Review of the cultivation program within the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts

Authors

• Peter J. Lammers, New Mexico State University
• Michael Huesemann, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Wiebke Boeing, New Mexico State University
• Daniel B. Anderson, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Robert G. Arnold, University of Arizona
• Xuemei Bai, Cellana, Inc.
• Manish Bhole, Reliance Industries Limited
• Yalini Brhanavan, New Mexico State University
• Louis Brown, Texas A & M University
• Jola Brown, Texas A & M University
• Judith K. Brown, University of Arizona
• Stephen Chisholm, Colorado State University
• C. Meghan Downes, New Mexico State University
• Scott Fulbright, Colorado State University
• Yufeng Ge, Texas A & M University
• Jonathan E. Holladay, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Balachandran Ketheesan, New Mexico State University
• Avinash Khopkar, Reliance Industries Limited
• Ambica Koushik, New Mexico State University
• Paul Laur, Eldorado Biofuels, LLC
• Babetta L. Marrone, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• John B. Mott, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Nagamany Nirmalakhandan, New Mexico State University
• Kimberly L. Ogden, University of Arizona
• Ronald L. Parsons, Solix Biosystems, Inc.
• Juergen Polle, CUNY Brooklyn CollegeFollow
• Randy D. Ryan, University of Arizona
• Tzachi Samocha, Texas A & M University
• Richard T. Sayre, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Mark Seger, New Mexico State University
• Thinesh Selvaratnam, New Mexico State University
• Ruixiu Sui, Texas A & M University
• Alex Thomasson, Texas A & M University
• Adrian Unc, New Mexico State University
• Wayne Van Vorrhies, New Mexico State University
• Peter Waller, University of Arizona
• Yao Yao, Texas A & M University
• José A. Olivares, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-12-2016

Abstract

The cultivation efforts within the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB)were developed to provide four major goals for the consortium, which included biomass production for downstream experimentation, development of new assessment tools for cultivation, development of new cultivation reactor technologies, and development of methods for robust cultivation. The NAABB consortium test beds produced over 1500 kg of biomass for downstream processing. The biomass production included a number of model production strains, but also took into production some of the more promising strains found through the prospecting efforts of the consortium. Cultivation efforts at large scale are intensive and costly, therefore the consortium developed tools and models to assess the productivity of strains under various environmental conditions, at lab scale, and validated these against scaled outdoor production systems. Two new pond-based bioreactor designs were tested for their ability to minimize energy consumption while maintaining, and even exceeding, the productivity of algae cultivation compared to traditional systems. Also, molecular markers were developed for quality control and to facilitate detection of bacterial communities associated with cultivated algal species, including the Chlorella spp. pathogen, Vampirovibrio chlorellavorus,which was identified in at least two test site locations in Arizona and New Mexico. Finally, the consortium worked on understanding methods to utilize compromised municipal waste water streams for cultivation. This review provides an overview of the cultivation methods and tools developed by the NAABB consortium to produce algae biomass, in robust low energy systems, for biofuel production.

Comments

This article was originally published in Algal Research, available at DOI:10.1016/j.algal.2016.11.021.

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).