Algae power

Current plans to greatly expand research into new energy sources include a variety of alternative hydrocarbon replacements. Some of these are very unique and a recent issue of The Scientist describes the potential for using lipid-forming algae as a future source of fuel. Featuring the Cargill solar evaporation salt ponds in the southern horn of San Francisco Bay, the article stresses that ponds such as these hold great promise for the future, because the microalgae they can grow may be used to produce a significant supply of energy.

The concept is not new, having been around for at least 30 years or more. In fact, while I was at FAO in Rome, I was fortunate enough to carry out a microalgae project in Lake Chad on the south-western edge of the Sahara Desert in the late 80s. Lake Chad, which is shared by Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria and Niger has shrunk in size from 30,000 km2 to 3,000 km2 in the last 40 years as a combined result of a prolonged drought and the uncontrolled irrigation it initiated.  Lake Chad also happens to be home to a great many species of algae and cyanobacteria, both of which have been long used as a source of food protein bt local tribes.  In looking at the potential use of algae as an alternative source of hydrocarbons, the indigenous algae we examined were a particular genus, Botryococcus, which contains over 90% of their weight as intracellular oil globules.  Processing was not particularly difficult as all that had to be done was to break the cells and centrifuge off the oil.

In those days, however, the price of oil was highly volatile and beginning to drop. As a result, the incentive for further commercialization of this resource was largely reduced.  Indeed, that has been the history of alternative energy research.  From the time of the first major oil crisis in the early 70s until now, the amount of research into all forms of alternative energy was controlled by OPEC.

You would think that with our expanding knowledge of global warming; our statistics on the explosion of fossil-fuel based CO2 production and our understanding of the ocean's limited capacity to sequester CO2, that worldwide research into alternative sources of energy would have steadily increased over the years, but it hasn't. Regardless of all those issues that really should have driven the research into alternative energy sources, the only thing that controlled the amount of research carried out was - you guessed it - the price of oil.  And OPEC will continue to use the price of oil as a disincentive for future alternative energy research.