Carbon emitted from potatoes helps grow oily “pond scum” biofuel
April 22, 2010 by admin
The innovative project from New Brunswick in this year’s national SABC final shows how carbon emissions from potatoes can be used to increase the growth of cyanobacteria (aka ‘pond scum’), the oil in which is a biofuel.
For Lee Nicholas, 17, there never was a time when the three R’s of reduce, reuse, recycle, weren’t a part of his natural way of thinking. He was raised in a First Nations environment that stressed harmony with the world. Sarah Sullivan, 17, Lee’s partner on the project, also came to the project with a strong personal interest: both sides of her family have farmed potatoes and she has worked on the land since she was 13.
Not only were the Grade 11 students at Southern Victoria High School in Perth-Andover keen to do real science with an accredited mentor, they were excited to work on something that could make a real impact on their community and many others.
Perth-Andover is the world’s french-fry capital, with hundreds of tons of potatoes in storage barns waiting to be processed at any one time. Stored potatoes emit CO2, which can quickly degrade them and so typically is vented outside.
Sarah and Lee essentially fertilized cyanobacteria using CO2-rich air from sealed containers of potatoes and measured their results against a control. “It was awesome,” says Sarah, “the amount of cyanobacteria doubled in some cases.”
The project holds special interest for mentor David Wattie, a potato pest specialist with New Brunswick’s Department of Agriculture and Aquaculture.
“It’s well established that cyanobacteria need CO2 to live, but nobody has tried to use the CO2 given off by stored potatoes to see if it had any effect on it,” he says.
It’s too early to say definitively that vented CO2 from potato bins can be used to grow cyanobacteria on a commercial scale or even that pond scum is a viable biofuel.
Right now it is enough to say that Sarah and Lee have contributed to those possibilities. And both say they now consider bioscience a viable career option due to the SABC experience.