Off-grid Algae Storage?

[Cory J. Geesaman]

Has anyone attempted an offgrid/renewable energy storage system wherein extra electricity would power lights on a recirculating algae system, which would then be turned into biodiesel and the algae composted for methane to be burned in a generator, then used as fertilizer for more algae in a relatively closed system?  I was looking into batteries for a 20KW 1-week off-grid system the other week and it's an insane cost for something that has to be fully replaced every 10 years.  I've also been fairly unimpressed with the flywheel and gravity storage systems due to sizes involved.  It seems like this whole system could probably fit into something the size of a shipping container and scale quite large and long-term but I haven't found anyone doing it yet.  Would there be any obvious issues with the system I'm missing?

[Dakota Hamill]

Seems like a pretty in depth engineering project just for algae.   Need a boatload of algae to make any useable amount of oil.   I remember growing almost 32L of algae and it looked so green and dense and then when I fine mesh filtered it and dried it in an oven it may have been not even a gram dried.  We're talking few hundred mf.

Soxhlet extracted it for 100uL of chlorophyll contaminated golden oil.  

 If BP and the oil giants who lost billions trying to make that work in the early 2000s couldn't crack it...that battery pack or solar panel setup you're talking about looking mighty fine instead.  

But if people have made systems like that it's be cool to see. 

On Wed, May 18, 2022, 1:33 AM Cory J. Geesaman <co...@geesaman.com> wrote:

Has anyone attempted an offgrid/renewable energy storage system wherein extra electricity would power lights on a recirculating algae system, which would then be turned into biodiesel and the algae composted for methane to be burned in a generator, then used as fertilizer for more algae in a relatively closed system?  I was looking into batteries for a 20KW 1-week off-grid system the other week and it's an insane cost for something that has to be fully replaced every 10 years.  I've also been fairly unimpressed with the flywheel and gravity storage systems due to sizes involved.  It seems like this whole system could probably fit into something the size of a shipping container and scale quite large and long-term but I haven't found anyone doing it yet.  Would there be any obvious issues with the system I'm missing?

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[Cory J. Geesaman]

I'm thinking of a continuous flow system that sorts the algae in a gradient, with lights that pump energy into it - when I calculated it out it came to something like 40% energy storage efficiency when factoring in the efficiency of LED diodes, algae energy absorption, then conversions through approx 40% of energy as biodiesel and another 35% in methane prior to being incinerated and reused for fertilizer back into the algae tank.  Balancing the volumes of the various components would get somewhat tricky but it seems like it would have much lower maintenance costs over time, be more carbon-neutral than batteries, and be cheaper (after initially working the kinks out.)

[Alexey Zaytsev]

Photosynthesis efficiency is on the order of a single %. Then you have the loss of converting that stored energy into a useful form, probably another 90% loss. The overall system will lose more than 99% of the energy you put into it and will have a non-trivial maintenance cost.

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[Cory J. Geesaman]

Photosynthesis efficiency is closer to 70% if you're talking about a vat of dense algae with LEDs putting out only the correct wavelength of light with multiple cells picking up the diffracted light.

[John Griessen]

On 5/18/22 00:39, Cory J. Geesaman wrote:
> Photosynthesis efficiency is closer to 70% if you're talking about a vat of dense algae with LEDs putting out only the correct
> wavelength of light with multiple cells picking up the diffracted light.

That sounds good. But what about Dakota's observation of low yields? Wouldn't the algae need some genetic changes to be more
like a schmoo for human uusefulness?

Nickel zinc batteries could be good in a stationary setting...built so they can be reworked after semi-random corrosion from
charge/discharge cycling degrades them. Nickel is getting higher prices lately also, not just cobalt.

[Cory J. Geesaman]

The bulk of the inefficiency is in diffraction per-cell and in not absorbing the full spectrum from sunlight to hit that ~1% number.  When you're dealing with a vat of single cell organisms wherein light can't reach the other side diffraction isn't a factor, and when you're dealing with an LED source which only outputs the ideal wavelength the spectrum isn't a factor.

[Jonathan Cline]

"batteries for a 20KW 1-week off-grid system the other week and it's an insane cost for something that has to be fully replaced every 10 years. "

48V solar panels and charge controller/inverter is about $2500.

High quality 48V 20kW lithium battery cell-packs with individual battery management system is about $4,000 and with a best-in-class charge controller will supposedly last longer than 10 years (although hopefully by 10 years the battery tech would provide a better replacement anyway).

Where is the "insane cost" ?

The "1-week" of an off-grid system depends on the current drawn out of the battery packs and a recirculating system should not draw that much, the flow rate would require what, a 0.25 HP motor pump? It's for bubbling not for a Blendtec.

The bigger problem is weather.  Both power systems (solar and algae) rely on the sun and clear skies.

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[Cory J. Geesaman]

There is no way you're getting 3.36MWh of storage (1 week at 20KW) for 4k.

[Cory J. Geesaman]

I may have communicated poorly, I meant 20KWh of continuous draw, not 20KWh total storage.

On Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 1:43:48 AM UTC-4 jnc...@gmail.com wrote:

[Cory J. Geesaman]

The algae system I was considering would be more something you'd stick in a shipping container: tubes of algae circulating under LED lighting and a storage container to hold them in bulk - probably some sun exposure but the goal would be to power the LED lighting to "charge" the system, pumping more energy into the production of algae, then converting it into biodiesel and methane prior to turning back into fertilizer for more algae - at which point the biodiesel and methane could be stored to drive a generator when you're in need of discharging the system.

On Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 1:43:48 AM UTC-4 jnc...@gmail.com wrote:

[Ravasz]

Hi there,

I founded Algacraft LTD, a startup company focusing on automated alga production. This year we plan to test one of our reactors at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, at a simulated Mars base in the desert there. There a combination of diesel and PV generators provide energy for the whole greenhouse, which will include our alga reactor later this year. Note that our system will not recycle organic waste just yet, so it will not implement the full loop you describe.

The full recycling loop has not been implemented anywhere, but the MELISSA project of ESA is attempting similar. It is more involved than you think though and despite millions of funding and more than 30 years of research it is not yet operational. We are getting there though...

Note that energy production with algae is much less efficient in practice than you describe as is not even close to viability. Biodiesel production has largely been abandoned because of that, the current focus is on regenerative food production systems like ours above.

Best Wishes,

Mate

[Cory J. Geesaman]

Any insights you can give as to the yields you've seen?  What types of algae strains are you using?  I've heard of some that have been engineered specifically for biodiesel production which is where the 40% biodiesel figure comes from.

[Ravasz]

You probably mean the nannochlopropsis engineered by Sapphire Energy. They put a lot of taxpayer and investor money into making alga biofuels and then went spectacularly bankrupt a few years ago. Nannos have a naturally high lipid content which the engineers at Sapphire boosted even further. It worked great on a lab scale. Sadly nannos are prone to infections and don't grow well at high densities so upscaling from a beaker in a lab to any commercial reactor always failed.

We grow algae that are approved for human consumption, as that at least works. Chlorella and Arthrospira are the two most popular genuses used, but there are a bunch of other more exotic options for possible future use. We also have our own secret favourites in the works.  Honourable mention goes to chlamydomonas which is a model organism used for various fundamental science experiments.

In terms of yields the stuff I see in literature is a mess. Often cultures are contaminated but they report biomass anyway, most often they report wet biomass even though 90% of that is just water, and even more commonly they don't specify the exact lighting and medium composition used for the experiment. This is why our company is developing lab-scale bioreactor arrays for the precise, automated, repeated measuement of microalgae in a highly controlled environment. So hopefully in a few years we should be able to present an accurate, standardized metric to report algal growth yields. I am not being terribly helpful, I know. Sorry I can't give good yield estimates but they always seem to contradict each other and tests have a super high variance in yields.

[Cory J. Geesaman]

This is good information, thank you.  I'll look into nannochlopropsis specifically.

[Ravi Ramana]

Across multiple references/studies the promise of algae as fuel/energy is just that, a promise or a potential. Not practical at all. 

Multiple fundamental issues, beginning with the typical low efficiencies of photosynthesis (this applies across the board to plants as well)

Next is the low densities. Necessity to pump very large quantities of water to filter out the algae for any further processing is again very energy inefficient. 

Technically, pumping alone will take 30-50% of energy yield from the algal lipids converted into biodiesel etc 

Companies eg. Joule have tried to engineered lipids secreted out into media (& thus easier recovery) but weren't successful. 

Algae or Biomass to fuels is never a wise enterprise, I think.  Bio to materials/chemicals is what works. 

(thinking about it : bio are typically low powered systems but are always high mass/material content - unless one can tap into the bioelectric/electrochemical 

phenomena operational in Bio - no tech exists for this presently & our battery/storage tech etc provide more power already for all practical purposes) 

Ravasz has provided nice insights above - Algae to food / materials will work as it has been working for many years (omega-3, DHA, algal proteins, pigments etc have been doing well). Spectacular failure has been  in biofuels/biodiesel from algae. Jet fuel is something being tried again now that Oil prices are very high. 

[Cathal Garvey]

What we're always chasing is the photosynthetic efficiency that some algae boast, which can be a few % above that of vascular plants. But with that advantage, there's still a reason nonvascular algae generally tend to grow diffusely over the surfaces of nutrient/competition poor areas (absent human pollution or destruction).

I'm not keen to speculate, I'm just saying that their more advanced photosynthesis has had plenty of time to translate into more competition with other autotrophs in their niche, but vascular plants still dominate full-sun environments. If I had to guess offhand, I'd say that they simply bottleneck out somewhere else in their metabolism, indeed I think our failures so far suggest several bottlenecks. Working around this looks like a technical house of cards.

There _is_ a niche where cyanobacteria's advanced photosynthesis and occasional nitrogen fixing advantage thrive on land: lichen.

Makes me wonder whether we should be investigating lichen farming as an alternative to vat-grown cyanobacteria. Shade-tolerance and low nutrient requirements mean they might work as a sub-solar-pv "crop" if they could be made to produce something useful. The trouble is that they tend to grow slowly (but can one "fertilise" the fungal symbiotes?), but once grown they are a stable natural organism that can compete for its own welfare.

Imagine growing them in clear tubes that are ventilated, and occasionally liquid-flushed to collect some desired exudate. Oil seems like a poor candidate in this case though for lots of reasons (energetic and purely technical) - for "pharming" though it could be interesting.

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[Cathal Garvey]

Hmm, let's make this more pithy, opinionated, and obnoxious:

Any engineering system for stable algal production converges toward (a bad) lichen

10 Jun 2022, 08:54 by diy...@googlegroups.com:

[Daniel C.]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 11:01 AM 'Cathal Garvey' via DIYbio <diy...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Any engineering system for stable algal production converges toward (a bad) lichen

That's because LICHEN is the purest and most powerful programming language. Anyone who complains about the parentheses just isn't enlightened.

[Ravi Ramana]

Ahh.. lichens. Humans are incapable of appreciating them (so engineering converging towards them is not possible & we are no good in engineering any thing that has long timescale feedbacks as in very slow growing systems. We may be good in tinkering with them but tinkering is NO Engineering!) 

Photosynthetic efficiencies are LOW (vis a vis photovoltaics which trump any photosynthetic organism in terms of energy capture efficiencies by orders of magnitude)

Conversion to Matter/Materials/Chemicals is what Life is good at. Algae are good at it. Lichens are incredible at it. (could remediate heavy metals we could throw). 

Let's leverage Bio for what it is good at. Energy/Fuel likely isn't that - even if we could devise any methods, it will be of lower value that using Bio for matter/materials/chemicals. As humanity we will just be missing out on what Bio really could offer us than means of energy. 

[Ravi Ramana]

If only there is a Like Button :) 

(Lichen) 

[Cathal Garvey]

Some say we didn't so much invent LICHEN as discover it

10 Jun 2022, 09:54 by dcroo...@gmail.com:

[Dan Kolis]

Even getting 1 kW for 9.5 h per 24 for a m^3 of 'footage' is a hard sell for human created stuff.

Ravi said:
> Conversion to Matter/Materials/Chemicals is what Life is good at.
> Algae are good at it. 

As an existent energy source Methane is misrepresented substantially. First combusted any old way it still benefits pollution abatement with 1/2 the burden of higher C-Chain fuels.

A Black box to take mostly Methane from any source and yield energy + C composited to a solid not a gas makes Methane much more amenable to a lean-in as a energy yield system without any excuses.

A haemoglobin like subsystem in built life con-existent with fuel cell ... whatever to nail down carbon would be worth a substantial energy allocation. H2 whether as 'city gas' from Anthracite or made is usable with considerable difficulties of all sorts. CH4 is easy to use, store, societies have considerable experience handling nat gas safely too..

The usual notion when C and O2 are in a system, someplace CO2 comes out. Ok, but managing Oxygen carefully is something life does well. Again: CH4 in, C-anything solid + usable energy. Combustion generally burdens such a process incredibly with unwanted high temperature products. No life science system works with effluents as hot as burning ... anything. Even if a processor had layer after layer of a microbial life to get C2 isolated its advantage procedurally compared to H2 is may be a game changer. Graphene-ish out I suppose is best. Diamond is a reference mtl in the notion too.