“How do you milk algae for their oil? Tiny milkmaids with very tiny tweezers.”
Dr. Richard Sayre, head of the Enterprise Biofuels Insitute at the Danforth Plant Biology Center has a whole comedy shtick to ease the listener into the serious topic of algae’s oil eventually becoming a major source of transportation and other fuels. His laboratory has devised a system to extract the oil (up to 50% of their weight) from algae without damaging them, so that the same organism can replenish its oil droplets again and again.
As the country scrambles to find economical substitutes for fossil fuels, the algae most of us think of as “pond scum” have emerged as a potentially major source of raw materials. And when it comes to research on these one-celled organisms, St. Louis has become a key center for basic research. Last year, both of the Department of Energy’s main grants for algae research were granted to St. Louis institutions; $15 million went to the Danforth Center, and $20 million to Washington University.
In addition, $44 million in ‘stimulus’ funds plus an additional $16 million from industry is being used to establish the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB), a consortium of 24 companies, universities and national laboratories whose goal is to make fuel and other bioproducts from algae commercially viable as quickly as possible. The Danforth Center heads the consortium, with Sayre as lead scientist and Dr. Jose Olivares as executive director. The aim is to explore different approaches to solving problems, and then to develop the most promising ones. For example, ‘milking algae’ by the process to be described later in this article will be evaluated against other approaches to growing algae and harvesting their oil.
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This article was originally published in the St. Louis Beacon.