Algae to combat climate change

By Flemming Johannesen

While the use of algae in cosmetics, neutraceuticals and other high value products is common and commercially viable, making a business out of cultivating algae for producing biofuel is still quite a novel endeavour. According to Dr. Jonathan Trent, Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the production of biofuel from algae could very well become a trillion dollar industry, providing a significant contribution to the world’s liquid fuel needs.

“The oil industry is 150 years old and it is a two trillion dollar industry. We have to find a replacement within ten years for oil or we are going to have serious problems” says the American professor, who believes that the sense of urgency can be turned into an advantage. The challenge is for scientists to figure out within a very short time span just how practical it is to grow algae from a biological, economical and technical, as well as environmental, point of view.

During a three-day workshop, a multidisciplinary group comprising scientists, engineers, economists, and policy-makers explored and evaluated, discussed and debated, if offshore algae production is feasible, scalable, environmentally acceptable, and cost-effective.

An offspring of an ongoing collaboration between the municipality of Lolland and the city of Santa Cruz, California to promote sustainable development and climate change mitigation, the workshop convened to consider the potential of offshore algae cultivation.

“The offshore wind farms off the coast of Lolland represent an incredible opportunity of an infrastructure for developing an offshore algae farm with all the advantages that might have” says Dr. Trent as he points to the 11 wind turbines off the northern coast of Lolland, which when installed in 1991 became the world’s first offshore wind farm with a production capacity of 5 MW.

Potentially big business

Algae offer great promise as a biofuel resource because it grows very fast – much faster than plants like soybean, palm, and corn currently being used for biofuel production – and they have a much higher yield of oil per unit area.

“To put it in perspective, the oil that we now get from land crops like rape seed is about 160 gallons per acre (1,500 litres per hectare) per year. Soy is about 50 gallons per acre (468 litres per hectare) per year. Algae would produce on the order of 2,000 gallons per acre (18,700 litres per hectare) per year” Dr. Trent explains.

Another advantage is that cultivation of algae does not require arable land and therefore does not compete with traditional agriculture or displace food crops.

The conclusion from the workshop was that Lolland has the potential to become an international test centre for the development of biofuels from algae.

Why Lolland?

What makes Lolland an ideal testing site is not only its wind farms and location on the shallow and relatively calm Baltic Sea, but also the people inhabiting the island. Like the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Trent believes that all great discoveries begin with enthusiasm, and enthusiasm he has found a great deal of on Lolland.

Given the topography of Lolland, fear of flooding would seem a natural driver for the enthusiasm that over the course of the past ten years has created a small scale green revolution on the island.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that an increase in temperature of two degrees Celsius will cause a rise in sea levels of almost a metre, entailing flooding of low lying areas around the world. Lolland is such a low lying area. Indeed, one third of the island would be flooded in the event of a rise in sea level of more than a metre. Much of the southwestern part of the island used to be sea bed and thus covered by water. It was only after a storm surge that claimed the lives of 82 people in 1872 that some 700 islanders decided to build a dyke stretching 63 kilometres along the southern shoreline.

Today, local renewables cover the entire electricity need of the island and 75% of heating needs. The enthusiasm that has driven the island of Lolland to go green, however, is not fear of the potential impact of global warming, but much more immediate and tangible problems.

From adversity to opportunity

When the shipyard in the port town of Nakskov – at one time in the 1960s employing as many as 2,200 people – closed down in 1987, Lolland in general and Nakskov in particular was faced with quite a challenge. An outer region of Denmark with soaring unemployment, the island struggled to make ends meet.

Part of the turnaround came in the late 1990s when local authorities in the western part of Lolland made a conscious decision to focus on attracting companies working in the field of clean technology. Leo Christensen, Project Director in the municipality of Lolland explains what the local authorities have done to provide optimum conditions for fast track and sustainable industrial development:

 “We simply decided to take the old shipyard which was closed down and turn it into a maritime logistic area. And we were lucky. Within a few weeks we got the first contract with Vestas Wind Systems producing wind turbines and then things took off”, explains Leo Christensen, Project Director in the municipality of Lolland. A subsequent decision not to build any plant without installing components enabling it to be used as a testing facility made a perfect marriage between the needs of industry and the municipality’s vision for sustainable growth and development. For example, half of the local power plant with a total production capacity of 20 MW is used by researchers to test components to make the generation of power more efficient.

Algae as part of green growth

Given Lolland’s innovative and green recent history it is no coincidence that the island is to host the world’s first International Workshop on Offshore Algal Energy. The planned algae research and development facility is just the latest addition to the many facilities on Lolland that enable full-scale testing and demonstration of clean technologies.

The Mayor of Lolland, Stig Vestergaard, hopes that an offshore algae energy research and development facility can become an asset for the island and help create more green collar jobs. An R&D facility plays in well with Lolland’s vision to become a modern and sustainable society, which implies an international outlook and cooperation across borders to take on global environment and energy challenges.

Photos: Flemming Johannesen