Lieve Laurens
Lieve Laurens
October / November 2011
Volume 9 Number 5
Light is a pervasive part of our existence. We can harness it to power homes and use it to stimulate the growth of microalgae that may someday power diesel engines. Research scientist Lieve Laurens at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is using light as a tool to filter microalgae based on its lipid content.
Whether a company is striving to make ethanol, green diesel or even jet fuel from algae, the key will be isolating the right algae from the pool of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of available strains in the environment. Sorting through water samples looking for the right fuel-making candidate consumes money and time—and lots of both. Laurens is helping solve that problem by using near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) to identify the best oil-producing algae strains.
“The traditional method to measure the oil content of algal biomass is very cumbersome,” Laurens said. “It takes a long time and it uses lots of chemicals. NREL is now using near infrared spectroscopy to determine the oil content in the algae in just a matter of minutes.” Using light to determine the compositional nature of various biomass feedstocks is something that NREL researcher Ed Wolfrum’s team uses at the lab as for a variety of terrestrial biomass species including corn stover, sorghum and switchgrass. He later garnered the funding to expand into algae.
Laurens came to NREL and the United States in 2008 via Belgium, France, England and North Wales. She grew up north of Belgium and earned an undergraduate degree in biotechnology. She earned her masters in France in molecular and cell biology and was off to England where she completed her Ph.D. in biochemistry. Although initially her interest was geared toward biochemistry, she left England to work on a collaborative algae research project in North Wales. “Exploring how we could get the oils out of algae to make good fuel components—that really got my interest going in algae,” she said.
During her initial work with algae research, Laurens became familiar with NREL’s aquatic species program. “Everybody in the industry knows about the Aquatic Species Close Out Report and I’ve heard people refer to it as the reference manual for algae research. Researchers tried so many things back in the aquatic species program that today saves people a lot of time.
“So, when I saw the job opening at NREL, I thought it could be fun because I was already thinking about how to quantify lipids very quickly, which is really an issue for the industry. Accurately measuring and reporting the oil content in algae is tricky and I thought it would be a nice problem to tackle.”
Laurens believes that algae derived fuels will hold a spot in the future biofuels portfolio especially in the diesel/high density fuel market. Algae have the added bonus of residual biomass rich in structural sugars that could be made into other fuels like cellulosic ethanol.
Near infrared spectroscopy filtering is non-destructive to the algae cell and, at this point, seems to be species agnostic. “We can scan the biomass and then continue doing something else with it,” Laurens said. This approach has researchers pondering other possible applications like real-time crop monitoring to determine when a culture is ready to be harvested. There also is a potential application for crop protection.
“In an outside open-pond system, it is likely that other algae will land in the pond and try to out-compete your species so this technique could be handy for monitoring the health of your crop,” Laurens said.
Even with all of these possibilities, NREL is the only entity using this process for algae. But, Laurens sees a potential for many people to be interested in this technology. “A lot of algae companies, at the moment, are looking for the ideal strain.”
Heather Lammers, NREL Public Affairs
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