NASA’s BioFuel Proposal: Off-shore Algae Harvesting in Plastic Bags

Picture: Offshore Algae Harvesting in Semi-permeable bags

NASA’s design calls for using large plastic bags, made of forward-osmosis membranes, and filled with sewage for offshore harvesting of algae for bio-fuel.

My earlier post about leveraging nanotechnology for increasing the commercial viability of Algal bio-fuel opened me up a fantastic world of realizations. The wonderful technologies being developed by NASA have been time and again used to improve the quality of life for the people who inhabit this world and not just the journeys and stays of astronauts in the space. And particularly, because I felt that my hope for algae as commercially viable source of alternate energy had an even greater chance of being realized because NASA researchers too are pitching their effots in the same direction.

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Just to recall the two major questions that bother us in extracting oil from algae:

1. How to grow algae so that it minimizes dependence on earth’s resources, either cultivable land (an issue in bio-fuels today) or water (an increasingly scarce resource)?
2. How to extract oil with minimal damage to algae so that growth lapses are minimized?

Equally as hope-inspiring as the nanotechnology based approaches for algal fuel extraction is NASA’s plan for algae harvesting in the ocean. Large plastic bags filled with sewage would be placed in the ocean to grow algae. These bags devised and used by NASA would have semi-permeable membranes that willprovide home for algae to grow (using up sewage for this purpose) and will allow fresh water to flow out, thus not getting encumbered by evaporation and refill issues that plague closed bioreactors.

These plastic bags or enclosures will be made of the same membranes that NASA is currently exploring for recycling dirty water in space missions using forward-osmosis. NASA engineers would like to call it yet another example of using the technology developed for space travel, instead for making the “Spaceship Earth” more sustainable.

The big gain is that these plastic bags float in the ocean and so we do not draw-away water to irrigate in a different spot and we do not impose costs of additional losses of water, through evaporation, either on way to or in the bio reactors. This win-win situation – where a by-product is cleanliness because dirt or sewage is used by algae for its growth – is made ever better because algae uses up CO2 and releases oxygen in turn, thus helping better our environment. Eventually residue sewage can be extracted-out (by pulling-up the plastic bags) to keep them clean and efficient. This Offshore membranes’ technique, that NASA plans to use to grow algae and harvest oil from, leaves me ever more hopeful of a superior energy solution. What a wonderful world the algae – and those working on it – promise to create for us.

Picture Credits: Offshore Algae Harvesting in Semi-permeable bags courstey: NASA

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