NASA Takes a Crack at Algal Biofuel

The nice thing about having the National Aeronautics and Space Administration tackle algal biofuels versus a startup is that NASA refrains from making impossible claims. The space agency’s Ames Research Center has come up with a technology that it says could potentially create aviation fuel, with the pleasant side affect of cleaning up sewage (or vice versa, depending on your priorities).

The fancy name for it is “offshore membrane enclosures for growing algae”, or OMEGA. The more straightforward explanation is, pardon the vulgarity, crap in a bag. NASA thinks that by putting wastewater and algae in large plastic bags and letting them float out to sea, it will provide good growing conditions for the algae, which will clean up the mess in the bag and produce oil for biofuels.

Every great idea needs a stroke of brilliance, and NASA’s is to allow the ocean environment to do most of the work. The rolling waves would keep the algae well mixed in the bag — one typical problem for algae is overcrowding, during which the top layer of algae can block sunlight for the rest. The plastic bags would actually be a space-age material, allowing oxygen and fresh water to leave and carbon dioxide, the algae’s other food, to enter, with the help of the motion in the ocean.

And the part about not making impossible claims? The project’s director, Jonathan Trent, is quoted by Greenwire saying, “We don’t think it will be cost-effective if we just go after the fuels.” That’s not pessimism speaking, but realism — after a recent flood of startups that claimed they could beat the cost of oil with algae, most scientists have returned to saying that algal biofuel is in fact quite expensive.

So instead, NASA would profit from the water treatment, fuel, fertilizer and carbon sequestration. Unmentioned are the chemicals and pharmaceutical products that some of the surviving startups are looking to make, but they could potentially be added in to the mix.

If the space agency can figure out the right kind of plastic and exactly how to deploy the floating bags, there could finally be an algae idea that works.