoff or downstream eutrophication.
“Microalgae grow much faster than land plants and will be a source of biofuel that makes sense environmentally and economically,” said Greene.
Greene believes that algae could be the answer to all of those challenges as biomass for carbon-neutral fuels, animal and marine feed and high-quality protein supplements for humans.
Global view
In 2007, Greene’s group, the Cornell AlgoBiofuel Consortium was funded by Royal Dutch Shell to look a way to produce biofuel using microalgae.
“We asked ourselves what was the environment going to be like when we couldn’t use fossil fuel anymore, so we looked at co-products that you can create simultaneously while you are producing the fuel,” said Greene. “After you remove the lipids from the algae, we looked at what we could do with that and discovered that you could use algae as a nutritional supplement for aquafeed (salmon and white shrimp) and land animals like pigs and chickens.”
“What if we wanted to produce all the fuels that the US needs and then the world, then how much land would we need and then how much protein would we need,” said Greene. “On a global scale, we could produce all of the liquid fuel demands, and we could do it an area one-third the size of Texas. At the same time, we would also produce 10 times the amount of protein as produced with soy from all over the world.”
“By 2050 we will have 9.5 to 10 billion people in the world, and with algae, we’ve found a way to feed those people by producing a large amount of protein. Maybe we can’t convince the Western world to change their diets, but we do have a way to get protein to the developing world that alone makes it interesting,” said Greene.
Green takes both a fuel-based and environmental approach to algae.
“If you look at this from a carbon neutral perspective – not introducing any new Co2 into the atmosphere – times have changed and continue to evolve,” adds Greene. “Most of the light vehicle fleet will be electrified by 2030 to 2050, and there won’t be as much of a need for liquid fuels, there will still be a need for liquid fuels for jets or shipping, but there will always be a need for food.”
“Regarding other global challenges, like food security, etc., if we have potential to produce large volumes with algae rather than terrestrial plants that are currently providing huge implications of land use, why wouldn’t we choose that path?” said Greene.
“One of the things that drive our CO2 emissions, is that we’re changing our use of the land, taking down a rainforest o produce or palm trees in Indonesia to produce palm oil,” said Greene. “If we can produce higher quality, more nutritious products in less area, there’s no need to take down the rainforest so that practice comes to an end.”
“We can produce the same and more from the land that’s already developed and gain an environmental perspective, that’s huge,” added Greene.
“There are all high-value products out there, algae has a lot of characteristics. anticarcinogenic, anti-inflammatory, people have been producing for these kinds of specialty products for a while, but those are not a large market,” said Greene.
“We have about 10-15 years to figure out what the solutions will be because it will take three decades to implement them at scale to solve these global challenges, then it’s game over,” added Greene.
“One 1,000 commercial algae facility costs about 500 million dollars to build, so you can’t go to Silicon Valley to make that happen, right now companies are doing this at demonstrations/R & D scale, or on a smaller scale like nutriceutical companies, but no one is doing it on a large scale, a commodity scale,” said Greene.
Mariliis Holm is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Non/Food, an early stage startup based in Los Angeles, with an agenda of creating radically sustainable algae-based foods that reduce agriculture’s resource and carbon footprint. She’s taking the matter into her own hands at a micro level.
Nonfood’s first product is the Nonbar, an algae-based snack bar that contains 37% algae and aquatic plant ingredients, already higher than any other ready-to-eat food product on the market which stands around 1-2%, by adding Spirulina. It has micro and macronutrients, nine grams of clean protein, antioxidants, vitamin A, calcium and absorbable iron.
Holm says that if she had one silver bullet for sustainable future food, it would be green and loaded with algae.
“Algae is the most efficient group of organisms on Earth turning CO2, sunlight, and water into densely nutritious food for all living animals for more than 3.5 billion years,” said Holm. “The future I envision consist of individuals and communities growing their own algae that can be eaten directly, blended into products or used as a feed for cellular agriculture.”
Holm has her own photobioreactor developed by Spira Inc. a DC-based start-up which was founded by Elliot Roth. She says that since 2016, she’s been working with the challenge of how to feed planet Earth and Mars in 2050 sustainably and maintain the pleasure of eating.
“Last summer (in 2017), after growing Spirulina, trying the green stuff…
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