Biofuel from Canal Algae to Power Venice by 2011
It’s plentiful, it’s homegrown, and it could help clean up the environment while powering our cities. The idea of transforming algae into a fuel is a reality. Nowadays there are numerous implementations of algae into the renewable energy market.
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“Sargassum muticum” and “Undaria pinnatifida” are the names of two kinds of algae brought by the ships coming from Japan and the Sargassi sea. The algea grows over the seaport of Venice, causing problems for gondolas and ferry boats. But today it could be turned into a resource.
Italy recently announced a 200 million euro eco-friendly project to harvest the prolific seaweed that lines Venice’s canals and transform it into emissions-free energy. The idea is to set up a power plant fuelled by algae, the first facility of its kind in Italy. The plant, to be built in collaboration with renewable energy services company Enalg, will be operative in two years and will produce 40 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to half of the energy required by the entire city centre of Venice.
The algae will be cultivated in laboratories and put in plastic cylinders where water, carbon dioxide, and sunshine can trigger photosynthesis. The resulting biomass will be treated further to produce a fuel to turn turbines. The carbon dioxide produced in the process will be fed back to the algae, resulting in zero emissions from the plant. “Venice could represent the beginning of a global revolution of energy and renewable resources. Our goals are to achieve the energetic self-sufficiency for the seaport and to reduce CO2 emissions, including those one produced by the docked ships”, says the president of the seaport of Venice Authority, Paolo Costa.
The idea sounds good and seems to open great possibilities for zero emission energy production; Venice could represent the first step of a real innovative evolution even if there are still some doubts about the huge amount of money required for this project and the authorization needed to built the plant.
For more information about biomass energy, see also Solena Group.
Image credit: Kevin via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Russ makes an excellent point about the capital investment required to grow algae in laboratories, which is much too high for an operation that will simply burn its product. Also, the Solena group’s website makes no mention of how they plan to remove the massive amounts of NOx that will be produced along with the syngas due to the protein content of the biomass, leading me to believe that they left this serious issue out of their design.
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The research is worth a try. Yes it may have flaws but it is a great avenue to explore. Aren’t there other algae fuels being researched?
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A simple calculation shows that the plant must produce algae with an energy content many times the amount of the solar energy incident on the plant area (if we consider a 10 hectares cultivation area).
I think that the first law of thermodynamics will not agree with this project.
Do you know who will pay for this project?
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[...] the Gondola: Algae from Venice’s canals (there’s a lot of it) is going to fuel a new Italian power plant that will provide half of [...]
[...] project to harvest the seaweed from Venice’s canals and turn it into emission-free energy. EcoWorldy reports: The plant, to be built in collaboration with renewable energy services company Enalg, will [...]
Lab algae strains are selected for high oil and hydrocarbon content. If they plan to feed those strains with lagoon water it could removed excess nutrients from the canals and clean them up further.
I spoke with Yves Bannel, the executive Vice President of the Solena Group, and his science adviser/project manager for the Venice project. They are NOT harvesting algae from the canals to use in the plant.
Instead, they sampled lagoon water, cultured algae species found there, and found a particular species of diatom that works well for their purposes.
They have isolated the diatom to be cultivated in their system of tubes, once they’re installed at Marghera. So they’re using a local species as feedstock for the plasma gasification process, but they won’t be dredging canals for it.
Hope this clears up some of the confusion.
Another important point from a different algae researcher I talked to concerned the energy you can get from macroalgae, like seaweed, versus microalgae like the ones the Venice project will grow in tubes.
“Sargassum and Undaria are not high energy density algae…Probably wouldn’t have anywhere the yield potential that microalgae would.”