Flying on algae
As everyone frets over rising oil prices affecting their driving freedom, or scrambling to find non carbon-based energy sources to power our cities and industries, the poor airline industry, with man’s lumbering metal birds of the sky, have been left white knuckled with fear (or maybe its just their passengers?) wondering how to fly without oil? Because one thing is (finally) becoming clear – by the end of this century (possibly even the middle), it is extremely unlikely our transportation system will rely on oil!
Enter KLM, The Netherlands largest airline, announcing it will fly on algae! Now there is a suggestion that excites the staff at The Dappled Planet who are addicts for long distance hauls to exotic new cultures. Algae is the green goo life on this planet evolved from. Its the green goo that dominated life on this planet for the first 4.1 billion years (give or take a few million years), but since life got a bit more complicated, its been valiantly fighting to reclaim its status as the number one lifeform on this planet.
And in certain areas, algae is winning, ironically with a steady helping hand from man with their insatiable demand for food and as a result, an even bigger appetite for fertiliser to grow the food. This is a boon to algae who love all that nitrous waste being washed into river systems and out into oceans and it grows prolifically at the expense of pretty much any animal life, and probably a lot of plant life as well. And this has resulted in ‘dead zones‘ now cropping up along various coasts around the world where the algae is so prolific, it has killed off all life in those areas – frightening stuff! (And some scientists want to seed the oceans with iron and grow more of algae to suck up CO2?! Don’t tamper with ecosystems you don’t know about – especially with algae killing fish in known ecosystems!).
If the current mania for biofuels (something we at the The Dappled Planet do not support in its present form) continues, then more fertiliser will be draining into rivers, lakes and oceans and there will be more algal blooms killing off ecosystems. So if KLM wants to step in and start finding methods to stop algae from taking over and destroying ecosystems (which yes, we admit, is not hinted at in their press release…) then this is a great idea! And even if they don’t use that algae, hopefully others will take to using the unnatural amount of algae blooming because of increased fertilizer run off. If nothing else, this is a promising direction which might move us more in line with managing the environment more effectively, instead of destroying it in wholesale panic to reduce the 0.038% level of CO2 in the atmosphere to 0.035%…
Our only niggling fear is that little throw away line, “algal-based fuel is CO2-neutral and is cost-effective when the price of oil passes the 100-dollar-per-barrel mark” – does that mean they are using oil to convert the algae to fuel for their planes?! But… in this case, if by at least starting to use algae as fuel, hopefully the cost will come down quicker and maybe they can use their algae generated oil to fuel the conversion of algae to jet fuel.
This will be an interesting line of research to keep an eye on -
