{"id":9193,"date":"2022-02-03T08:25:41","date_gmt":"2022-02-03T13:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/?p=9193"},"modified":"2022-02-03T08:25:42","modified_gmt":"2022-02-03T13:25:42","slug":"the-good-the-bad-and-the-algae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/2022\/02\/03\/the-good-the-bad-and-the-algae\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good, The Bad and the Algae"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Georgia Southern Professors Explore Multiple Uses for the Oft-maligned Renewable Resource<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Is algae good or bad?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a question most people don\u2019t think to ask. After all, when algae accumulates on the outside of your house, or in containers left outside, or in your swimming pool, you just get rid of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s something worse than common household algae, however, and more harmful. They\u2019re called algal blooms that form in bodies of water. The largest of these is called \u201cThe Dead Zone,\u201d a mass of water more than 6,300 square miles that sits in the Gulf of Mexico. It\u2019s \u201cdead\u201d because the water is hypoxic, with oxygen levels so low that it can\u2019t sustain life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Algal blooms happen when the chemicals from agricultural runoff and wastewater from urban areas flood bodies of water with nutrients like nitrogen and potassium on which algae feed. The algae consumes all these nutrients, growing and growing until the nutrients run out. Then the bloom collapses and dies, sucking all the oxygen from the water in the process. These blooms can cause massive fish kills, create toxins that cause sickness and death in humans, raise treatment costs for drinking water, and hurt industries that depend on clean water to operate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what\u2019s good about algae?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Georgia Southern biology professors Anthony Siccardi, Ph.D., and John Carroll, Ph.D., are researching all the good ways this oft-maligned substance can potentially be used to solve some of our more pressing environmental problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI mean, it is complicated because the algae that cause these blooms are primarily phytoplankton, and those are really important,\u201d said Carroll. \u201cThat\u2019s the base of the marine food web. And so it\u2019s not that the algae itself is bad, it\u2019s when there\u2019s an overgrowth of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carroll and Siccardi are serving as co-principal investigators on a project with the Sandia National Laboratory, under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, to find out how to use algae grown on algal turf scrubbers to create biomass that is usable for biofuel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An algal turf scrubber is a ramp covered with artificial turf or some other kind of rough surface. Using a pump, water is pulled from a water source and pulsed down the ramp, where algae begins to grow on the turf. When the algae has grown substantially, it is harvested and the process starts over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Siccardi says the process isn\u2019t just about harvesting algae, however. It actually purifies the water, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say you have a river that\u2019s polluted with excess nutrients like excess phosphorus or excess nitrogen,\u201d said Siccardi. \u201cThe algae are able to sequester those nutrients into the algal biomass, removing it from the water column. And then you can take that algal biomass and convert that to biofuel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Siccardi and Carroll are part of a network of several researchers around the country who are working together with Sandia to refine the algae growth process. They\u2019ve tried different types of surfaces and flow rates in their research. Sandia will then take the harvested biomass and see which specimens work best for biofuel, which is not only a more sustainable fuel source, but also burns cleaner than petroleum-based fuel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Grad student Emily Wells prepares algae samples.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The technology promises an exciting future, but there is still a long way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRight now the key is cost,\u201d said Siccardi. \u201cThe cost is still higher than you would normally pay for fossil fuels out of the ground. Each year, the price of a gallon of biofuel comes down a little bit as different advancements are made.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to their work with Sandia, Carroll and Siccardi are looking for other ways to use the harvested algae. Because algal turf scrubbers can be so beneficial to the environment, the question is how to scale their use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf this is going to be a scalable thing, if we\u2019re going to say you can use these turf scrubbers to remove nutrients and then you can make things out of the biomass, it needs to make sense,\u201d said Carroll. \u201cIf there are too many steps to use it, then people aren\u2019t going to use it. And then what happens is that biomass just gets thrown back into the dump. So those nutrients just get back into the system. So I\u2019m interested in, \u2018What are we going to do with this stuff now that we have it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The professors are working with their colleague Jennifer Zettler, Ph.D., in the biology department as well as Casey Schachner and Jason McCoy in the art department to use the algae in kiln-fired ceramics. By drying the algae and then grinding it into a powder, they incorporated it into clay and created small structures, one of which Zettler now has on her desk. They also hope to test the durability and resilience of the clay to use as a structure on which to grow oysters which eat algae and can help control algal blooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Siccardi and his graduate student Michelle Lowery are also working with the Sustainable Aquaponics Research Center on the Armstrong Campus, which combines raising fish with hydroponics to produce plants. They are using algal turf scrubbers to remove excess nutrients from the system water, and then harvesting the algae. The algae can then be used as a soil additive, or it can be fed to black soldier flies, whose larvae can be fed back to the fish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you look at some of these aquaculture facilities where they have a lot of animals in a small pond or tank, and then you\u2019re putting all this feed in and you have excess feed, and some of the animals die \u2014 all of that is releasing nutrients into the environment,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then when they harvest, they typically just drain down the pond and that water winds up getting dumped into a river or a lake or a stream or the ocean. It causes a lot of environmental problems. So I\u2019ve always seen this as a way to capture those excess nutrients and convert those excess nutrients into this algal biomass that you can then use for a whole host of
other things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The professors are working on grants to pursue their ideas using turf scrubbers and biomass. Siccardi says the simplicity of the process and its impact on the environment make him excited about the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
John Carroll, Ph.D., Anthony Siccardi, Ph.D., and grad students Christopher Lee and Emily Wells work with the algal turf scrubber at the Priest Landing site.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI just think that\u2019s so cool to be able to recycle all of those nutrients in an extremely sustainable way,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are the types of things that could be easily transferred to other countries that maybe don\u2019t have access to a lot of the technology the U.S. has. It\u2019s literally open to anybody.\u201d
\u2013 Doy Cave<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Georgia Southern Professors Explore Multiple Uses for the Oft-maligned Renewable Resource Is algae good or bad? It\u2019s a question most people don\u2019t think to ask. After all, when algae accumulates on the outside of your house, or in containers left outside, or in your swimming pool, you just get rid of it. There\u2019s something worse than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":9197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-9193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","tag-winter-2022"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}