Jim Sears spent years in his Boulder garage pondering the details of a system for turning algae, sunlight and power-plant exhaust into fuel on a massive scale. The company he founded to make his vision a reality, Solix Biofuels, launched with fanfare in December.
In that same garage two weeks ago, Jim Sears met with Boulder biodiesel entrepreneur Mark Fischer and Colorado School of Mines Ph.D. candidate Jonathan Meuser, an algae specialist. On Friday, Sears and colleagues launched an organization called Solar Democracy. About 30 attended the event at the Spice of Life Events Center.
President George W. Bush asked for 35 billion gallons of biofuels a year by 2017 in his State of the Union address. Corn ethanol can produce just 15 billion gallons, so algae is getting serious attention, said Katherine Andrews, a biologist working on algal fuels at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. But problems abound, she said.
The organization will probably be a nonprofit, Sears said, but they haven`t had time to nail that down, exactly. Solar Democracy`s founders have had time to do little but describe the enormous challenges in harnessing algae to produce fuel — and outline how they, with a great deal of help, hope to surmount them.
Producing oil from algae is in principle simple: grow algae in water, feed them carbon dioxide, let them sunbathe and then harvest the oil. Several companies are pursuing it; none are producing more than a dribble of fuel.
The problems range from the technical to the scientific to the political. They are too great for any one company to handle alone, Sears says.
Enter Solar Democracy.
The greatest of the challenges is one spanning science and politics. Researchers have yet to identify which of the 100,000 known species of algae produce what kinds of potential fuels, Meuser said.
Some algae make hydrogen. Others make ethanol. Some produce something like olive oil, which could be made into biodiesel or jet fuel.
But depending on the water and local weather, a given type of algae could behave quite differently. It could take decades to nail down the best algae for a given location, and thousands of algae native to different regions may be needed, the Solar Democracy founders say. The reason for that is political, Sears said.
"Nobody`s going to let you build one of these things with genetically modified algae unless you have one hell of an environmental impact statement," Sears said, so you need to go with local algae.
Solar Democracy`s idea is to encourage widespread "bioprospecting" by, for example, sending out collection kits and inexpensive diagnostic tools.
Schoolchildren or curious adults could zap information on promising algae over the Internet and have it reviewed by scientists. Hot prospects could be sent to a full-fledged lab for analysis, Sears said, and Solar Democracy would build up a comprehensive, publicly accessible repository of information on photosynthetic organisms.