[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]

♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow

♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around

Dr. Regina: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. I’m here with my co-host and he hasn’t been on our show for a while, so I’m gonna welcome him back, Jordan Baker.

Jordan: Hi!

Regina: How’s it going?

Jordan: Good. I don’t know if I was here last when I was a butcher, but I think I’ve switched careers, I guess everybody knows.

Regina: You’d switched. Everybody knows. Now you’re a home inspector.

Jordan: Home inspector, yeah.

Regina: But we’re going to talk about biofuels, algae. One of my colleagues at Western, welcome Gregory, or Greg.

Greg: I go by Greg. Yeah, that’s fine. My mom calls me Gregory. I’m Professor Greg O’Neil, I’m at Western in the Chemistry Department. So, thanks for having me on.

Jordan: Yeah. So, biofuels.

Greg: Yup.

Jordan: So, let’s just give me a rundown. Like, what’s the —

Greg: Where do we begin? Yeah, fuel, right? So everybody gets fuel. You use biofuel today, if you fill your car with gasoline. There’s methanol in there, right? You see those busses running around town that say, “This bus runs on biodiesel.”

Regina: I want to ask the question right away what I thought about when I thought about biofuels, because there was that big kind of hubbub in Washington State about, basically, biofuels made from corn and how like that was this big thing, and then it suddenly wasn’t, right? And so, you do algae so you don’t have to deal with that situation, but can we like rehash that just so — for our listeners to kind of understand what happened with that and how that affected the biofuel industry?

Greg: Right. Well it goes even back further. So, I think, you know, this idea of ethanol as a fuel goes actually back to the Model-T Ford. There’s a famous quote by Ford that talks about how there’s fuel in everything that grows. The first diesel engine was built to run on peanut oil and now we’ve gone full circle. So, we sort of know the story that petroleum was really cheap and so we got away from the biofuels. There’s a lot of reasons that there’s been this sort of resurgence of interest in biofuels, one of them being geopolitical. So you can trace a lot of this back to, actually, the early ’70s when there was the oil embargo.

Regina: Right.

Greg: You’ve seen those pictures of these long lines at gasoline stations and things like that. And then, they kind of went away. People forgot about biofuels and now all of a sudden, as you mentioned, corn ethanol is supposed to be kind of the next great thing.

Regina: Yeah, that was like in the aughts, but then there was a lot of resistance, because they were saying like, you’re using all this land for this corn and it’s not actually to eat; it’s for these fuels and it’s not that efficient. Is that basically what happened?

Greg: It’s true, yeah. So, you know, we talk about food versus fuel controversy, so this is a big deal. Taking a food crop and diverting it to fuel is problematic. At the end of the day, we’re trying to save the environment. So that’s what a lot of this is motivated by. When you’re burning ethanol or gasoline or whatever, you’re still sending up CO2 in the atmosphere.

Regina: Right.

Greg: So, there’s questions about what the mitigation is in terms of the greenhouse gases emissions, and things like that.

Regina: Yeah, like, how much better is it really?

Greg: How much better is it? Right. So, that’s kind of how I sell algae a little bit is that some people have said that algae are better at — have sort of better benefits to the environment.

Regina: Okay, when you burn it?

Greg: Yeah, you have to look at the whole process. So, the cycle — so, biofuels in general, in an ideal world, you would burn the fuel, it goes into the atmosphere and then the plants would fix that CO2 back into sugars and things like that, and so we call it this closed carbon cycle.

Now in reality, the rate at which we burn the fuels is faster than the rate at which the plants fix the CO2. Algae are a little bit better at fixing CO2 than plants, corn for instance. Things like this.

Regina: Right.

Jordan: Are there people out there manufacturing moonshine from algae though?

Greg: Yeah, right? So, alright, that gets —

Regina: And bacon. That was another thing I wanted to talk about.

Greg: Algae bacon?

Jordan: Bacon?

Regina: Yeah, did you not hear about like a bacon substitute from algae and it’s basically a vegetarian bacon, but its flavor is so close.

Jordan: Hang on a sec. [Hurling sound.]

Greg: [Laughing.]

Jordan: This hurts me as a former butcher.

Regina: I would totally — I love seaweed, I love bacon. I don’t understand why this would be a bad thing. But anyway, sorry.

Greg: So, let’s be clear. You mentioned seaweed, right? So, algae is —

Regina: Algae is not seaweed.

Greg: Well, so it is. So, there is macro-algae, which is seaweed. Then there’s microalgae, which we call algae. At the end of the day, it’s seaweed. It smells just like seaweed. So, it has that smell of the sea that you would associate with seaweed. And that’s one aspect that I don’t come out and tell my students when they want to work on this project, is the smell associated with the algae.

Regina: I love that smell. I’ll come work in your lab.

Jordan: But in reality, can you actually distill algae?

Greg: Well, you can if you wanted to. There’s a big push for making what they call co-products. One of the biggest criticisms of algal biofuels is that it’s too expensive. So, if you compare the fuels that you get from algae to petroleum for instance, it would just be way too expensive. Now, one way to cut the costs would be to make more than one type of product.

Jordan: Right.

Greg: So, you go to the store and you buy a liter of vodka. This is a lot more expensive than a liter of gasoline, correct? You know, orders of magnitude greater, right?

Regina: Yes. [Laughing.]

Greg: I buy cheap vodka too, but it’s still more expensive than $3 a gallon of gasoline. So, there’s the question. Do you go after a high value, lower volume product like booze, or do you go after fuel? Now, granted, making more grainy vodka, or something that’s not gonna taste very good, is it necessarily going to save the environment?

Jordan: I don’t know, but the heads and the tails is what they call it. Was that methanol?

Greg: Yeah.

Jordan: So, that’s cleaning products?

Greg: True.

Jordan: So I mean kinda.

Greg: Kinda. If you could make multiple products from the same seaweed, then potentially you could sell your alcohol, and then sell your gasoline, and maybe use that to offset the cost. So, you could maybe get closer to what the price point needs to be compared to petroleum.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ La, la, la, la, la, la, la
♪ Early late at night
♪ I wander off into a land
♪ You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
♪ There’s a world inside
♪ Where dreamers meet each other

Regina: I do want to take a step back though. That’s a very good, for me, an intro into what you’re talking about when you’re talking about algae biofuels. But, on this show, we have a lot of scientists. We like to talk about how did you get into your field? Think about what was your path? Because, listeners like to know that scientists are human and that they have different paths to get there. It’s not like you’re born a scientist.

Greg: No, in fact, I think chemistry was not on my radar probably until I went to college. I think that’s true for a lot of people, right? You kind of get to college and the idea is at that point maybe it’s because you know that in 4 years you have to decide what you’re gonna do for a career so you have to start getting a little serious. Maybe this is why I’m an educator, but it depends on the experience that you have in the different subjects. So, you know, I had a really positive experience in my chemistry classes.

Regina: What about physics?

Greg: Not so great.

[Laughing.]

Regina: Seems to be a theme.

Greg: Yeah. Maybe that’s not necessarily on the teacher. I think there’s some aspect to that and then there’s some genuine interest by the person and what you’re good at and what makes the most sense to you, and what you excel at. My own path to biofuels was also circuitous in terms of — we didn’t set out to work on biofuels. We were just interested in algae, these particular chemicals that we were extracting from the algae. At that time it was when people were really interested or started to become interested again in algal biofuels. So, we kind of went that direction.

Regina: What were you working on before that? What were you doing with the algae before you were like, “it can make energy”?

Greg: So, there’s probably two aspects of my own research that I think is different than some of the other groups that are working in this field. One is that — so I’m not interested in making a drop of fuel. There’s a lot of groups out there that make one drop of fuel and then they say, well, you know, so I grew my algae in this coffee cup and I made a drop of jet fuel. If I grew algae pool the size of Bellingham Bay, you know, I could solve all of Washington States jet fuel needs. But there’s a big difference between growing algae in a coffee cup and in the Bellingham Bay. Scale is a big issue. There’s a lot of groups that will sort of do that in this field. We’ve tried to make large amounts that we can actually test and perform these studies to see if it actually —

Regina: At Western?

Greg: At Western. To see if it actually performs as a jet fuel. So that’s one aspect. Then the other aspect — and this is kind of how we got into it — is that the particular algae that we’re interested in biosynthesizes a unique lipid or wax that we think has some potential applications.

Regina: Like, from that seaweed?

Greg: From that seaweed.

Jordan: Algae earwax.

Greg: Algae earwax, if you will.

Jordan: Perfect.

Regina: Yeah, thank you.

Greg: There’s only a handful of algae that make this particular wax and we think it’s got lots of potential applications aside from fuel. So that’s kinda how we got there.

Regina: Locally?

Greg: Do we grow it locally?

Regina: Yeah.

Greg: We could. At the moment, I don’t grow any algae in my lab. We buy all of our algae from an outfit down in San Jose, California. My understanding is they grow this algae, it’s called Isochrysis. They grow it on maybe an acre scale or something like this.

Jordan: [Whispers] Isochrysis.

Greg: Isochrysis. I’m having an Isochrysis.

Jordan: Right, exactly. [Laughing.]

Regina: Why do they call it that?

Greg: But I have connected with — Western has the Shannon Point Marine Center.

Regina: Yeah.

Greg: So I’ve connected with some scientists there and they’ve grown this particular algae. My understanding is it grows like a weed. You know at Taylor Shellfish Farms, they grow a lot of algae actually. The reason is to feed their oysters. So that’s why this group down in San Jose actually grows this algae, is because it’s fish food. We’re taking that fish food and trying to turn it into fuel.

Jordan: Which is a lot better than the corn that they were feeding the fish.

Greg: Right. Yeah, nobody cares about taking food from fish, right?

Regina: When you’re talking about this idea, we can kind of go back to what we were talking about to begin with. This idea of corn and it not being as good as this algae. One, it grows faster, right?

Greg: Mmhmm.

Regina: Two, it takes less to make it grow, correct, than putting whatever you put — resources you put into corn, right?

Greg: Mmhmm. One, is, you know, when you talk about resources, what it takes to grow corn versus algae. They both need nutrients. I honestly don’t know what that intake is, but certainly, because it’s a marine algae, we’re using saltwater or brackish water. We’re not using fresh water. So, I think that’s actually a big deal.

Two, productivity is better. So, we’re interested in extracting oil out of this algae. People have suggested — some studies have suggested that these algae can make lots of oil compared to normal plants, terrestrial plants.

Jordan: Terrestrial plants. [Laughing.]

Greg: Terrestrial plants. So, the output would be better. Then, the other one would be CO2 fixation rates are supposedly higher.

Regina: Are there still big factions — let’s say we go to a biofuel convention or something, which I’m sure there is, right?

Greg: Mmhmm.

Regina: Okay, good. You go there and there’s like factions. Are there still large factions of, let’s say, ethanol versus what you’re doing with the algae, and I don’t even know what other kinds of biofuels there can be, but —

Greg: Yeah. Like with anything, when there’s limited resources, you try to say that your technology is the best.

Regina: So, are those the two big ones? What is the layout at a biofuels convention?

Greg: Okay. So, one thing you need to be a little bit careful about comparing those sorts of things. So, right now on the market is ethanol from corn, and it’s actually corn kernels. So it’s the edible part and a lot of oil from soybean palm oil and canola oil.

Regina: Okay. Like the people that take like the stuff from McDonalds and use that for their car.

Greg: Exactly. I probably would recommend against doing that.

[Laughing.]

Jordan: Why?

Greg: Why, okay.

Jordan: Because I know people who have done it.

Regina: I think we all do.

Jordan: So that was the question.

Greg: And you can do that. Certainly, it’s cheap. That’s why they do it, right?

Jordan: Right.

Greg: There’s lots of fryer oil. But like anything, the quality of the feedstock is gonna impact the quality of the final product. When you’ve got this used fryer oil, you know, you pour in this beautiful yellow oil — we’ve all done this in our frying pan — then you cook with it. You end up with this gunky, and there’s some solid material.

Regina: Particulates.

Greg: Particulates. It changes color. So, it’s brownish and all these sorts of things. Hopefully these people kind of filter it a little bit when they do that, but it still doesn’t remove all of that material. You put that in your engine and it’s gonna cause some problems.

Jordan: I know about, like, some diesel engines. They now put filters, even for pump diesel.

Greg: Sure. You can actually — you can buy these kits that would change or modify your car so that you could run it on what they call pure plant oil. So you could go down to the grocery store, you could get gallon of vegetable oil, and you could pour it in your car and use that.

Regina: Back to the biodiesel convention.

Greg: Sure.

Regina: You have soy, you have canola, you have all these places.

[Laughing.]

Regina: Yeah. Biodiesel that is being sold right now, is there algae biodiesel?

Greg: No.

Regina: No, got it.

Greg: I would argue that I may have the world supply of algal biodiesel in my laboratory right now.

Regina: Uh oh, now they know!

Greg: It’s a scarce product. We talked about how these are kind of falling out of favor because its corn and edible crops.

Regina: And just land use.

Greg: Land use is a problem, right. Next generation, cellulosic fuels, so this is taking the parts of the plants that are left over. You know, it’s a huge amount of material. So, all of that stuff is made of sugar, but it’s a different sugar material, so you have to sort of unlock the sugar to make it fermentable. That’s one of the challenges with cellulosic fuels. So, I would say that that’s certainly more advanced. Then, fuels from algae is at the very beginning stages.

Regina: Okay.

Greg: There are some technological or engineering challenges for making economically viable. But at the same time, that might actually be one positive aspect is that people are talking about growing algae in wastewater plants. So, the idea is that you can use that to remediate the wastewater as well.

Regina: It’s not like we’re gonna be eating it.

Greg: Nope.

[Laughing.]

Regina: So, we’re gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we can talk about this waste idea that Jordan had just brought up. But we can also talk about this idea of other kinds of energy too. Alright, we’ll be right back.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
♪ Your magic mind
♪ Makes love to mine
♪ I think I’m in love, angel
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I think me left me underpants
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland

Jordan: Welcome back to Spark Science. We were talking about biofuels with Greg O’Neil. We were just talking about the rivalry in the tradeshows are whatever.

Regina: We were talking about like a biofuel conference or something.

Jordan: Right, I don’t know, conference, I’ll call it a tradeshow.

Regina: [Laughing.] I mean, there are tradeshows too.

Jordan: Our product is better than that stuff and then you mentioned the solar, solar is like, “we’re way better than biofuels.”

Regina: You’re right. I just watched the Simpson’s episode with — they were at a energy trade show and it was like nuclear power and the solar and they were getting screamed at the whole time. I don’t know if you know this episode.

[Laughing.]

Jordan: Or just resonates with you.

Regina: I imagine that. We’re playing it up — I’m sure there’s not any fist fights at these things. But there is a competition. Like you said, there’s competition for grant funding. There’s competition for private grant funding, for government grant funding, space at universities if your science is like doing enough. What is the, kind of, what do I want to say, landscape of the fuel industry?

Greg: It can get heated, right? It’s not a lie.

[Laughing.]

Regina: I was giving you an out, so like, maybe it isn’t heated. Okay, so it does get heated.

Greg: You go in, you present your results, and people will stand up and tell you that what you’re doing is not the way to go. Cellulosic fuel, for instance, is the future.

Regina: So, they’re like devoted to their field.

Greg: Sure.

Jordan: Everybody has the antithesis of like, “hey, you’re this.” “No this study says this.”

Greg: Yeah.

Regina: They can’t all be right.

Greg: No. You have to, right? You have to believe in what you’re doing, right?

Regina: Right.

Greg: I think maybe I should come right out and say I’m not either — I’m not a proponent or opponent of these algal fuels. My real interest is generating data to see if these things are viable, right?

Regina: Right.

Greg: So, we talked about fuel property tests. I’m not interested in making a drop of this stuff. I want to see if this is legit. You asked about kind of the overall picture of where things are going. You might have noticed that gas prices or oil prices — they dropped off, right?

Regina: Mmhmm.

Greg: So, there was a kind of a peak in 2009-2010 and then it really dropped off significantly. Biofuel startups and companies — they took a hit. A lot of them went out of business when that happened because, at the end of the day, the bottom line is: how do they compare to petroleum?

Regina: Right.

Greg: Right? I mean, ask yourself, if you were gonna buy a plane ticket, would you be willing to spend $200 more to fly in a plane that’s using biofuel versus petrol.

Regina: Maybe if it was Leonardo DiCaprio.

[Laughing.]

Greg: But doubtful, right?

Regina: Yes.

Greg: At the end of the day, the bottom line is there, is the petroleum.

Regina: Well, there’s also this push for electric cars and then fuel’s out entirely. So what do you do?

Greg: Electric cars — we see them all over the place. I think that it’s gonna take a long time before we see the entire transportation fleet transition to electric. I mean, I don’t buy cars that often and I’m assuming you don’t either.

Regina: Right, no.

Greg: Most people don’t buy cars every other year, so it’s gonna take a long time for us to see all the gasoline cars, for instance, come off the road. One industry where I think biofuels could make a big impact would be aviation. When I was working on this, I had a retired admiral from the US Navy come and talk to me about our biofuels. He was saying that he can’t fly his F-18s on batteries and windmills.

[Laughing.]

He needs energy-dense liquid fuel. If you want to go green, the only place you’re gonna get that is from biofuels. So, actually some of the biggest interests in biofuels right now is commercial airlines and the US Navy and Air Force, because that’s a tough nut to crack. There was this electric plane, this around the world trip, the Solar Impulse I think is what it was called.

Regina: And it had like one person in it.

Greg: It had one person. [Laughing.]

Jordan: It’s a start.

Regina: It is a start.

Greg: It think there were maybe more than one person in case somebody had to take a snooze or something. I think the wingspan was 200 yards or something like that.

Jordan: Wow.

Greg: It required a really narrow range of takeoff and landing conditions.

Regina: I think I had actually heard — I’m from Bellingham, I listen to NPR. So, I was listening to an NPR story and they were talking about that — this idea that we really want to have these renewable energies, electric cars, all this kind of stuff, but it just doesn’t have the same kind of effectiveness when we’re talking about planes. That scaling thing that we’re talking about, and also other — I never thought of that, but you’re absolutely right. I don’t think your biofuels are gonna be in jeopardy at least for — not like tomorrow.

Greg: No, yeah. In Europe, I think they talk about going all hybrid in, let’s say, 2050. The US is notoriously behind Europe and we try and implement these things, right? The reality is probably for the next 50 years or something like this, we could expect to see, certainly, a lot of gasoline powered cars still on the road.

Regina: Oh god.

Jordan: People love their hotrods though.

Greg: Yeah.

Regina: But if we can stick the biofuel on there instead.

Greg: I think you could make a difference.

Jordan: So, we were talking earlier about other products that you can get. What are some other products?

Regina: From the waste.

Jordan: That you don’t use for the jet fuel or whatever.

Greg: Right. The algae that we’re working on — you can extract oils that we can make. A couple of those oils are actually omega-3 fatty acids, so EPA and DHA, which actually are used a lot in infant formulas and things like this.

Regina: But if you’re making them in the wastewater, I guess we could still do it, it’s distilling.

Jordan: He mentioned earlier about a really expensive filtering process.

[Laughing.]

Regina: That’s true. So, for babies.

Greg: So, for babies, right. They use that as a supplement, or if you’re making biodiesel, and again, widely different markets.

[Laughing.]

Jordan: I was just about to dump a bunch of omega-3s in some water and throw it in my car.

[Laughing.]

Regina: Yeah.

Greg: Right. Try that. See how much it costs to go down to —

Regina: I used to do McDonald’s but now, omega-3 vitamins.

Greg: That would be expensive.

Regina: It would be so much more expensive.

Greg: I mentioned these waxes that we get out of our algae.

Regina: So, what do you do with the waxes?

Greg: We’ve converted them to jet fuel, partly because we know that that’s a challenging target for biofuels. We have some chemistry that we use to convert these waxes into jet fuel. Whether or not that’s the way to go, again, if you want to be competitive, you have to make large amounts of jet fuel very cheaply. Right now, it costs us a lot more to do that.

We’re thinking about other products that we can potentially make, and if we want to stick with the biofuels, well we can make biodiesel with the oils, but maybe we can take these waxes and make something else that’s useful. One thing that we’re looking at is actually personal care and cosmetic applications. I had to relate it or compare it to something that you’re familiar with — it’s probably most similar to bee’s wax.

Regina: So instead of Burt’s Bees, it’ll be like Greg’s Algae Cream and it’ll have your face on it.

Greg: Yes, exactly. Covered in green algae.

Regina: Because, with white dudes — that’s what sells, Burt’s Bees.

[Laughing.]

Jordan: He’s like a clean-shaven Burt.

Regina: Yeah, he’s like the younger, hipper version of Burt’s Bees. That’s how we’re gonna sell it.

Greg: Yeah. You might start seeing this, because it would be totally locally sourced. We could save the bees. Bees are in danger, we all know —

Regina: So, don’t make them make your cosmetics. We can make your cosmetics.

[Laughing.]

Regina: I love this.

Greg: I think vegans probably are not into bee products as well. I think there are other —

Regina: Hmm, yeah.

Greg: Groups that would prefer to have a product that is not sourced from insects.

Regina: You are a genius. This is so Bellingham.

[Laughing.]

Greg: So, you might see this coming. This is a pipedream.

Jordan: I don’t want to mess with the bees wax. I can’t see algae.

Greg: Yup.

Regina: I want to make sure it’s gonna be like algae wax, the future.

Greg: So, mass balance, we get, let’s say, 50% we get the oils that we can make biodiesel if we wanted to. 10% would be these waxes that we could do some other things with. The other thing that we’re extracting out of our algae is there’s carotenoids, so you might have heard of betacarotene. This is what makes carrots orange and makes our salmon red. There’s actually a carotenoid that comes out of our algae that we can extract that’s currently sold as a weight loss supplement.

Regina: Mmm.

Greg: So we are trying to extract every bit of value from algae. What’s remaining after we do all this? There’s sugars that we could potentially ferment into our moonshine. Then there’s also protein that we could potentially use as food.

Regina: Bacon.

Greg: Or, bacon. There you go. That’s kind of where the technology is at the moment.

Jordan: Is pretty much going down to a zero budget, I guess, I don’t know what to call it, but you’re like a zero waste?

Greg: Right. We’d want to use every bit of that algae, but if we want to keep this conversation centered around biofuels, at the end of the day we’re trying to maybe offset the costs of those biofuels by selling these other products. This all looks good on paper. The students in my lab are maybe trying out some of these things, but we’ll see how it plays out in the future. We’re at the very early stages I would say of that.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ The grass grows inside
♪ The music floats you gently on your toes
♪ Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
♪ Don’t freak and hide
♪ I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
♪ Don’t resist
♪ The fairygods will have a fit
♪ We should dance
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there

Regina: So what other universities are working on this around the country?

Greg: So, actually, PNNL, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has a big interest in algae. I should probably point out that this idea of making transportation fuels from algae is not a new idea.

Regina: Where did it come from?

Greg: The US Department of Energy spent 20 years looking at trying to make transportation fuels from algae. I mentioned the Mideast oil crisis, that was the early ’70s. Then, following this, all of a sudden the DOE funds a program to look at making transportation fuels from algae. That went on from mid ’70s to mid ’90s. Then they cut the program. The reason was because they decided that it was just not cost competitive with petroleum at that time.

When they cut the program, the cost of crude oil was about, let’s say, $20 per barrel. In 2010, 2009, it was about $100 per barrel. So, all of a sudden, you see this resurgence of interest in looking at algae for transportation fuels. So the question becomes, now that it’s $100 per barrel, is it cost competitive at this point.

So, anyway, PNNL, Pacific Northwest National Lab, is closely connected with the Department of Energy, and so they have a number of people actually out at their Sequim lab who are looking at growing algae and doing a lot of the cultivation work. Then there’s some groups in Richland that are looking at the actual conversion of the algae into the fuels.

Regina: So is it kind of a Northwest thing than? Are there any other places that are really doing this?

Greg: Sure. It’s worldwide. In fact, I collaborate with groups in France, Australia, it’s really worldwide.

Regina: So every bit of the world is working on this a little bit.

Greg: And I think it reflects the fact that you can grow algae all over the world.

Regina: Because there’s oceans all over the world.

Greg: There are oceans and the other thing is that there’s hundreds of thousands of species of algae, many more species of algae than corn, for instance. The idea is that you can, wherever you are, whatever climate you’ve got, you can find an algae that will grow well in your particular region. Some are fatter than others and produce more oil. At the end of the day, I think you’d be more successful growing algae, for instance, in Bellingham than corn.

Jordan: I know we’re gonna stick to biofuels, but I have to ask a question. You said the seaweed is the macro. Well, if I just go out somewhere and I look in a puddle or a stagnant pool of water or something, and I was like, “Oh, that may or may not have algae in it.” How would I know? Does it, like, form on the top? Could I scoop it up with a net? Do I fish for it?

Greg: Technically, you probably want to take a sample and look at it under a microscope and have an expert tell you, because — you may have seen, for instance, pink scum in your bathtub. So, some algae is pink, some algae is green. Cyanobacteria technically are algae.

Regina: Dr. Robin Kodner deals with snow algae which is pink. We had her on the show.

Greg: So, as you know, it comes in many different shapes, and sizes, and colors.

Jordan: You mentioned the sink or whatever, but it’s like, sticks to the edges or does it float? Does it sink? Is it just encased in like [Inaudible]?

Greg: It depends. Usually it’s all mixed in. When people are growing algae for industrial purposes, there’s usually two different ways. One is like an open pond, but they call it a raceway pond, so it’s sort of a circular track that continues to circulate the water, and nutrients and all this sort of stuff. If you look at it, it looks homogeneous, so it’s just mixed in algae and water. So, you can’t really see it floating on top.

Regina: So, it’s like a slushy, all mixed together.

Greg: Right. It’s not separated, the algae are here and the water is here, which is one of the challenges. So, then how do you get rid of — or how do you actually isolate the algae away from all this water?

Jordan: Harvest it.

Greg: How do you harvest it? So, there’s different methods. For instance, you can add things that will get the algae to clump together.

Regina: Do you inject something into the water?

Greg: Yeah, these flocculating agents they’re called and so I just collect and they clump together. My lab, when we buy it from this company, we buy a paste that’s 80% water and 20% algae. We pay about, let’s say, $100. Just to give you an idea.

Regina: Wow. For how much?

Greg: So, sorry, so it’s a kilogram.

Regina: Okay, so that’s like —

Greg: 200 grams. It’s not very much.

Jordan: Is that a softball size you’re doing there?

Greg: Maybe a coffee cup. That’s where a lot of the cost is. We literally take our algae paste and we spread it into a baking dish. This is something we found is most convenient, and we put it in the oven. We literally just bake it and then we have a scraper that we can just scrape all the algae off the sides of the container. Then we get this dry algae. Anyway, yeah.

Regina: But you were talking about wastewater. People have been talking about possibly growing this algae out in the wastewater and the side effects of the algae actually helping the wastewater or helping filter it. Tell me more about that.

Greg: So, I mean, it’s full of fertilizer, if you will. If we think about algae need these inputs. If we can grow them using the wastewater, well then that’s that much less cost in terms of having to add additional nutrients to grow this algae. That wastewater will probably be run through a raceway pond or something like this. In the process, as the algae grow on it, sort of treating that wastewater. Presumably it’d have to go on for further treatment before it would get released.

Regina: So, we’re gonna take another break and then when we come back, we always ask guests about how their science is being portrayed in pop culture. Also, I’d like to talk about the politics, because you’re talking about this idea of programs being started and then stopped and then started. I’d like to talk about who supports those projects and who doesn’t. Anyway, we want to take that break. We’ll come back and we’ll talk about that stuff. We’ll be right back.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ [Inaudible.]
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I think me left me underpants
♪ This is your land
♪ This is my land
♪ We belong here
♪ Stay the night
♪ I am so inspired
♪ You touched my wires
♪ My supernova shining bright

Regina: Welcome back to Spark Science where we’re talking with Dr. Greg O’Neil about biofuels. I’ve learned a lot about like, I dunno, the politics of biofuels, but also how it’s created.

I wanted to actually go down that road of politics a little more, because I know we’ve had a lot of astronomy on our show. We’ve had people that do like space policy on our show. Space is something that kind of has bipartisan support.

Because we were talking about biofuels, and kind of where that lies in renewable energy, it’s kind of in between solar and like fossil fuels. It’s kind of in between, so does it kind of garner bipartisan support or does it not? Is it definitely like a Republican thing or definitely a Democratic thing? What is it like in the lobbying world?

Greg: Yeah. Well I think, certainly, right now, there is questions about whether or not this type of work will continue to get funded. So we’ve heard a lot about the coal industry coming back. There’s a lot of interest in shale oil technology, fracking, and all of that is moving forward.

Some time ago I mentioned the bottom line is petroleum. When petroleum is cheap, biofuels are gonna have a tough time, at least industrially. There is a real question right now of whether or not, for instance, my current funding, my grant will be up fairly soon and I’ll need to ask for more money to continue this work whether or not I can expect to get that. There is some influence from the top on what, for instance, the National Science Foundation, what the priorities are for funding.

Regina: Biofuels is not at the top.

Greg: Certainly not anymore. I don’t know if it was necessarily at the top, but I think we saw a lot of momentum in the last, I think, 5 or 6 years. There’s been some momentum and there’s been a lot of government incentives to do this. Already, there’s still a lot of worldwide policy moving toward biofuels. There’s something called the renewable fuels standard, which is in place, which said that by 2022, the US was gonna blend 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel into its transportation fuels. Whether or not that gets renewed or enforced —

Regina: That’s coming up soon.

Greg: The EU has this emissions trading program. What’s interesting on that is that if you’re using biofuels, those emissions are counted as zero. It’s as if you’re not emitting any CO2. That’s how it gets counted. Again, the argument being, well you’re using plants that are gonna trap that CO2. So that gets counted as zero.

Regina: So it’s a net zero.

Greg: It’s a net zero. So, if you look at the fine print. So there are incentives in Europe to continue this biofuels usage. If you exceed your allotment — so in that program, if you exceed how much emissions you’re granted, then you have to sponsor other type of alternative fuel or greener technologies. So, whether or not some of that money might get funded to do these types of programs, we’ll see. So, yeah. I think it is political in that sense.

Regina: You gave me a number. You said like — as the US, under, at least the Obama Administration, we were trying by 2022 to be — what did you say, 40%?

Greg: Well, 36 billion gallons, and I honestly don’t know. It was enough to give some of these biofuels companies confidence that they would have somewhere to sell their product.

Regina: So it’s not that now though.

Greg: Now I think there’s uncertainty of whether or not we’re still going to. We pulled out of the Paris agreement and these sorts of things. Whether or not we’re going to stick to that goal or target remains to be seen.

Jordan: It’s interesting to hear that the government would be, for me — I don’t watch the news on purpose.

Regina: Yeah. [Laughing.]

Jordan: When you do hear a lot of people saying, “Oh, big oil, big oil.” Governments ran by big oil. To hear that there actually are organizations within the government that are funding this; that’s hopeful for me I guess.

Greg: Yeah. I should point out that actually some of the biggest players in the biofuel industry are the big oil companies.

Regina: Right. Because they have to look to the future.

Greg: Yeah. They’re looking to diversify. They also have a lot of the know-how for making these types of products. It’s when people like BP and Exxon and these people step up, and Shell, that’s really when this industry is gonna take off. These guys are the experts. If we see advancement, it probably will be from them.

Regina: So, what is the latest, biggest news in biofuels?

Greg: So there’s a couple different areas that I think are being pushed. So, there’s a company called Synthetic Genomics, which is trying to basically make a biofuel organism from scratch.

[Laughing.]

They’re gonna make the ideal biofuel producing organism. They’ve got money from Exxon to do this.

Regina: Okay. That seems very, like, Gattaca.

Jordan: It’s not really a synthetic if it’s —

[Laughing.]

Greg: I should point out that’s probably the opposite of what I do in my lab where I’m taking a bug that’s grown by a mom and pop shop down in San Jose and has been grown for, let’s say, 30 years industrially. Whether we want to game nature to try and make better biofuels, I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.

Regina: More power to them.

Greg: Yeah, but I think right now the goal is still to just get the bottom line for their cost with petroleum.

Regina: So, I’m gonna get to my favorite question. This is sometimes my colleagues’ least favorite question.

Jordan: Do you watch Star Trek?

Regina: No.

Greg: I should probably preface this with I’m pretty far removed from pop culture, so —

Regina: What do you like as an unwind, as an escape? Are you one of those scientists that have science all the time?

Greg: No. So, right now, all of the time that I spend outside of school doing science is taken up mostly by my kids. I have two young kids and they occupy most of my time. So, once I’m done with that then I’m happy to just take a breather.

Regina: Do they like TV?

Greg: They watch some shows. Let’s be honest. It’s pretty easy for you to take a break and let them watch some the shows.

Regina: I love TV. That basically — I just make everyone love TV as much as me.

Greg: I would say, I’m not aware of any shows that portray the biofuel industry, algae. I do want to see — there was recently a movie that was put on about the Macondo well blowout. So, this was that spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2000 and — I’m dating myself.

Jordan: It was a while ago. Close to a decade.

Greg: So, that was a giant spill. There was a movie that was recently put out that was really good. Kennes [sp?] — what comes to mind? Doc Brown in Back to the Future.

Regina: We’ve talked about him several times.

Greg: I think all of my neighbors probably want to have a peek in my garage because they think that I’ve got some crazy stuff going on there being a chemist.

Jordan: He’s just making moonshine. There’s nothing going on here people.

[Laughing.]

Greg: For instance, today in the teaching laboratory, the students did distillation and so you can’t help but relate that to making moonshine.

Jordan: Which is illegal. None of us do that in our garages with converted pressure cookers.

Regina: It’s totally okay. It’s okay that other people don’t like pop culture.

I want to thank you for being on our show and I want to thank you also because this is at the end of our show. Greg had actually put together a workshop at Western and he got AAAS (which is the American Association for the Advancement of Science) to come and do a workshop on being a better science communicator. I’m indebted to Greg. It’s nice to have another colleague at Western that actually cares about getting science out there and making us look less scary.

Greg: I hope I did so.

Regina: Yeah. [Laughing.] Thank you for coming on our show and educating us about biofuels. This was awesome.

Greg: Of course. Happy to do so.

Jordan: Yeah, I loved it.

Regina: Thank you.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
♪ Your magic mind
♪ Makes love to mine
♪ I think I’m in love, angel
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I think me left me underpants
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland

Regina: Thanks for listening to Spark Science. If you missed any of the show, go to our website, sparksciencenow.com. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us a message on Twitter or Facebook at Spark Science Now. Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE, Spark Radio, and Western Washington University.

Jordan: Today’s episode was recorded at the KMRE studios operated by the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention in Bellingham, Washington.

Regina: Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. Our audio engineers are Natalie Moore, Andra Nordin, and Tori Highley.

Jordan: Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monae.

[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]

♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent and

♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop then
♪ And they hit the ground

[End of podcast.]