NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

By: Jim Hodges

The key is not so much getting the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That ship has largely sailed, particularly since the machines during the Industrial Revolution started belching effluence into the sky.

No, the key is limiting the carbon dioxide that goes into the air, and here's an idea.

Capture carbon dioxide emissions and feed them to micro-algae in ponds. The plants use the carbon dioxide with photons from sunlight to create lipids to become fuel, which creates more energy and more carbon dioxide in a never-ending cycle for more micro-algae in a never-ending cycle.

"It's the Holy Grail of renewable energy," Aristides Patrinos told a Colloquium audience Tuesday in the Reid Conference Center at NASA Langley.

"It's also a significant challenge from a technological point of view. There are still major advances that need to be made to make that conversion successful."

Aristides Patrinos says scientists have gone from "hammers" to "surgical instruments" for their work in engineering the fuels of tomorrow. Credit: NASA/Sean Smith

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That it is even being talked about is because of advances made in biology over the past 10-15 years. Those advances have spawned companies like Synthetic Genomics Inc., of which Patrinos is president.

He described a process in which biologists used to gather a few people, prove a hypothesis and then move on to another hypothesis. "They weren't much into data," Patrinos told the Colloquium group.

"Physicists would smash some things together and get data and good things would happen."

The key was for biologists to begin emulating physicists. That emulation has helped spawn genomics, in which scientists are determining all manner of human attributes to predict the man's future. In the case of Patrinos and his boss, J. Craig Venter -- who was to speak later Tuesday -- they are trying to change the future of renewable energy.

It's a revolution, according to Patrinos, that is still in its adolescence, spurred by the tools it is developing along the way.

"Once they were using a very blunt instrument," he said. "They were using hammers, and now we have surgical instruments. We can be more effective in manipulating microbes and manipulating plants so that they can do things that we need much better and much faster and much easier."

It's why companies like that of Patrinos and Venter are moving away from biofuels from corn to other "feedstocks," such as jatropha, a plant native to Central America whose seeds are crushed to extract oil for fuel. Then those seeds become biomass to fire electrical generators.

"I've never liked the idea of using food for fuel," Patrinos said of favoring a move away from corn-produced ethanol.

His goal is holding carbon emissions to 550 parts per million, about 170 parts per million more than today.

"Many of my environmentalist friends are angry with me when I say 550 because they think that that's way too high," Patrinos said. "They think that the safest level is 450.

"The safest level is a matter of debate. What we do know is at the rate we are burning fossil fuels, it could be much greater by the middle of the century."

His forecasts of the disaster that could bring were alarming, much as forecasts of others who have gone before him behind Langley lecterns. They include rising water levels to cover much more of the world; particularly those parts bordering the Atlantic if Greenland's ice sheet goes into the ocean.

The slide he showed of water running into a crevasse on the sheet in Greenland reinforced that prophecy.

But he countered that with hope fed by the future.

"I am confident, though the road will be long and bumpy, that when we get to Copenhagen next December (to renew atmospheric standards) that there will be an agreement on global warming," Patrinos said.

And he is hopeful that people like him and competitors and cohorts alike will be successful in their quest for "the Holy Grail."
 
NASA Langley Research Center
Managing Editor: Jim Hodges
Executive Editor and Responsible NASA Official: H. Keith Henry
Editor and Curator: Denise Lineberry