When it comes to energy, there’s always something new under the sun.
Except for solar power, which has always been under the sun. NASA Glenn Researcher Bilal Bomani has been working on a process to use biofuel as an alternative energy source for commercial aviation.
Along with experiments involving everything from clean coal to bacteria, the plant Salicornia has emerged that produces an oil that can be refined into biodiesel. It’s also robust.
"You know that hurricanes devastated Galveston, Texas. When we went to Galveston, Texas, there was nothing there. The oil fields were devastated, but we saw Salicornia all over the place! It can actually help with the coast line, cause it has nice root structure, and Salicornia has very thick roots."
Salicornia is also known as Pickleweed or Dwarf Saltwort. It’s flourishing far from the coast -- in saltwater and sand tanks at NASA’s wind-turbine powered Green Lab near Cleveland-Hopkins airport.
"This is a green solution. In order to be considered green you have to satisfy three metrics. One, be alternative, and clearly this is alternative. Two, be renewable, this is clearly renewable. And three, be sustainable, and we have all three here. That’s why this is called a green lab. It’s completely sustainable."
This entire process works without precious resources such as fresh water or arable land. Even the fertilizer comes from an unlikely source: freshwater mollies, which can be climatized to saltwater in a matter of hours.
"They’re cheap, they love to have babies, and they love to go to the bathroom. And that’s why we use them. And so, all we have to do is basically is seed one of the tanks outside with 50 mollies, and now each one has over 300. And that lab’s been in existence since 2009, November."
Bomani holds degrees in mathematics and computer science from Cleveland State and Case Western, but his interest in fish led him to NASA.
"In college, I did not have a television, I had a fish tank. In 2006, there was a meeting of the minds at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. And they said ‘we need to think outside the box; we need to come up with something that’s dealing with saltwater.’ And that’s how they found me. Actually it was Dr. Bulzan, we had a meeting, he was like ‘well, we’re looking into this, do you think you could do this?’ And I said ‘let me think for a minu- YES, I can do this’."
As the fish do their thing, the Salicornia grows and eventually produces oil that is shipped to a company in Chicago. OAP refines the oil into jet fuel, which is sent back to NASA Glenn for combustion testing in a DC-8. So far, the fuel has all the required characteristics: high freezing temperature, light weight and “carbon neutrality,” which means the entire process of producing the fuel results in lower overall emissions.
David Pimentel of Cornell University, thought this sounded too good to be true. He’s been skeptical of ethanol and soybean biodiesel for years. His primary concern is how much labor, fertilizer, water and electricity it takes to make each kilocalorie of fuel? Depending on how all of those costs are defined, theoretical prices for a gallon of algae-derived fuel range from 19 cents to $52. And that’s one of the reasons Pimentel was skeptical of algae as well.
But he and fellow Cornell researchers investigated and are authoring a paper on the subject. In their controlled environment, they were pleasantly surprised at their findings.
"We were getting 1.3 kilocalories per kilocalorie of input that we had in the system. That’s still way and above ethanol production, better than biodiesel production."
Pimentel’s group isn’t the only one studying algae biomass jet fuel. Many of Bomani’s partners are right here in Ohio.
"In this area we do have some collaborators. Obviously Cleveland State University, we have Toledo, we have OAI, we have Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Univenture, which is in Dayton area, we got Phi Cal which you may have heard of is here. I would say there is an Ohio initiative."
The Ohio Initiative, as he calls it, has even signed an agreement on alternative fuels with Governor Ted Strickland.
All of this assumes the greener jet fuel can be made on a scale that meets the country’s needs.
"If we had the land mass of the state of Maryland, and we had our algae and halophytes, we’d have enough fuel for the entire U.S. It’s not as far off as you think. We don’t have a lot of time, because by 2013, we need 400,000 gallons of this."
If a former skeptic like Pimentel can be convinced, Bomani’s goal of 2013 doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
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