Molly Putzig, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Hello, everyone and thank you for joining us today for the Women-in-Algae Research webinar. We’re going to go ahead and get started. I will turn it over to Leslie Ovard for our introduction.
Leslie Ovard, Idaho National Laboratory
Welcome to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office, Women-in-Algae Research webinar series. When I refer to BETO, that is the acronym for Bioenergy Technologies Office. This event is hosted through Operation BioenergizeME, which is the base camp for BETO’s workforce development-related resources and activities.
01:08
Today we are joined by Amanda Berry, Lynn Wendt, and Christy Sterner. Amanda and Lynn work in algae research at national labs. Christy serves as a BETO technology manager in the algae program. I would also like to introduce Molly Putzig, who is the moderator for this webinar—She has a few housekeeping items including how you participate or how you ask questions—and then she will turn it over to Amanda. So thank you.
01:38
Molly Putzig
Great. Thank you Leslie. So before we get started, I’d like to go over a few items so you know how to participate in today’s event. You’re listening in using your computer’s speaker system by default. If you would prefer to join over the phone, just select telephone in the audio pane of your control panel and the dial-in information will be displayed. You’ll have the opportunity to submit text questions to today’s presenters by typing your questions into the question pane of the control panel. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation. We will collect these and follow up at the end of today’s presentation. Now I’ll turn it over to Amanda Berry.
02:18
Amanda Barry, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Great. Thank you, Molly and Leslie, for the intro. I'll start this up.
02:32
Today I’ll be talking to you about how at Los Alamos National Lab we’re tapping into algal biodiversity for biofuels.
02:40
I want to begin for those of you who aren’t as familiar with algae—what are algae? What are we talking about? Algae is a very general term that encompasses a diverse group of organisms from cyanobacteria to seaweed. These are some pictures of some algae to show you what I mean by how different they are from one another. This is how we grow algae in the lab—we grow it on these plates. If you’ve ever worked with bacteria, it’s a very similar process. We streak it out on these agar plates.
This is a chlorella here. Over here, this pretty photogenic algae is the diatom. So diatoms are very pretty with these silicate cell walls. This is galdieria over here on the right. It’s a red algae. Down here this is nannochloropsis. It’s called a stramenopile or a heterokont. Over here, this spiral algae you might be familiar with. It’s called spirulina and it’s actually a cyanobacteria made up of multiple cells, and this is what you see in your food and smoothies. Down here in the bottom left, this is chlorella. This shows you how small these algae are. A lot of the algae that I’ll be talking about today are in these tiny micron sizes, and they’re single cells floating in this liquid culture.
03:52
What’s neat about algae is that when you stress them, they form lipids, and that’s the oil that we then collect for biofuels. You can stress them by depriving them of different nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. You can also stress them by either reducing the temperature or increasing the temperature. You could have high salt, high light, differences in pH, and this is what it looks like.
This is a picture of a cross section of an algae. On the top here, there’s no lipid bodies being formed so it’s not under stress. It has nitrogen. When you starve it of nitrogen, down here in this panel, you see these large, big fat droplets forming, and that’s these oil bodies. They contain a molecule called triacylglycerol (TAG) in different chain links, and these are what go into biofuels.
04:45
This is the algae-based biofuel process.
The idea is that you have these large algae raceway ponds (I’ll show you a picture of those in the next slide in real life), and they grow in these large shallow ponds on land. Hopefully you’d have a CO2 source nearby that you could pump into that pond so the algae use that CO2 through photosynthesis and grow more biomass. It uses the sun so you get a lot of biomass and a lot of that lipid, hopefully. You then harvest and extract that algae, extract that lipid, and then that can go directly into our existing refinery structures—it’s a fungible fuel—and then out comes your jet fuel, your gasoline, and your diesel.
05:33
Why algae biofuels? One of the benefits of algae is that it can grow on marginal lands. This is something from 2011 that was published in Science. This is the land required to displace all gasoline in the United States. To give you an idea of how much that is, we consume in the United States a little over 140 billion gallons of motor gasoline a year, and this is how much land is estimated to take in the best-case scenario. If you had the best biomass productivity and the best lipid productivity of that algae, it would use much less land than other biomass sources.
It has a high productivity and you don’t need land where you’re going to be growing food. It’s also able to use wastewater and brackish water, so water that we aren’t drinking, and it can recycle that carbon dioxide. Algae, as you probably know, can be used for other coproducts such as foods and nutraceuticals. It can produce a wide range of biofuels, including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and ethanol. That’s why it has the potential to be a high-impact feed stock and is hopefully going to contribute about 5 billion gallons per year to renewable fuels. This is a picture down here on the lower right of algae growth facilities. You see these large raceway ponds. This is actually in New Mexico south of Los Cruces. Algae grows in these shallow ponds, and they cycle around these ponds with a paddle wheel.
07:12
This is the eukaryotic tree of life. This is the tree of life that we are on, down here in the bottom right in the boring branch. I just want to show you this to show you how diverse algae are. Algae occupy four out of the five eukaryotic super groups. These stars here are the algae biofuel potential strains, or strains that we study for potential biofuel production. There’s green algae over here on the left, galdieria the red algae up there on the top, and then down here the stramenopiles, including nannochloropsis. These little blue lines are the endosymbiotic events, or the events where one organism has engulfed another along the evolutionary road of life.
Down here in the bottom left is a picture of some of the protein-encoding genes that are similar between the different algae groups. As you can see, they share some genes, but there are also many genes that are unique to the different types of algae. There’s really a lot of biodiversity there that we can tap into, and a lot of these organisms are only just now beginning to be explored.
08:27
Some of the tools that we use for algae optimization—we use genetic tools. We can use directed evolution, where we can exert a pressure on an organism to have a trait that we want, such as high-temperature tolerance, low-temperature tolerance, etcetera. We can also introduce non-native genes that we call heterologous, so genes from other organisms that we want to give a certain trait to an algae. We can manipulate the native genes in that algae to do what we want it to do.
We also have tools like genome editing. You’ve probably heard of CRISPR technology, so that’s something that’s now beginning to be applied in algae. That gives us the power to directly edit the genome of the algae and perhaps not leave any other pieces of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) behind (so it won’t actually be a genetically modified organism [GMO]).
Breeding is now just beginning in some of these production strains. A lot of research into that. As you probably know, in plants, breeding has been one of the ways that we’ve been able to evolve species to have the traits that we want for foods. We’re trying to do that also with algae.
09:42
And then this way, from our little algae sitting in a culture to hopefully a super algae that can do really well outside and make us a lot of biofuels.
09:45
Some of the omics1 approaches I’ll be talking to you about today that we use—we use “genomics,” which is the study of the DNA in the organism. We use “transcriptomics,” which is the study of how that message of DNA is transcribed into RNA. We do “proteomics,” which is how that message of RNA is translated into protein.
This is a picture of that to give you an idea that we’re doing genomics when we look at the DNA, transcriptomics when we look at the RNA message, and proteomics when we look at the protein or the molecules in the cell that have the activity.
1Omics approaches refer to innovative technology platforms, such as genetics, genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, recently developed techniques for identifying many different molecules.
10:35
We also do “metabolomics,” “lipidomics,” and “glycomics.” (this is looking at different small molecular weight compounds or sugars also inside the cell. This way we can understand what’s happening with the biology of that organism.) We also look at “phenomics,” which is how the algae behaves, what it looks like, and how these different genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics effect the traits of the cell.
11:07
One of the challenges of this incredible genetic diversity of algae is that it’s very difficult to create these genetics tools and methods that are universally applicable across all species.
11:24
What are the traits of the super algae?
We’d like it to have temperature tolerance, because down here in New Mexico, we have very cold winters, and then we also can have very hot summers in the desert. We want an algae that can last year-round so that we can harvest that algae in all seasons. We also want it to have low nutrient requirements. One of the things that will make algae economical is if we don’t have to add a lot of fertilizers into that pond.
Salt tolerance is also good, so that we don’t need to use fresh water. We can use sea water. We could use brackish water from underground that isn’t going to be used as a drinking source.
We want it to have rapid growth in pond conditions, and we do that by increasing its resistance to photo saturation, or the amount of light, coming into the pond (it’s tolerance to oxygen saturation). We want it to efficiently capture that carbon dioxide for growth, and we also want it to be stable over time.
One of the things with the ponds: they get predators. They get pathogens, and we want those competitors to not outcompete the algae that we want for biofuel production. We also get a lot of rain, and that can dilute the pond. One of the unique problems with ponds in New Mexico is that they also get tumbleweeds building up and then blocking the paddle wheels, which isn’t good.
We want them to have that high oil production, and ideally, we’d like them to do that without having to starve them of nutrients or lose any growth because when you deprive them of nitrogen, they also stop growing. (We would like to be able to have that oil production without having to do that.)
13:13
At Los Alamos National Lab, these are some of the tools that we use. Generally, we start here on the left. We have our algae streaked out on plates. We then inoculate that algae into these smaller flasks, and then we grow them up. We can do small-scale studies on the bench in these flasks. Eventually, we go into these, the photo bioreactor matrix, and these are small columns. These are close ups down here—where we have light coming from the top down, and we can have different environmental scripts that actually mimic outdoor conditions in whatever season we’d like. We also can bubble in gases in here, so we can see how it behaves under different concentrations of CO2 and air. We also have mixing. In this way, we’re trying to mimic the outdoor conditions at a smaller scale so that we can do replicates and have controls so that we can do good science.
Once we’ve done our experiments here, we can move outdoors into our greenhouse and our mini ponds (these are 50 to 100 liters). These are the much larger ponds right here. We can do triplicate experiments in the greenhouse and hopefully how they behave here is how they’ll behave at even larger scale.
14:37
Again, this is the algae-based fuel process, and I’ll talk about my research specifically. One of the [research] questions [we are addressing] is “how can we increase the biomass productivity of this pond?” We want to increase the biomass, the lipids, and the carbohydrates in that algae to get the most biofuels.
We know that we could add sugars to this pond, but one of the problems with adding sugars is that you’ll get contamination with other organisms (a lot of organisms like sugar), and you might get fungi and bacteria and other things growing in that pond. Sugars are also expensive, so it’s not very economical. Some of the questions [we are addressing] in my lab is “can we add cellulose or plant material?” and “Is there another carbon source that’s readily available that we can add to that pond to increase that biomass productivity?”
15:33
One of the organisms that we looked at was auxenochlorella protothecoides, and this is a green algae. It was identified in a previous project before we started working with it in my lab as a high-lipid-producing green microalgae. We knew it could make a lot of lipids and we knew that it liked sugar, so it could grow both “heterotrophically” (on sugars alone) or “mixotrophically” (both with sugars and with photosynthesis). We decided to test this growth on cellulose as the sole carbon source.
16:05
This is a picture of a plate of algae, and this red color here is Congo red staining (the red dye binds to cellulose).
When you have a clearing in that cellulose, or when the algae utilizes that cellulose or takes it up into the cell, you’ll get this clearing in that staining, and there won’t be any cellulose there for that stain to bind to. You can see here that with auxenochlorella protothecoides, this top panel really could clear the plate. After a couple of days in the dark, that cellulose would disappear. This is in comparison to another strain, a lab strain of microalgae that researchers commonly work with called chlamydomonas. (We knew it could utilize cellulose—that had been published previously—but not nearly as well as this organism appears to.) It also appears, if you’ll notice, that it’s a defuse pattern. The cellulose clearing isn’t directly under the colony as it is with chlamydomonas, so we thought that maybe this organism was secreting something into the media to degrade that cellulose.
17:10
Then we had the [research] question “could this organism grow on raw plants?” Adding purified cellulose to a pond is still really expensive, so we wanted to see if it could actually break down plant matter. This is the leftover plant matter from other processes. Here we have corn stover, which is just the part of the corn plant leftover after you harvest the corn. We have grass, switchgrass here. You could also use grass from lawn clippings. We picked 12 of these that we got from the Idaho National Lab feedstock library [Biomass Feedstock Library, or BFL]. (They provide that for free.) We added these to our flasks to see what happened.
17:56
What we see—this is algae with switchgrass on the left and the triplicate experiment, and then algae alone here on the right. You can see the cultures with switchgrass are very green and that when we count these cells over time (we actually have to count them because there’s plant matter in there so we can’t do a simple optical density measurement), we get a lot more cells when we have that switchgrass present. We also see that the algae is storing a lot of that carbon that it’s using from that switchgrass into lipids, so we get higher lipid production and higher biomass.
Basically, by adding switchgrass, we made a super algae. This was the first example of algae actually utilizing raw plant material for growth and carbon storage, and we published this last year in Algal Research.
18:48
We also scaled this up to our mini ponds, and this is just to show you how we use these mini ponds. On the top here, this is algae grown without switchgrass. In the bottom, this is with switchgrass, so these are the pieces of the grass there in the pond. You could see this culture looks very green and very dense compared to without [switchgrass].
19:15
Then we wanted to do some of our omics to figure out exactly which part of the plant the algae was utilizing (this is called “glycomics”, [which] looks at all of the sugars in that plant, or the glycome of that plant material, to determine which part is disappearing when you have algae present. You don’t need to look at this graph or understand everything going on here, but it’s a really pretty picture.) Where we have all these little blue arrows is where we see changes when we have the algae present in that plant glycome, and what we saw is that it’s utilizing these xylans fractions, or the hemicellulose fractions, of the plant.
19:59
When we isolate the xylans fraction and feed it back to the algae, we can pick out which part of the xylans fraction it’s utilizing. In this box that’s labeled with a plus sign, that row is with the algae present. These bright bands over here on the left have disappeared when you have that algae there. That also corresponds with xyloglucan.
Interestingly, xyloglucans are the cellulose micro fibrils in wood, and they cross-link the cellulose micro fibrils in wood. This organism was actually isolated (we got it from a feedstock library). It was isolated in the 1800's from plant material, so it makes sense that this organism has this ability to make its niche in its environment.
20:52
We also wanted to identify the enzymes involved (or the proteins involved) in this activity and how they are breaking down this hemicellulose. When we do genomics, we see that it has each one of these labels that correspond to a different gene in this organism has the potential to be a cellulate or something that breaks down cellulolytic [tissues] and has the cellulolytic activity. We see that in the presence of plants, certain genes are expressed.
21:27
We could also do proteomics to look at this further. Each one of these spots corresponds with a protein, and we can do algae plus plants, plants alone, and algae alone. (This is with Kendrick Laboratories in Madison, Wisconsin.) We can then do a subtraction plot to determine which proteins are expressed. We can sequence these spots and compare that data to our transcriptomic and our genomic data.
21:55
In our lab, we’re also bioprospecting for cellulosic activity in other organisms. We were sent these strains from a collaborator up in Canada, and these were isolated from a pulp mill pond. They also have the cellulolytic ability, so we see this clearing on plates. We’re able to use our genome sequencing facilities here at Los Alamos National Lab to identify those organisms, and those are both chlorellas.
22:24
We also are looking at which plants certain algae prefer, and this is another strain of algae that we grow over time with different plants. We can see that it really likes corn stover compared to these other plant residues.
22:40
We then can do scanning electron microscopy with our collaborators at USDA and really look at what is changing in that plant material when you have that algae present. When we have algae, we lose these structures here that you can see on the plant. These are called trichomes, but they get shut off when you have that algae present, so maybe the algae is utilizing that material.
23:08
Again, I want to leave you with this eukaryotic tree of life. Algae are very diverse and there’s a lot there that can be tapped.
23:20
This is my lab. We’re located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This is our building. This is our greenhouse where we have those mini ponds, and these are four of the students who have worked on this.
23:34
I was asked to talk about how I got to algae [in my career], so this is my life flow chart.
I was actually born and raised in northern California on a mountain outside of Redding, California.
I read a lot of books, so I would recommend to anyone just to read, read, and read.
I then moved up to Portland, Oregon, and that’s what introduced me to Oregon State University, where I received my bachelor’s degree.
I also studied crop and soil science and the microbes in grass seed crops in Oregon.
I then went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I did some work with extremophilic archaea that actually was from my hometown in Redding, California.
And then I switched gears completely, taking a masters in Wisconsin and returning back to Portland, where I went to Oregon Health and Science University for my Ph.D. There I worked with human cells (two eukaryotic proteins in human cells and how they transfer copper to one another).
I did my post doc at Johns Hopkins University, studying two other copper proteins in that same system. ([I was] very focused on copper metabolism in human cells.)
Then I came to Los Alamos National Lab and completely changed again and applied a lot of the tools that I used in human cells to algae. That’s what I do now, and I like it a lot because of that biodiversity and all that we have to learn from these unique organisms.
25:19
Leslie Ovard
Wow. That is amazing Amanda. Are we cutting you off or is that it?
Amanda Barry
That’s it.
25:42
Leslie Ovard
Thank you. We’re going to let Amanda take a seat now and Lynn Wendt from INL will talk to us about some of the work that she’s doing. Her work comes after production, which Amanda talked to us a lot about, and before the end product. So Lynn, how about you?
26:04
Lynn Wendt, Idaho National Laboratory
Great. Thanks Leslie.
26:16
I’m going to talk today about feedstock supply and logistics so going from the raceway to the biorefinery. As Amanda mentioned, I’m at Idaho National Lab.
26:36
Let me introduce the biomass supply chain again to you. Amanda did a great job of talking about cultivation and algae production and all the diversity in algae species. One of the things that we at INL think about the supply chain going from cultivation to conversion. Logistics are an important part of that because you have a very dilute algae in cultivation, and in conversion you need something of a different format and has more energy density.
Some of the things that I like about algae biomass, and Amanda talked about these as well, is that it uses energy from the sun to grow and also CO2. One source of CO2 could actually be flue gas from a coal-fired plant—the Department of Energy is supporting some of that research and so that’s really exciting—and it also needs water, of course, to grow in, and some sort of nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorous.
A lot of times, those water sources can be the same thing. In the case of waste water treatment water, they can be very high in nutrients. There are also a lot of water bodies that have high nutrient content because of agricultural runoff. The Department of Energy is investing in some of those technologies as well to try to help some environmental issues as well as make a product from that.
You can see the logistics operations here in the middle between cultivation and conversion. We start with harvesting the biomass. Then we dewater it. So it basically goes from something that looks like water to something that looks like toothpaste. Some of the work that we’re doing here at INL is stabilizing the biomass, and I’ll talk more about that in a second. Then there’s also, a lot of times, either pumping to the bioreactor or some sort of transport.
Then, once you finally get to conversion, there are a lot of different products that you can make, and the Department of Energy looks heavily into fuels because we want to help with displacing petroleum-based gasoline and diesel. There are also a lot of chemicals that can be produced (biochemicals or bio-based chemicals), as well as (Amanda had suggested) the protein sources, nutraceuticals, and cosmetics. So there are a lot of opportunities to use every part of the algae to maximize our profit, which is very exciting to me.
29:27
Let me talk about INL’s feedstock logistics program. INL does the feedstock logistics research for every bio-based product. That can include corn stover or switchgrass or algae, in this case. Some of the interesting things about algae are that there is a lot of variation in composition depending on the species and how it’s grown, and there can be things that go into the ponds such as soil that’s blown in. The algae can have different moisture contents and have different handling. In feedstock logistics, what we’re trying to do is really minimize that variation and provide a really stable consistent on-spec feedstock for conversion.
One challenge that we’re looking at addressing is the amount of sunlight that hits the United States every year changes based on the season. We all know that we experience that in the different seasons, but this figure on the bottom shows that over a course of one year, the sunlight can double during the summer compared to the winter, which really affects how well they grow. The Department of Energy is looking at a lot of ways to mitigate this variation by using different strains.
One thing that INL has focused on is trying to define a method to basically take apart all of that variation using storage.
31:19
What we do is take biomass that—if we produce too much biomass in the summer, for example, we’ve developed a method that can store this biomass throughout the year so that a conversion facility can use it whenever they need it. Our method is based on ensiling, which is used for cattle feed quite a bit and has been used for hundreds of years actually. That’s a really great way to connect agriculture into the algae world.
We’ve shown that when we use this method which in this method you have microbial fermentation that occurs and it makes these stabilizing organic acids and it lowers the pH. So you don’t have a lot of activity during this storage and it makes – and our algae can survive really well in this. So and the alternative to doing this would be drying but that’s really expensive and uses generally natural gas. Our method can be done without all of the costs of drying, the energy consumption, and the greenhouse gas emissions. So this is a really green technology for managing variability.
32:44
I want to talk also about the excess nutrients in the waterways in the United States. This is a map that shows the prevalence of toxic algae blooms that have occurred over the last few years in the United States. You can see that these blooms are happening in every state, and it's impacting us all. Another thing that you can see is that the water supplies for large population centers are often the ones where these blooms are happening, so that water supply can be at risk. A lot of this is coming from excess fertilizer in agricultural runoff and the bacteria that are present in those waters—we can start using that and then become kind of dominant. One thing that we’re looking at, which I’m involved in this project and I’m really excited about it, is using beneficial algae to reduce the nutrient content in this water before those harmful bacteria can start growing.
33:56
I work with my collaborators at Sandia National Laboratory. They have this system where the water from an affected waterway can be pumped over this matrix, where algae and any cells that are in the water can attach to this matrix and start growing. At the end of the matrix or at the end of the flow way, you have a lot less nutrients in the water and that is then redelivered to the waterway. In effect, you’re growing algae that you want from the nutrients there. This can be applied in a lot of different types of water. It can work in sea water, brackish water, agricultural runoff, and fresh waters. This picture here is actually just near the Salton Sea in Southern California, and the water source is originally from the Colorado River.
Not only does this system utilize the nutrients in the water, but it can also use the CO2 from the air. We have also noticed that it can concentrate, in some cases, heavy metals. We want to get rid of those in waterways so they don’t have adverse health effects for the population. This is one way we can do that. We also are looking at using this biomass for biofuels and fertilizers and other applications. This is an exciting project that I’ve been involved in, and it’s really nice to see that algae can be used to not only make a fuel source, but [it has] environmental services. Our role in this project is really to help Sandia define a logistics system for this biomass, so we’re looking at how stable the biomass is, and how to upgrade its quality (for example, removing soil contamination) and how the biomass might transport well, and things along that line.
36:15
I want to talk about my background briefly. I grew up in the Midwest—Winona, Minnesota, and LaCrosse, Wisconsin, which are right on the Mississippi. I actually had the opportunity in high school to take biology and plant biology courses at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse. I highly recommend any high school students or parents of high school students that are out there to take advantage of these opportunities. That actually helped me graduate from the University of Minnesota in three years instead of four, which saved me a lot of money and time. From the University of Minnesota, I got my bachelor’s degree of science in biochemistry in 2001. While I was working there, I did some plant genomics research similar to what Amanda described with looking at genetic regulation and changes as a result of different stresses in plants.
One thing I want to point out was that during my high school and college years, I was able to have a summer job at a camp in Idaho, and that was a really impactful experience for me. I actually started as a dishwasher, and I worked my way through the ranks to become the head cook when I was 18. That was a pretty fun experience because not only did I have to learn how to communicate really well with the customers, but I also communicated with my kitchen team and learned how to organize things. We had to feed 100 kids breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, so the skills that I gained during that experience are really important for me, and I actually use them every day in my job now. I just want to encourage everyone that even if you start as a dishwasher at a camp, you can really make an impact in your life and change it and make it a leadership opportunity.
When I transitioned from the University of Minnesota to INL, I actually was trying to figure out if I wanted to go into the culinary world or go into my biochemistry background and science. My parents recommended to me that I try to go for science because I’d worked so hard in science all my life. I took their recommendation, and I ended up at Idaho National Lab in an internship in 2002. What I learned working with other scientists around me was that science and cooking are not dissimilar.
In cooking you have a recipe that you follow and you have ingredients and you mix them or bake them and such. In science, you have protocols that you follow and you have ingredients that you add as well. It can be chemicals. It can be water. They can be microorganisms. You also do a step to incubate them or heat them or treat them in some way, and then you look for the results. It was nice to see that there are so many parallels between cooking, which I really love, and science, which I really love, too. From there I stayed at Idaho National Lab and they funded me to get my master’s degree, which I did in 2006 from Idaho State University. After that, I was hired as research staff at INL, and I’ve been working in bioenergy since 2007 here.
39:56
I want to take [my presentation] broadly back out to bioenergy in general. The studies that the Department of Energy have funded have shown that there is enough biomass in the country to produce a billion tons of biomass a year, and that’s enough to provide some pretty significant impacts: (1) over a million jobs could be created, (2) it could contribute to over $260 billion in revenue for the economy, (3) we could produce 50 billion pounds of bio-based chemicals and products and (4) generate 50 billion gallons of biofuels.
40:41
So when you look at the algae feedstock logistics chain, don’t think that just biologists or agronomists are the ones that need to be mobilized to create this industry. There are multiple career opportunities in algae research, and we need everyone to be mobilized. That includes the geneticists and the chemists and the mechanical engineers and economists and policy makers. Everyone is needed to make this industry grow and make it successful.
41:20
Here’s some pictures of a few of the researchers in the algae community. These are people from academia, from industry, from national labs, and from the Department of Energy. There’s a large community of scientists that are working on these problems, but we definitely still need new scientists and engineers to help us out.
41:50
I’ll leave you with a few pictures of algae-based products that are currently on the market. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
42:02
Leslie Ovard
Thank you, Lynn.
Lynn Wendt
Yes.
Leslie Ovard
I didn’t realize how many products already are made out of algae, and I really appreciate that. We’re going to hear from Christy Sterner who works for the Bioenergy Technologies Office at the Department of Energy, and she’s going to tell us a little bit about their priorities and what they’re doing to prepare a workforce. Christy, can you hear me?
Christy Sterner, Bioenergy Technologies Office
I can. Thank you. Can you hear me?
Leslie Ovard
Yes.
Christy Sterner
Ok. Thank you, Leslie.
42:42
Amanda’s and Lynn’s presentations are a great lead-in to what I’m going to talk about. As Leslie said, I’m Christy Sterner. I’m a technology manager with the advanced algal systems program at the U.S. Department of Energy in the Bioenergy Technologies Office, and I’m briefly going to talk about what we do in the program, our R&D focus, and how we approach R&D. Then I will briefly tell you some technical accomplishments that we’ve had over the past couple years. I’ll then focus on a kind of a unique project that is applied science but also something that we need to consider when we look at opportunities for employment and industry at large as we develop it.
43:22
I will start with just letting you know what the advanced algal systems is about. We have the strategic goals of helping this industry develop technologies that enable the production of sustainable algal feedstocks, and we look at everything from strain development all the way through harvesting, dewatering, going on to preconversion-type processes and pretreatment processes that get things ready to take those intermediates on to the biofuels and bioproducts that both Amanda and Lynn have mentioned. We work very, very closely with industry, academia, and the national labs. We have lots and lots of partners, and great partners with Amanda and Lynn. There’s always increasing opportunities for more partnerships and more collaboration throughout the industry.
44:15
In the Advanced Algal Systems Program, we focus on multiple areas. Our main overall goals, of course, are to reduce costs, increase productivity, make more products, do everything we can to help reduce those costs, do it at scale, produce the algae biomass and the bioproducts in areas that make most sense, that are most economical, take advantage of the scales, the reduction in cost due to scale, all of those types of things—and use non-arable land—lots and lots of the ideas that both Amanda and Lynn have talked about.
Our focus areas are looking at the places where the costs exist and where we can make improvement. Recycling water and nutrients is hugely, hugely important in making this sustainable and reducing costs. CO2 utilization, of course, is also a big cost. It actually turns out to be about one third of the cost overall in producing algal biomass. We have an ongoing effort to look at improving CO2 utilization and efficiency within the algae system. [We also want to increase] energy efficiency in many of the processes involved in cultivating algae biomass, and processing it further to biofuels and bioproducts requires a lot of energy. Being the Department of Energy, our goal is to reduce that cost, reduce the energy use, and increase the efficiency to make the whole overall system more efficient and economical.
45:41
So how do we do that? Our R&D approach is to use an iterative system (most of us know most R&D systems are iterative). You’re going to start usually in the lab at a very small scale. I think Amanda did a very, very nice job of describing [research] starting out on plates and building up from flasks into larger systems, simulating outdoor conditions, and then moving on to systems that are actually outdoors. Our research projects and approach do the exact same thing. (In fact Amanda’s research and Lynn’s both are funded from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Algal Systems Program, so that makes sense.)
You can see in the pictures that we go again from the plates and into the simulated systems before we actually move it outdoors to what we term as mini ponds. We have lots of partners, and lots of [our partner] sites have these mini ponds. What’s great about doing that is the information that you get from these larger scale (but still small enough scale to where you kind of have an ideal environment) from the research side, is you can take the results from that, feed it back into the lab, further develop and improve your strains, improve your processes, get higher productivities, move them back outdoors to those mini ponds, and test them again. You also get your first input into real weather conditions, real pest situations, crashes, contamination—the types of things that will happen in those mini ponds. You can iterate between the mini ponds and the lab to address those items before you start to scale up for field trials.
We also have quite a bit of research focused on field trials at larger scales, and you can validate that you have the most productive strain, that you’re getting the best productivities and yields, manage to protect your crops, and that you limit pond crashes. There is a lot going between the mini ponds and the field trials in that iterative step, and a lot of that is done by evaluating at the large scale whether you have the right control devices in place to keep your ponds from crashing so that you can recycle water and nutrients, maximize your CO2 input into the ponds, and focus on your harvesting and dewatering strategies so that you can make those more energy efficient.
The whole process is very iterative. We have projects that focus solely on the lab work with possibly some outdoor mini pond work all the way up to full scale (what you see down in the bottom). (That’s a full-scale precommercial site. That’s not a commercial plant down on the bottom. That’s Global Algae Innovations Plant, about eight wetted acres, and we actually have funded quite a bit of research there, where they take it all the way through those ponds and look at all the things that I’ve described previously.)
The nice thing about doing this iterative process, of course, are the lessons that you learn at every one of those scales. Even when you get to the field-trial scale, the information that you gather feeds right back into your lab, where you can further develop and optimize your strain. It feeds right back into your outdoor mini ponds, where you can test mixing strategies, CO2 utilization strategies, and crop protection. It’s not uncommon as you move between these scales to see new and exciting research opportunities. Things pop up all the time as you start to scale up in any type of research environment.
Oftentimes, what you think you have resolved at that outdoor mini pond scale you move to a larger scale for the field trials, and, all of the sudden, a new pest comes up, or you’re mixing strategies aren’t working as well, or maybe you have developed a new idea or strategy or process for putting CO2 into the ponds. Every one of those steps requires that the lessons learned be fed back to the previous step, and you just iterate continually to always improve the system.
49:36
Under the Advanced Algal Systems Program, we fund research opportunities by putting out what we call Funding Opportunity Announcements [or FOAs]. Our funding for algae research from the Department of Energy really ramped up starting back in about 2009. We had the [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] Recovery Act [stimulus funding] between 2009 and 2012, where we focused on really large-scale pilot- and demo-integrated biorefineries (we had three algae projects in that). Back to this slide is where we really started to see focused funding solely for algae research again, within the Department of Energy.
On this slide are the various funding opportunities that we have issued solely in the algae program since 2012. We have had some incredible research [projects] that have come out of this and have really enhanced and developed and moved the industry forward. We are continuing down this road. The last one there is the Efficient Carbon Utilization and Algal Systems FOA (Funding Opportunity Announcement). (We do everything in acronyms, so I apologize for that.) Under that FOA, those projects are just getting underway, and they’re very exciting. They are looking at not only efficient use and utilization of carbon dioxide in the systems and in the algae themselves, but they are also looking at direct air capture technologies. So again, there is lots of opportunity to advance a system, make the processes more economical, and more sustainable. [There are] great opportunities for folks to enter this industry and this field and help develop these technologies
I would add here that we don’t just focus on the competitive Funding Opportunity Announcements. Both Amanda and Lynn, as you know, work for national labs, and we fund quite a bit of core, hugely valuable research to the industry through our core capabilities at our national labs. Even though the national labs participate in these funding opportunities and our competitive projects, they also get funding to [work on] the core strengths of their labs [and] do [what they can] within the algae industry to move things forward and get information out to the public. [It’s important to get information out] so that you don’t have everyone within the industry repeating the same type of research and spinning their wheels on things that the national labs have already solved and can help them solve. So all of that funding, as well as this competitive funding, go hand in hand to advance and develop this industry.
52:08
This slide shows a lot of our key partners that have won awards and have projects with us under those funding opportunity announcements that I just showed you. This is by no means a comprehensive list. There are so many wonderful, amazing researchers and industrialists and technology people within this industry. These are really just a tiny handful of the many, many wonderful partners that we work with here at the Department of Energy. Of course, you can see Idaho National Lab on there, and you see Los Alamos National Lab. We have the national labs.
We have academics at just about every university you can think of. We have great partnerships with our other offices within the Department of Energy. We also partner with the USDA and the environmental protection agency [(EPA)]. It is a great opportunity to work with such a diverse group of people all to [achieve] a common goal and move this industry forward.
53:08
I’ll touch briefly on some key accomplishments. Again, I can only touch on a few in the limited time we have, so I wanted to point out that kind of the diversity in the accomplishments we have. This first one that you see on the slide has to do with our DISCOVER program (again another acronym. I do apologize. It’s the government, everything has an acronym). This is a really interesting project; it is a multi-lab consortium, which is super, super exciting. It’s bringing together those core competencies that I talked about within the national labs to focus on algae research. The really, really nice thing about that is everything that they’re working on with the discover project is also public information. All of the data, everything that they generate in there, goes out to the public.
The nice thing about this consortium as well is that they have lots of industry and academic involvement, so they get feedback from anyone in the industry. They work directly with industry and with the academia as well. They all have input into this, and they work together. It has been hugely, hugely successful. In fact, they just had a 28 percent increase in summer productivity on a strain that they’ve been focused on. That data, of course, is available to industry, so that if industry is looking for a very good, robust, productive strain, they can get that from one of the strain libraries and start growing that strain.
The next one has to do with one of the FOAs that you saw in the previous slides. The Algal Biomass Yield II FOA resulted in projects looking at optimizing the integration of algae development and cultivation all the way through dewatering and harvesting to pre-processing, getting that algae biomass ready for biofuel and bioproduct production. (The site that you see on there is Global Algae, who is one of our partners.) [Global Algae] has also met a crucial milestone that we have of producing 3,700 gallons of biofuel intermediates per acre per year. That’s a pretty large amount.
That means you have to have a very productive organism, and you have to have your systems pretty well ironed out and optimized so that you don’t have your ponds shut down by crashes, etcetera. That they have met that milestone is hugely, hugely valuable and shows that the productivities and the yields that we can get from these systems are moving the industry forward to get us more economically in line with petroleum costs.
The next one has to do with the algae technology education consortium. I’m going to touch on this one briefly after this slide and give you a lot more detail just because this is a very unique project.
The Department of Energy Advanced Algal Systems Program is focused on applied technology and science. We’re not looking at the basics so much as taking it to the next step, where you can actually take these technologies out into the field and apply them and learn from that. What makes this project unique is that it is focused on workforce development because it’s great if you have a really robust and exciting new industry out there, but you need a skilled technical workforce to go along with that. You also have to have the education out there to get society-at-large excited about and accepting of what you’re doing. So this ATEC program (another acronym) is hugely exciting, has been hugely successful, and is actually focused on developing the workforce for this developing industry, which, as we continue to move forward, we’re finding is very, very needed and very, very valuable. I’m going to focus on that more in just a minute.
The last one has to do with the regional algal feedstock test bed at the University of Arizona. RAFT (again, acronym) is another project we had that was hugely successful. It was a consortium project that had multiple sites: some in Texas, some in Arizona. They were focused on long-term cultivation trials, basically developing data for industry that looked at seasonality of algae production (pond crash information) so if the ponds crashed they did full analysis on why, what happened, and what caused it. They looked at temperature applicability, the flex in temperature, and how that affects different algae strains for cultivation (just about anything you can think of). Then they took that data, plugged it into a techno-economic and a life-cycle analysis, and looked at if [the seasonality] fluctuated and the variability between various parameters [to see if things could be] more economical and more sustainable (things like that). All of the research fed into those analyses was fed to the public as well. They have a website where you can go online and you can get any of that data, look at it, manipulate it, play around with it, and calculate the productivity of anything that you might want to see to learn about various strains that they looked at. There is a really, really wonderful final report that summarizes this project that is also available online.
58:26
As I mentioned, I was going to talk briefly a little bit more about ATEC. I have to tell you, I love this program. It has been so amazing. It started out looking at how we can develop a skilled technical workforce that goes with this developing industry, to make sure that the folks that are out there that are trying to move [this industry] into pre-pilot, precommercial, and eventually into commercial scales are going to have the workforce to go along with this.
ATEC did a study on the [algae industry] job survey. They contacted industry and asked “As you’re developing your industry, do you have the skilled workforce that you need? Do you see that you are going to have it going forward? Is there something we can do to help you?”
The industry survey came back and said, “We don’t have this technical workforce. There are lots of industries that are synergistic with the algae industry, but there are some specifics that we need. Plus, in the type of areas (kind of the rural coastal areas where these technologies are likely to develop just due to productivity and temperatures and things like that), this workforce isn’t available.
So ATEC was formed [with a focus on the] way that they could provide curriculum to community colleges to get degrees and certificates going to get the skilled workforce out there and available.
[Forming this consortium was] kind of seen as a long shot because how do you [both] develop this brand new industry and the skilled workforce right alongside that developing industry? How do you do that? How do you get that workforce out there? How do you get people excited about algae?
Most people hear algae and they immediately think of the pond scum that’s on their ponds and their pools and things like that. They don’t realize that there’s immense value and an entire industry that has been framed around that and there are amazing, incredible products that you can get from that. So getting that education out there, getting people excited about it, getting students wanting to learn about it and actually get degrees and certificates in this, is hugely valuable. But it’s also quite a challenge.
Basically, what happened with ATEC is they got together a whole bunch of renowned scientists, investigators, researchers, professors, industry folks—anybody you can think of within the algae industry—who got excited about this and joined ATEC. They donate a lot of their time and expertise to (1) developing the curriculum for various community colleges around the U.S. and (2) getting these programs available so that we can get folks out there and excited about it and wanting to work in this industry.
01:01:03
Like I said, there was a challenge of getting this workforce out there, and ATEC has done so many things to provide solutions to that. They have produced an Algal Massive Open Online Course, the MOOC, and it is free and available to everybody. I highly encourage you, if you are interested in this industry at all, if you just want to learn more, or if you want to see what it’s about—please go online and look at that MOOC. It’s hugely, hugely exciting, it’s free, and it offers you the basics. It will talk about everything that Amanda covered in the basics of algae, the highly technical research that she talked about. It will talk about feedstock logistics in those projects like the attached growth systems and storage, and the things that Lynn is working on. It will teach you just to be really familiar with strains and the terms that go in the algae industry.
Of course, it will prepare you should you want to pursue additional courses and degrees or certificates in this industry (how you can go about doing that.) They collaborate with an industrial advisory board to get input from the industry on what might be missing when they go out and they talk with other community colleges and folks in other states, [and those that] already have an aquaculture program or a lab program that’s focused on different lab techniques, is there something that can be added from the algae side that will not only expand your program but will expand people’s interest and knowledge of algae? ([ATEC has] combined a lot of their courses into existing curriculum that’s already out there.)
[ATEC] set the long shot goal to have two community colleges accept their curriculum and get things rolling, and then [planned to] expand from there. Within the first six months, ATEC had two community colleges that were interested and developed full courses and full curriculum. [The consortium has] already had their first graduating class from Santa Fe Community College. There were six students that jumped all over it and have either gone on to get advanced degrees or they have opened up their own algae farms±—one student has actually opened up their own algae industry. Two other students have been offered jobs with industry leaders in the algae industry.
01:03:17
Some additional accomplishments that they have is that they have many, many more participating students. Austin Community College, which is focused on biotechnology for algae, has 100 participating students right now. They thought their first classes would be in the fall; however, they have been able to get some of the courses into this spring [semester] so that’s already off and running. Of course, there are far more students now in the Santa Fe Community College curriculum than there were originally. [The consortium] has expanded beyond that to many, many additional states.
01:03:50
These are formalized relationships that ATEC has with additional community colleges, and you can see from the maps that it’s going completely across United States. We’re looking at Washington, Oregon, California, and it’s up in Maine. The program has expanded to seaweeds and macroalgae beyond just microalgae, and ATEC isn’t going out and initiating [all of] these conversations with community colleges and universities. [Colleges and universities] are now hearing about this program and contacting ATEC.
01:04:27
All of the courses that are developed through ATEC through online sources are free. Anybody can go and check them out and look at them (again, I highly encourage that if you have any interest in this at all.) Some things to note about them that were hugely successful and kind of surprising to all of us [are that] 17 percent of the folks that have taken the algae MOOC have received a pay increase or a promotion in their current positions, and 62 percent have received some type of tangible career benefit. That’s amazing, and [ATEC leads] had no idea there would be so much to gain just from that course or that people would be so interested.
And as you can see on this slide, [ATEC has engaged] approximately 3,500 students, and they expect that to double or triple over this year. They get high ratings on it. The [MOOC] course was completely designed and reviewed by algae industry experts and taken by a lot of them. A lot of industry experts were surprised that there is so much good valuable content in there. We think it will be hugely valuable and, of course, it has been beyond our wildest dreams.
01:05:33
I wanted to explain that ATEC also has a K through 12 program that is getting young students interested and excited about [algae]. This will lead hopefully to them taking jobs that look at aquaculture, wastewater treatment, algae farming. or cultivation both on the macro- and microalgae side.
[ATEC has] kits that they send out to schools (for free), where students can grow their own algae, look at it, see what it looks like, and learn about the the lipids and all the products that you can get from it.
This started out at 2,000 or 3,000 kits when they began this a few years ago, and now they’re sending out 20,000 kits to schools with a goal of getting at least one of those kits into every school in the United States.
01:06:20
It is just amazing, and obviously, I’m very passionate about [ATEC]. I think it’s a wonderful program and it’s open. It’s online. Please just contact them even if you’re interested in that. They love the input. They love the help. They’d be happy to talk with you.
I was asked to give you a little bit of background about myself and how I got into this. I have a chemical engineering background from the Colorado School of Mines, which led me to be a project manager. I did do some R&D prior to this, and that R&D turned out to be synergistic with the job I have here. I was focused on oil extraction from various feedstocks, which played very, very well into moving into bioenergy and then into algae research and development. It was kind of my academic and initial job pathway that led me here. I was doing oil extraction R&D when I found this job and applied for it.
I started out as a contractor and got to work across the [Office of] Biomass Program, which is what it was called then. (It’s the Bioenergy Technologies Office now.) I worked in every one of the [Office R&D] areas. I worked in feedstocks. I worked in conversion. I worked in the integrated biorefinery program [during this time], which I absolutely loved as an engineer. (Scaling up anything is just super, super exciting, so I was happy to take on projects like that.) Then I became a federal employee directly for BETO, and I had large-scale algae projects. When those were offered to me—having a chemical engineering background, having my research and development background, and being able to look at things at much, much larger scales and help develop an up and coming industry—I was super, super excited, so happy to take it on.
I started working in those projects, and I haven’t looked back since. I have been working in the algae program now for close to ten years. In that last bullet, you’ll see I’ve put “Algae Cheerleader” in quotes. I kind of make a joke about that because I’m known in my office, with some of the industry partners, and some of the national lab and academic partners as the algae cheerleader for our program because I am super passionate about this industry.
I see this as a solution for the future. I’m a diehard tree hugger. I love the environment. I’m all about saving our resources and this earth and making the most out of everything we can. I love pond scum. I love where the algae industry is headed. It's so exciting to be [working] at this point in this industry at this time, [and I] highly encourage anyone who is listening to check it out, and look into the opportunities. If you would like to contact me or [you would] like any information from me about our programs, what’s out there, what’s available, how to get involved, please do reach out to me.
The two resources that I put on here, they’re kind of small on the slide. The aquatic species program was where the algae research started for the Department of Energy back I believe in the 70s and ended in 1996. Then around 2009, with the Recovery Act, there became a resurgence of algae research within the Department of Energy. We developed the algal technologies roadmap (I highly encourage folks to look at that), which outlines (with industry input where the industry was at then and how to move it forward.
With that, I will wrap up. Thank you for your time, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like more information.
01:10:08
Molly Putzig
Great. Thank you so much Christy. I know we’re a little over time here, so I’m going to go over a couple of additional items.
As a reminder, biofuels derived from microalgae at the commercial scale could, if efficiently produced, meet U.S. transportation needs while using a fairly small land area. Microalgae can be grown in brackish water on land not used for food and breakthroughs are needed all along the supply chain to give algae-derived biofuel a significant role in the U.S. transportation fuel industry.
If there’s something about algae development that you’re interested in, there are many different skills that are needed. The BETO website has a great resource—the career map—that explains the different types of careers that are needed in this industry. (Let’s pull that up for you here.)
01:11:17
My job roughly fits in this triangle between liberal arts and science. (I do science management.) There are traditional jobs, [such as] engineer. There are many jobs out there that require diversity, so if you have interest in multiple areas, don’t feel like you have to restrict yourself to one area. People with diverse skill sets are always very useful and needed in this field.
With that, I want to thank you all for joining us today and thank Amanda, Christy, and Lynn for their presentation. We are out of time for questions, but if you do want to follow up with any of today’s presenters, don’t hesitate to do so. If you want to submit a question through the question pane, then we’ll follow up with you after the webinar. Thank you everyone for joining us today, and have a great rest of your day.
01:12:10
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