These facilities to be deployed on a brownfield

Algae, which have the particularity of grow and multiply rapidly, will may soon play a role in improving our environment. It is sufficient to provide them with water, light and few nutrients (nitrite, ammonia or sulfate). The CO2 being provided in abundance by the fumes from power plants coal, refineries, chemical plants or industry heavy. Just then harvested daily to produce oil (biodiesel) and recycle dry matter (biomass is ethanol). It is of interest. In growing and multiplying to algae absorb greenhouse gas and provide a cheap raw material.

Yet, this is not as simple. The secret of the recipe lies in the optimization of the reaction of photosynthesis in the heart of the process, by sorting the microalgae on the component and providing them with an environment designed and sharpened at the nearest retailing.

If the research date back to the 1970s, in the national laboratory for renewable energy (NREL), founded by Jimmy Carter, they were halted in 1996. Ten years more later on the other hand, "the increase in oil prices, concerns about national security related to oil dependence and the inevitability of State regulations future to control carbon emissions play in our favour," said Julianne Zimmerman, Director of Business Development for GreenFuel Technologies, a wavy by Isaac Berzin, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). Its bioreactors are of long hoses translucent triangular structure (to maximize sunlight), deployed on the unit which they recover the toxic fumes and the cooling water. Algae reduce the CO2 emissions by 40 and 86 nitrate. The daily harvest algae is automated, with a production rate of 14,000 litres of diesel per hectare and per year, and as much ethanol. The fuel may be consumed internally or sold to third parties. In all cases, GreenFuel anticipates that cost savings and/or fuel revenues should allow to amortise the investment in ten or twelve years. These facilities to be deployed on a brownfield. It even evokes already the development of "algae farms" in the desert, uninhabited and cultivating of the American Southwest areas. A first test runs currently on the site of a power station coal which the operator has requested anonymity. Two to four additional tests are expected before the end of the year. "We hope to deploy the first facilities pilot in 2007 or 2008", note Julianne Zimmermann.

Monitor brightness

Investors make them trust since GreenFuel Technologies concluded last December a second fundraising of $ 11 million by the California star of Draper Fisher Jurvetson venture capital firm. "They have an extraordinary technology." "I note simply that their system is dependent on the natural sunlight, with the limitations that implies," said David Bayless. Professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Ohio, he founded a Research Institute specializing in energy and the environment. With his team, he started in 1997 with research on a system of cultivation of microalgae on flexible vertical walls bathed by a continuous flow of water. With two specific goals: minimize congestion of bioreactors and control brightness to maximize photosynthesis.

In partnership with the national laboratory of Anchorage, which has developed a technology to collect and transmit solar light by optical fibre, the team of David Bayless submitted in 1999 in the Department of energy project which earned him a $ 1 million grant to continue their research. Technology has already been sold under license to an incubator of companies of renewable energy and clean technologies, Greenshift Corporation.

Other projects still underdeveloped considering even go further: making genetically engineered microalgae to make faster, more efficient and less costly natural reaction. In any case, it is the objective of j. Craig Venter, the controversial biologist who played a central role in the decoding of the human genome. Its Synthetic Genomics start-up has already lifted 30 million to this effect.