NASA has decided to pony up millions of dollars for a scientist’s schme to grow algae in plastic bags floating in the ocean to harvest biofuel and treat sewage.
The scientist, Jonathan Trent, declined to say exactly how much NASA has earmarked for the project. But he said on Saturday that the last minute funding came after he pitched his plan to big name venture capitalists Vinod Kholsa of Khosla Ventures and Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Jonathan Trent pitched his project to VCs Vinod Khosla and Steve Jurvetson
Both had turned him down, though Trent did receive a $62,000 early funding grant from Google.
The ambitious – and still experimental – proposal has a remarkable pair of environment benefits. It has the ability to produce a high quality fuel to replace gasoline and at the same time as cleansing municipal wastewater normally dumped in the ocean. And it does so without transferring farm fields from food production, as other biofuels initiatives require.
Trent, who developed the proposal while working at NASA, says the algae will sequester the greenhouse gas CO2 from the atmosphere while producing a useful by product: agricultural fertilizer. The ocean will regulate the temperature of the algae cultures without using fossil fuel energy and waves will tackle the necessary task of stirring the mixture.
By using plastic bags with a semi-permeable membrane, cleaned water will flow on into the ocean, leaving behind a concentrated mixture of algae and fuel.
Trent says the project isn’t yet financially competitive with the price of oil, but notes it is at an early stage. He says he is working to design the right plastic bag and on a system to protect the bags from storms at sea, perhaps by sinking them below the agitated surface currents.
Because he is using freshwater algae, a project disaster would have little consequence. If the algae were to escape the plastic bag, the salt of the ocean would kill them.
The project is named OMEGA, an acronym for offshore membrane enclosures for growing algae.
