Efforts to eliminate waterway dead zones and algal blooms nationwide have focused on pollution from manure.
Agricultural fertilisers washed off the land by rain can cause algal population booms, making more food available to the larvae.
ECONOMIST: A new study puts numbers to the Great Barrier Reef��s decline
Much is washed off by rain, ending up in local watercourses where dissolved nutrients can cause algal blooms and kill fish.
Experiments that add iron to the sea have had mixed success, though, and may cause harmful algal blooms and ocean acidification.
Indeed, some of the strongest emissions come from algal species found in warm, often windless waters such as the Sargasso Sea.
In May, Dow Chemical said it would tap a strain of Solazyme algal oil for use in electrical transformer insulating fluids.
FORBES: The U.S. Military's Great Green Gamble Spurs Biofuel Startups
Creating gigantic algal blooms risks using up all the oxygen in large parts of the ocean, killing anything else that lives there.
Progammes include the Global Sea Level Observing System ( GLOSS), regional tsunami warning systems and the Harmful Algal Bloom Programme ( IOC-HAB).
If perch become more efficient eaters, the numbers of zooplankton will be suppressed which could lead to more frequent algal blooms in waterways.
Whether grown in bioreactors or in desert ponds, algal oil mostly sidesteps the food and land conflicts that potentially can limit other biofuels.
FORBES: The U.S. Military's Great Green Gamble Spurs Biofuel Startups
They will be closed only for short periods of time and only during the winter when the water temperature and light are too low for algal blooms.
Solazyme is building two production facilities in the United States and one in Brazil that will have a capacity to produce 450, 000 metric tons of algal oil.
FORBES: Solazyme Taps Asia Market In Algae Oil Deal With Japanese Conglomerate
The sewage also caused burgeoning algal blooms in the harbor.
High oil-yielding strains of algae can be grown and dried and the oil extracted from the dry algal mass, before being similarly converted to biodiesel in a process called transesterification.
The study said improving water quality was key to controlling starfish outbreaks, with increased agricultural run-off such as fertiliser along the reef coast causing algal blooms that starfish larvae feed on.
Not surprisingly, the report, just published in the prestigious American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology, has put the cat among the pigeons, since there are many new companies gearing-up to produce algal biofuels.
FORBES: Report Says Algal Biofuels May Not Cut Carbon Emissions, But Read More Closely
It is possible that the designer method can overcome some of the drawbacks involved with making fuel from algae, namely robustness and competitiveness of particular strains over other organisms, enhanced growth rate and yields of algal oil.
The NIR method is highly specific for the detection of different kinds of fatty acids and it is intended to develop a database of fingerprints for different fatty acid components in algal biomass, with which to analyse actual algae.
Disaster mitigation, through early tsunami warning systems, but also by quantifying the trends of typical marine hazards, including typhoons and storm surges, sea level rise, or harmful algal blooms, are critical objectives of ocean monitoring with immediate and sustainable impacts.
According to a life-cycle analysis, the land-based crops all were found to sequester more carbon than that incurred in growing them, while the contrary was true for growing algae, meaning that replacing fossil fuels by algal fuels could cause an overall increase in carbon emissions.
FORBES: Report Says Algal Biofuels May Not Cut Carbon Emissions, But Read More Closely
The combination of natural and man-made circumstances "is unfortunately consistent with ongoing trends, which means that more huge algal blooms can be expected in the future unless a scientifically guided management plan is implemented for the region, " said the report's lead author, Anna Michalak, of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Even if there remains some dispute over the exact figures used, what the study does highlight is the importance of developing an integrated paradigm of production and recycling for algal fuel production, as I stressed before in the context of rare metals such as are required to maintain the electronics and solar power industries.
FORBES: Report Says Algal Biofuels May Not Cut Carbon Emissions, But Read More Closely
The next trick, which Exxon's money will help pay for, is to tweak the biochemical pathway that makes the algal oil (which is known, technically, as a triglyceride, and has oxygen atoms in it as well as carbon and hydrogen) so that the oxygen-containing parts of the molecules are snipped off and a pure hydrocarbon is left.
应用推荐