Vegetable Oil from Seaweed

The future of fuel for transportation seems to be biofuel. My personal work will be on trying to use seaweed to make vegetable oil. I started a new seaweed-oil blog. If you know of any good seaweed, links, books, ideas, etc., please post them to my blog.

The Potential for Seaweed Oil

Diesel engines can be converted to run on straight vegetable oil (SVO) if you put a small electric heater on the fuel line. People need to be careful about the SVO conversion and the acid, salt, etc in the oil. After vetegable oil really takes off, car and truck makers will make SVO conversion a factory option and there will be standards for vegetable oil used for fuel. Till then buyer be ware.

Some types of Algae have significant amounts of vegetable oil in them. A centrifuge is commonly used to get vegetable oil out of the plant matter (oil floats to the top).

Sargasso Seaweed currently has like 1 to 3 percent vegetable oil. However, with genetic engineering, or a breeding plan, we could make a floating seaweed with a much higher percentage of vegetable oil. After you get a high enough percentage, it should be profitable to farm the seaweed. The Sargasso Sea covers thousands of square miles and Sargasso Seaweed grows native there. Currents go in a big circle, so seaweed is not usually washed onto land. So it could be possible to farm large areas of the ocean.

There are world reserves of over 1 trillion barrels of oil. At over $60/barrel this over $60 trillion dollars worth. While we have been finding more oil for a long time, the total amount under the ground is really going down as the Earth is not making it any where near as fast as we are pumping it up. There is a high demand for this resource, and a limited amount under the ground. The oil market is huge and the main source has a limited future. So the potential for biofuels like oil from seaweed or oil from algae or other biofuel approaches is huge.

Background

The cells of seaweed contain many, like 50, Chloroplasts which are the descendants of Cyanobacteria, a bacteria previously called blue-green-algae. Millions of years of Genome reduction has resulted in the chloroplasts having a much smaller DNA than free floating Cyanobacteria.

The this is a symbiotic relationship where the seaweed is providing a protected environment near the surface of the ocean for the chloroplasts/bacteria, which is in exchange providing sugars for the seaweed.

The main Sargasso Seaweed found in the Sargasso Sea is reproducing by being broken in two by waves. Since this is not a sexual reproduction, a standard breeding program is not going to work. There are however closely related seaweeds that do attach to the ocean floor and do have some kind of DNA exchange.

Plans for Attacking the Problem

Make sure there are chloroplasts that make oil (it may be that something else makes oil from the sugars).
  1. Genetic engineering of chloroplasts
  2. Breeding Plans
    1. Small sections of regular Sargasso seaweed
    2. Related seaweed that grows both floating and attached
      1. breed for oil and then use as free floating
      2. breed and then exchange chloroplasts
    3. Removing Chloroplasts and breeding them outside the cells, then putting them back in. This probably won't work, as the Chloroplasts probably need protiens defined by seaweed cell nucleus DNA.
    4. Breed Cyanobacteria to make lots of oil then:
      1. Cross these with the chloroplasts to bring up their oil percent
      2. Try to introduce these to seaweed cells. This seems like it has a reasonable chance as we have examples of bacteria joining cells and adapting over a few years.
  3. Use animals to turn plants into oil
    1. Not as efficient but might be easier to do
    2. There Many marine copepods produce large fat sacs which serve as energy stores for the winter - There may be copepods that eat Sargassum - "Studies of Sargassum" book is not sure.
  4. Breed other brown seaweed and then use genetic engineering to move genes to Sargasso Seaweed

Rockweed

I have been told of a "rockweed" in north-east US that has so much oil you can sqeeze it in your hand and see the drops of oil on the water. So this could be a good one to start with.
  1. I think this is Ascophyllum nodosum.
  2. lots of info
  3. It is commercially harvested so there should be lots know about it
  4. It is also know as Norwegian Kelp - can buy some from this link also
  5. Also called Knotted wrack wikipedia - slow growing - there is a free floating species too
  6. Lots of oil at 5.46% oil - this is high!

Sargassum Muticum / Wire weed

  1. sargassum muticum started small in Japan but has done well in invading the rest of the world
  2. reproduces both sexually and by fragmentation
  3. grow to 12 m in length, forming floating mats on sea surface
  4. grow 7 cm per day, live to 3 or 4 years
  5. strong and dense enough to impede boat traffic
  6. people try to kill it off and it still spreads
  7. showing an extraordinary ability to tolerate a wide range of conditions and is regarded as highly invasive
  8. other images has wire weed showing washing line appearance - looks like 2 ropes could hold at the ends and a bunch of seaweed could be controlled to float where you wanted it. Nice.

Todo list

  1. See exactly how oils are made (cynanobacteria chloroplasts or something else feeding on sugars)
  2. Try to grow regular Sargasso Seaweed in captivity (use model wavebreak)
  3. See how much equipment for genetic engineering to do this would costs
  4. work out methods for measuring oil content very exactly

Global Warming

When we pump oil out of the ground and burn it we add to the "green-house gas" problem of CO2 in the atmosphere. When seaweed grows it takes carbon out of the atmosphere. When we burn seaweed oil we are just putting the same carbon back, with no net increase in CO2.
  1. Understanding the Global Carbon Cycle - Woods Hole
  2. Global warming could raise ocean level by 1 meter or more in 100 years

Algae to clean smoke stack exhaust / Greenfuelonline.com

  1. greenfuelonline.com grows algae fed on exhaust of power plants, oil or dry algae as coal substitute
  2. Algae - like a breath mint for smoke stacks - christian science monitor article
  3. More articles about greenfuelonline.com
  4. First round VC $2.4 mil, second round $11 mil

Other Plants

  1. Duckweed - small fast growing floating freshwater plants - could breed seed with high oil content
  2. marine macrophytes -

Market

  1. Palm Oil prices mostly broken links but this has $387.50 US/metric-ton if 6 lb/gal then MT is like 366 gal, so just over $1/gal in Malaysia
  2. $0.22/lb so at 6 lbs/gal then $1.32/gal in US
  3. palm oil is 54% of vegetable oil export market
  4. palm oil is about 16 per cent of world vegetable oil production and 40 per cent of world trade in vegetable oils.
  5. retail vegetable oil watched from $5/gal to $8.50
  6. On oil_from_algae someone said a railroad tanker full of vegetable oil in the USA was about $2/gal

Links

  1. Yahoo group oil_from_algae
  2. google search for (seaweed OR macro-algae OR macgroalgae) AND biofuel
  3. Info on farming seaweed and nice pictures
  4. Dry Spirulina is 2% fat - can search a few other seaweeds but nothing higher
  5. Says Dulse has most fat of any seaweed but this conflicts with seaveg.com
  6. Says seaweed fat is 1 to 5% for dry seaweed
  7. some of my posts on the net
  8. seaveg.com has 3.6% fat for Alaria, 1.7% for Dulse, 2.4% for Kelp, and 4.5% Nori (must be for dried seaweeds).
  9. Endosymbiosis - bacteria starting to live in another cell
  10. Evidently, after 5 years, the nuclei had become dependent on a bacterial function (an enzyme produced by the bacteria but no longer by the host). What started as parasitism had evolved into mutualism (the bacteria could not be grown outside their host).
  11. Google Answers on seaweed oil content
  12. Google Answers for seaweed with more than 5.5% oil
  13. Talk-Biology
  14. Some freshwater algae can be 50% vegetable oil
  15. possible to farm 40 to 64 wet tons of kelp per acre per year
  16. little harvesting of sargassum and no cultivation
  17. lipids very high 3-7% and very little fat 1-5% - I thought these would be the same ranges
  18. Lipid - wikipedia
  19. Phyco.org alternative fuels - algae varieties, cultivation
  20. fao.org info on growing microalgae
  21. carolina.com Algae Culture Kits
  22. discount-hydro.com - hydroponics kits, pumps, timers, nutrients, lights, ph testers, etc.
  23. Biodiesel equipment is not very expensive - like $4,200 to do 85 gal batch
  24. changingworldtech.com, res-energy.com , and Thermal depolymerization - wikipedia ~anything to oil - 200 barrels per day- $10,000/day
  25. Interesting report looking for high oil species of algae 100,000 species of algae
  26. Soy oil typically yields 55 gallons per acre and can be profitably produced for $1.80 per gallon by farmers in the mid-west.
  27. Oil-producing algae. Seems you just dry/press/centrifuged or something to extract the oil. Seems more oil per acre than oilseed rape / sunflowers etc. Seems 70% of the oil in algae can be extracted with a simple press.
  28. Vegetable Oil Centrifuge -
    1. oil floats to top leaving rest of algae below under high Gs
    2. search google and there are plenty
    3. alfalaval.com - big centrifuge 10,000 Gs
    4. labessentials.com Small lab one does 2000 g.
  29. Fish eat algae or other things that eat algae, so have same oils
  30. Greenhouse gas emission credits - we could get paid to remove CO2!!!! Proof can be the delivery of the vegetable oil.
  31. www.biodieseltechnologies.com
  32. It seems biodiesel costs like $0.50 to $1.00 gal to make on top of the oil costs. It will be easier and cheaper to focus on straight vegetable oil since cars can run on that and the price for customers is better in the end. Let others convert to diesel if they want. Anyway, straight vegetable oil at under $2.00/gal seems like it might just be doable.
  33. Someplace said 20,000 gal/year/acre using algae to make oil.
  34. Could have algea blooms from IronSulfate and then just drive boat around filtering algae out of the water. But probably floating ponds are going to work better.
  35. biodieselamerica.org
  36. 72 MPG dodge prototype diesel-hybrid
  37. Best cars in the future will be vegetable oil hybrids
  38. List of oil yields for different crops "Oil Palm" can get 635 gal/acre/year
  39. Oil Palm - Wikipedia American Oil Palm Elaeis oleifera is native to tropical Central America and South America.
  40. Shows fat of 0.5% to 2% for some types of kelp Fat and oil should be same
  41. Algae_culture wikipedia
  42. Nitrogen in Benthic Food Chains - says seaweeds like 10% lipids dw - PDF page 10, book page 200
  43. psaalgae.org links lots of links
  44. yanmar made 27 and 36 hp ourboard diesel engines the 27 uses 1.5 gal/hour, ran on "fuel made from soybean oil"
  45. crude vegetable oil needs some refining anyway so going biodiesel may be reasonable, ran engines on vegetable oil
  46. general info on fats and oil
  47. Minnesota is pushing biodiesel with requirement that all diesel in minnesota contain 2% biodiesel
  48. Dr Diesel demoed his engine on peanut oil at 1900 worlds fair - wanted farmers to be able to grow own fuel