• Question: Why don't we use agae fuels its alot more enviromentally friendly and works in smilar ways and also can you convert methane into other hydrocarbons so can we use cows and other biologcal waste to make plastic?

    Asked by matt21 to Edd, Jess, Zara on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      That’s a good question.
      There should be many research on this.. as lots of results on google when I type in algae fuel!
      People also try to add ethanol into petrol to make it more ‘green’. There are ideas to use enzymes in reactions to make polymers (and plastics).. via using supercritical carbon dioxide system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide).

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      People are definitely working on this at the moment and I know there is some excitement that we could come up with better fuels. One of my colleagues is actually working on this at the moment – he uses maths to try and work out the best way to design a bioreactor that would produce algal fuel:
      http://www.maths.gla.ac.uk/~mab/ABBL.htm

      I think the problem at the moment is getting the technology right that will generate this fuel on a large enough scale. We can do this in the lab but making enough to use in cars or homes requires a much bigger scale and approach.

    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hey matt21!

      I agree that it’s very important that we find alternatives to fossil fuels if we want to tackle climate change – algae fuels are one way to do that. We could use them to make fuels for cars like biodiesel and reduce our CO2 emissions.

      I think that one of the reasons algae fuels and other biofuels are not used very much at the moment is because of the cost of building the infrastructure (e.g. replacing or upgrading petrol stations to contain biofuel) and research (like Edd says, it can be difficult to translate something you do in the laboratory to the big wide world!). We’re still in the early days of algae fuels and so it may be a while before it is widely available.

      As for methane from cows… I think it would be difficult to collect their…uhh… farts. Then again, I just googled and it looks like it has been done: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2274995/Cow-farts-collected-in-plastic-tank-for-global-warming-study.html – as part of global warming research! Scientists are trying to figure out how to change the diet of cows to reduce their methane emissions.

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