 I thought I'd give you a slightly different perspective on energy and approach it from a biological end. And this actually stems from a project that we're doing with Ellen Yee. And it's on an alga called Batriacakis. And Batriacakis produces a huge amount of hydrocarbons. And those hydrocarbons actually go to the exterior of the cell. And they're packaged in certain way, but they're outside the cell so they're accessible. Now, of course, as most of you know, we're emitting way too much carbon based on fossil fuel use. And I think it's about four gigatons of carbon extra that's going into the atmosphere every year. And of course, CO2, which is most of the emitted carbon, is a greenhouse gas. And of course, there are other greenhouse gases like methane, which we heard about a little bit. Nitrous oxide, a number of hydrofluorocarbons. So there are many greenhouse gases that are emitted through industrial processes. And so I guess the country in general and the world in general is trying to some extent to get off sort of the energy obesity orientation that we have and move towards sort of carbon neutral types of technologies. And even in biology, people are thinking about that very seriously. So I thought I'd show you a picture of algae. There are many types of algae. In fact, it's an incredibly diverse group of organisms. They come in all colors. If you notice, plants come in green more or less. And that's because of chlorophyll and that's the photosynthetic pigment in plants. Algae, of course, have chlorophyll, too, to do photosynthesis. But they have many other pigments which help them do photosynthesis. So they can absorb light along a broad spectrum of wavelengths and use that light. Some of the organisms that I'm showing you here are green algae like chlorella and chlamydomonas is another very popular green alga that's used. There are diatomes and dinoflagellates and many, many different groups. Porphyra is one that you may know as Nuri. That's the wrapping of sushi. And that's a commercially viable alga that's used. So there are literally hundreds of thousands of algal species. Many still not characterized. Some that have been actually lost over the last number of years because of extinction and because of contaminated environments. So algae actually is the source of most of the fossil fuel. The algae were buried and under the pressure and heat, they developed long chain polycarbon chains of carbon. And those are basically what we call petrol or petroleum. And this gives you some of the characteristics of algae and what they can be used for, how we think about them, how they can be incorporated into a carbon budget. So some algae grow under very extreme conditions. So you could grow them in deserts. You just have to bring the water to the desert, of course. And you have to worry about evaporation and many other things that go along with that. You can use various qualities of water, including waste streams of water. So they'll grow on waste streams. Once you get the oil out, you could use the biomass that's left over to co-produce other things. And in working with a company, one of the things that we did is we extracted oil from an algae that makes a lot of oil. And we did have a lot of biomass left over. And that biomass could be bleached. It could be made into flour. It could be incorporated into human food. It has more fiber than regular flour. So if you had 20% of the algal flour, you get a better product, a healthier product. The oils, there's still a little bit of oil in there. And the oils are generally healthy oils that the algae make. And in fact, the algae make some of the best oils that I've actually ever tasted. And they can be used for a lot of purposes. So for food, they're used quite a bit. Now, to get to the point where you're not emitting much CO2, you have to develop a process whereby you actually generate the oils in the algae, you extract them in an energy efficient way, you use them, and you recycle the CO2. So you're trying to make a net carbon neutral process. Of course, it'll never happen because you have to have energy to move some of the things around. You have to have processing going on. But if you made an 80% net carbon neutral, it might be very useful. And if we got off carbon fuels, liquid fuels all together, which I don't see happening in the near future. But if that did happen, of course, these algal oils are incredible food products. They make their use for many things. And I think the next slide shows some of the things that we use algal oils for. These are many of the projects that we use algal oils for. Now, there was a mad rush to actually use algae to make biofuels. And the field itself, I think, hurt itself very much in that mad rush because they oversold the process. And it's very hard to make it in a way that's carbon neutral and that's worthwhile. But it's also hard to make it in a way that's cost effective. This is an old slide, actually. So these prices, priceings are not right. But the bottom line is, if you're making fuel, it's the least expensive product, just about, that you could make out of these oils. So the orientation, of course, of many of the companies was we're going to make clean oils with a smaller carbon footprint. And we'll have a huge market for those oils and we'll make a lot of money. But in fact, I always thought the way to go was to start at the top. And of course, people do use it to make cosmetics. And I think if you appeal to people's vanity, you always could make money or usually make money. But also, nutraceuticals and various cooking oils, incredible cooking oils could be made out of algal oil, soaps or factants, detergents, lubricants. So there are many, many projects that could be made. Now fuels, of course, are the least expensive of those. This is just to give you, again, a biological perspective of how these are actually made, how these oils are made. And they're made through the generation of what's called triacylglycerides in most algae. And that's a glycerol backbone with fatty acids coming off of that backbone. And the algae are interesting in that they could use many feedstocks. What you want to use generally is light. Light is free, there's a lot of it, and the algae can use that light fairly efficiently. But you'll see later on that you might want to use other feedstocks like cane juice or cellulose or industrial byproducts that could feed into this process to make triacylglycerides. So algae can make large amounts of triacylglycerides. It can be extracted. It can be converted easily to biodiesel. The oil companies have done that for years and years. So the technology has been around, it's easy to use. But you could also make many other products from that. The remaining biomass can be used for energy or for other products. But this is probably the difficult part. You're converting lipid production from laboratory growth under optimal conditions because when you see reports, this is the way it's usually done. And so you generate the optimal conditions and you get high yields, right? But that doesn't necessarily translate to large-scale production, which requires really the identification of the most significant challenges to tackle when you're dealing with biofuels. And I wanted to really give you a feel for what some of those challenges are and how you think about them from a biological perspective. Now, here's a typical large-scale pond. And in this raceway pond, you could see there are a lot of algae. It has large volumes. Generally, the organisms grow slowly and to low cell densities. So you have to harvest a lot of algae to get the amount of oil, a significant amount of oil. There's problems with light delivery and utilization. And this is something that many people don't realize. It's difficult to control culture conditions in switching from conditions that generate biomass, that allow the organisms to grow and fill up the pond relative to generating oil, to making oil. And we'll talk a little bit about that. There's heavy contamination of some of these ponds and cultures. And you could have a pond that looks beautiful one day and the next day it'll be decimated. There are problems in growing genetically engineered organisms in the open environment. It's costly to harvest something like this and to process it. And so is it economically feasible and how can one make it economically feasible? There are ecological difficulties, water utilization, evaporation, percolation into the ground water, changes in local environmental conditions. So there are all sorts of other ecological problems that are associated with this. It's better to use probably outdoor photobioreactors but it's much more expensive and it's difficult to operate sometimes. The use of light energy itself can cause significant production problems. And you have to remember that algae haven't evolved to produce biofuels but to survive under a range of environmental conditions. They don't care as much about energy. They generally have plenty of energy. What they care about is survival. Biological challenges with respect to biofuel production include fluctuating levels of light energy, delivery of light energy into the algae and the ways in which the algae use that energy. So let's look at that a little bit more. This is actually a picture of the photosynthetic electron transport chain and we actually have incredible molecular information about photosynthesis. We have crystal structures of all these complexes. We know where all the pigments bind. We know where the proteins come together and the interacting surfaces. And this shows you electron transport. Now most of you probably when you think about photosynthetic electron transport you have light coming in and it's absorbed by pigments like chlorophyll and it's shunted, it's passed on to a reaction center. And that reaction center does a charge separation and electrons are transferred through the system and they're used to reduce NADP to make NADPH and ultimately to reduce CO2 to make fixed carbon. And of course they get the electrons back by extracting those electrons from water which is a very difficult process to do. Now that's what probably most people think about when they think about photosynthesis but there are other things to think about because the system itself just like you have leaks in industrial platforms you have leaks in photosynthesis and the leaks are electron leaks and you'll see or energy leaks and you'll see photosystem too when it can't use the energy productively that's absorbed by the pigment molecules you often get excited oxygen molecules you get singlet oxygen here and singlet oxygen is highly reactive and it could interact with components, proteins, lipids and you basically destroy biological processes in the cell. You also from photosystem one get super oxides formed and again those are highly reactive and you could see that plants know how to protect themselves against high light but you can go too high. For example, here's I think this is cute melon this is melon leaves under high light and maybe slightly starved for nutrients they start to photobleach and they die. This is a coral reef, this is a healthy reef and of course the corals are supported by algae which supply them with the fixed carbon that allow them to grow but under conditions that are stress conditions whether you go up in light conditions and temperature the algae start to be ejected from the animal and possibly because they're making more reactive oxygen species the animal senses that and eliminates the algae but ultimately that causes the death of the reef. So you have to think about the dangers of photosynthesis as well when you're using it for production purposes. This just shows you why the ponds don't get very dense and why light isn't that effective and it's because you have the absorbance from the algae from the pigment molecules and the light starts at the surface and it gets absorbed out as you go deeper and deeper into the water column and so by the time you get to the bottom of that water column there's no more light and so the organisms at the bottom of the water column don't see that light. So much of the day the organisms on average are absorbing low light. This limits the rate of growth and the concentration that organisms attain within the pond. Ultimately the density of the cells increase to the point where the light coming in just supports that biomass. It doesn't support any additional growth and so you stop growth and it's usually at a pretty low cell density. You could imagine if you're getting one gram of cells per liter in that pond and you're getting even 50% oil you have to harvest a hell of a lot of pond water to actually make fuel. Okay, now this shows you another problem that we have as biologists in the utilization of light and that is light is absorbed by plants and when you're at low light the plant can absorb all that light energy and use it for assimilation and you get photosynthetics, you get CO2 fixation. As you get higher and higher in the light there becomes an excess of light energy and you've saturated photosynthesis but you still have light coming in and you're absorbing that light still. And this is an extremely dangerous process where you're absorbing energy and you can't use it effectively and so you have to down regulate that and again the organisms have incredible ways which are called quenching, non-photochemical quenching which actually eliminates that light energy as heat. Now this curve is not so far from reality because if you look at a lot of plants here on the campus and during midday you have 2,000 micromole of photons per meter squared per second probably most of these organisms could use 30% of that and so 60, 70% could be dissipated as heat and this gives you an idea if we're looking at a reaction center here and we're looking at what happens when we add light and here you could see I added more light here and when you do that you stimulate photochemistry so that's the green arrow you stimulate excited chlorophyll molecules and you overstimulate them such that they start to decay to triplet chlorophyll which could interact with ground state oxygen giving you singlet oxygen there and that basically burns up the cell, you destroy the cell. So what does the cell do? It takes some of that energy and it starts getting rid of it through vibrational modes and molecules as heat and that's called quenching. Most of the quenching is non-photochemical quenching although I would say there's also something called photochemical quenching too. When we think about photochemical quenching we think about CO2 fixation but these electrons could go to oxygen too and in a sense that's photochemical quenching as well. So we start to dissipate it as heat. When we do that we start to reduce the photochemistry, re-reduce the singlet chlorophyll molecules, the triplet chlorophyll molecules and basically we reduce the toxicity of photosynthesis. So the organisms have created many mechanisms to protect themselves against light energy and again as we manipulate organisms and try to use them for biofuels we have to know about those processes. We have to know what processes are critical to keep and if we start to eliminate things and we see other processes being eliminated that are critical we have to backtrack and think about how to do it in the correct way. So algae dissipate light energy at the surface of a pond because of non-photochemical quenching so much of the light doesn't reach deeper regions of the pond. But there's even more that happens because no matter what you do in terms of quenching you still damage the photosynthetic apparatus. And so here you have light energy coming in, this is photosystem two, one of the reaction centers, the light at highlight, you damage the photosynthetic apparatus and you could see this red protein which is part of the reaction center gets damaged and it has to ultimately be repaired and that cost energy as well. So here's another problem and that other problem is that if in these outdoor ponds when you're growing organisms you often have invaders, people who organisms that basically cheat and use what we've made to survive. And here you could see this is a ciliate, no this is a rotifer and it's filled itself up with a green algae called chlorella. This is a ciliate, vorticella and it's filled itself up also with a green algae and it keeps that algae for a while and it lets that algae photosynthesize and it gets food from that algae and then when photosynthesis begins to decline in the algae the ciliate can eat the algae as well. Now, but algae too have the amazing capacity to make huge amounts of oil and I've never quite seen anything like this and it's interesting from a number of points of view. This is clamidomonus which is a standard model organism and it can be filled up with oil to some extent and here you see this has been stained with a particular dye that stains oil, it's called Nile Red. This is chlorella, this is another green algae and here it doesn't have so much oil in it but when you treat it in certain ways you could see this is the same organism but you see this black circular middle space, that's all oil, that's all become oil and what you can get is 80, 85% oil in that organism. That's based on total biomass which is pretty incredible. This is the organism we're working on with Elinye and the CERC project and it's called Batriacacus. Batriacacus makes long chain hydrocarbons and those hydrocarbons come outside the cell and they build up and so you can get a huge amount of hydrocarbons from that but you have to extract it in a certain way, it's a slower growing organism so there are other challenges in terms of that particular organism. And if you think about it, well talk about it in a little bit again, another organism that I like and that's used now more by companies is picochlorum and this particular strain of picochlorum was isolated from the Gulf of Mexico, it has a doubling time of two to three hours which is phenomenal for an alga. It grows in seawater that's 2x and that's important because almost nothing else invades that seawater, right, nothing else can live in it. It has very high light tolerance so you could hit it with 2,000 micromoles and it doesn't photo inhibit and it just keeps doing photosynthesis fine. You get very high biomass production, can we make it oily? We possibly can through genetic engineering, it doesn't make that much oil normally but you could take the biomass and you could process it through hydro processing to make fuels that would work in aviation and cars and the thing about this organism is it's enormously productive and here just every month, the production was measured in an outdoor pond and here you see it's 35 grams per meter squared per day and you can make 40 grams per meter squared per day. If you think about photo water trophic production of algal biofuels still has additional obstacles and especially the cost, growing in an outdoor pond, the cost is phenomenal. There are biological use of light energy, ecological and economic issues that need to be met to make photo water trophic production a reality but actually I think we're at the stage where we can get it to work. We know enough about it and I think it still needs a little more fiddling around, a little more thinking, a little more integration of biologists with engineers to really get this to work well and I like this quote from Odyssey Clock. New ideas pass through three periods. Actually I would say there's a pre-period here which is the hype period and usually that drops off very quickly but it can't be done. It probably can be done but it's not worth doing. I knew it was a good idea all the time and I think I'll stop there and I'm glad to take any questions. Thank you. I can ask you the data that you got was it a CO2 carbonation in the pond or was it just from the atmosphere? The data in terms of the biomass production? Yeah. It's actually taking the cells out and doing biomass analysis. Yeah but were you putting the CO2 source was it atmospheric or for men? So to get the best growth you have to supply it with higher CO2 and that's something we're trying to engineer into these organisms, a carbon concentrating mechanism. We need the resistance to carbonate properly and it costs money. It costs money. We've done it and I think our colleagues here that have also played in that space because we did a project that Arizona stated it was very expensive. It was like $900 a barrel. Right. Avoid it in bioreactors over in the pond. It's tough also because of the carbonation. Yeah. So the bioreactors of course you're using light energy too so you still have all those same problems with light utilization. We'll take another question. Yeah. Thank you for the chemical engineering perspective. Thanks, that probably helps. I was thinking the chemical engineering perspective of these bioreactors, photobioreactors and it seemed like some part of the reactor does not get enough light and some part gets too much light and you have to compensate for it. So I wonder if some kind of a natural mixing or replenishment from the bottom to the top with not too much energy of course because you're trying to preserve energy but at least share the light. So you have to mix it because you actually have to mix the gases too to keep it working, right? CO2 and O2. So you have to keep mixing but quenching occurs on the order of less than seconds. So you can get quenching very fast. What people are trying to do to actually increase productivity is very interesting and it has worked. That is you have a quenching process so at high light you start to quench, dissipate almost all the energy as heat but then the light gets low and you want to absorb it and use it but you have a relaxation of that quenching. That takes time. So people have sped up that relaxation so now it could use light more effectively and you get a 5% boost which in a sense is a lot. Thank you.