Stuff You Should Know - Algae: Food, Fuel, What?

Episode Date: October 4, 2018

Just a couple years ago, algae was touted as the green, plentiful biofuel of the future. But that didn’t pan out. Why? And is algae down for the count? Don’t bet on it. Only a fool would bet against green water.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh, and I just wanna remind you that we are releasing a brand new podcast called Short Stuff. It's got its own feed and everything, but it's still the same great kind of stuff

you should know that you love. It's got me and Chuck and Jerry, but the topics are briefer and the episodes are shorter, and we hope you like it. It's its own thing, it comes out every Wednesday, and you can find it by going to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and searching for Short Stuff.

Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there, and Jerry said go, so this is Stuff You Should Know,

which America loves because it rhymes. What rhymes? Jerry said go, so it's Stuff You Should Know. And Americans love rhymes. Isn't that the new reality show? America Loves Rhyming. That'd be cool. It'd be like a hip hop, right?

Kind of talent show. Yeah. I think that'd be neat. America's got rhymes. Yes. How's it going? Pretty good, how about you, man? I'm good.

I'm finally all cleared up for my weird Australian gold. Oh, that's good. You sound much better. You look good. Yeah. Just loving life again? Well, not that, but I feel physically able. I got you.

Life is tough right now, but... It is. You're like in the grips of it. Jerry's all strung out. I'm a little tired. Kind of what's going on? Like I keep saying, if you see me live in November, then that means all as well.

Yeah. Almost there, Chuck. Just another month-ish. Yeah. Yeah. What stinks is October is my favorite month, generally, but this October is the suck. Oh yeah, you're a Halloween is your favorite holiday

kind of person, huh? I love it. Just Halloween, football's cranking up. That first fall breeze blows in. The whole thing of October. But of course it's Atlanta, so it's still, you know, in the 90s. Yeah, it's weirdly hot.

Ridiculous. Atlanta's got some odd weather. I'll give you that, my friend. I was telling Jerry the other day that I saw a thing, I believe it was the New York Times, had this interactive feature where you could see how many days above 90 degrees where you lived was when you were born compared to now.

And in 1971, Atlanta had 55 days above 90. Now it has 77 and in another like 10 years, I think it'll be 90 days above 90 degrees. Wow, because of climate change or is that just the New York Times editorial opinion? No, I mean, these are the facts. They didn't say why. We could debate that if you want.

Because it sounds fake to me. No, I mean, that's just the reality of the temperature. They weren't saying, I think, let's just draw our own conclusions. Sure, sure, I know. Point is it's hot. It is hot, and you know what happens when it's hot, Chuck? I love this segue.

Algae blooms. Yep. And you know what happens when algae blooms? Fuel is born. All kinds of things, potentially you're born. Cosmetics, mayonnaise, food, livestock, sushi, all that stuff. All of it is born when algae blooms. Sushi sandwiches?

Sushi. Sushi sandwich? Oh, Steve Brewell, you have our heart. Yeah, I had a very flirted with greatness when a publicist for John C. Riley said that he might be on movie crush and it did not happen. Oh, I'm sorry about that. That's right, that would have been pretty exciting.

You were broken up for a little while there, weren't you? Yeah, I'm right, though. Yeah, you recovered just like it was an Australian cold. Nothing. All right, so let's talk algae. This is pretty remarkable. Yes, so we should kind of set the stage here because just in the last couple of years,

the bottom has kind of dropped out on the algae's biofuel push among venture capitalists and oil companies. Dropped out as in not happening? It's not happening, at least not right now. There was this moment in time, about 2011 to say, 2015, where it looked like, at least as far as money and attention and media exposure that was being thrown at algae,

was that it was the next great biofuel and that it was going to happen really soon. But the thing that I was learning about venture capitalists is they don't like soon, they like right now. And so as it became very clear that a lot of the early preliminary results from the lab were not necessarily translating into the real world, a lot of people walked away. But in doing that, it's not to say that algae as a biofuel

isn't going to be a viable fuel of the future. It's just going to take a lot more money and a lot more time than everybody at first was kind of hyped up for over the last couple of years. So it's still there. The promise is still there. It's just not happening tomorrow. Some people predict it might not even happen this century,

but I take issue with that. I think it'll happen in the 21st century. Well, it's funny because I did occasionally for stuff like this, I will search just news on the old Google. And today there popped up an article about a company in Hawaii that is in fact pushing forward after all their testing and everything, they're pushing forward with the plant, with a biodiesel production plant from algae.

That's awesome. At least one place is doing it in Hawaii. Yeah, I think there are a few companies there. We're staying in the course. We're going to figure this out. Yeah. But from what I saw in the parlance of venture capitalists, the industry's pivoted to food production,

more than food and additive production, more than fuel. But from the research there, learning how to grow more algae faster and better and harvesting it more cheaply and processing it more cheaply, all those lessons can be extrapolated over to the fuel industry as well. So as long as people are messing around with algae, there's a lot of good stuff that's going to come from it.

And I can understand after researching this article, where all that hype came from, because it's just like beautiful stuff. Yeah. It really is. And we should specify here, and we're talking algae, there's something like 100,000 or more different genetically diverse strains of algae.

But typically you can kind of divide it into two categories. There's microalgae, which is what makes water green. And it's a microscopic single celled plant. And then there's macroalgae, which is like you think of with seaweed or kelp or sea lettuce or something like that. Yeah. And for this show, we're talking about alga culture. And this is not any, I mean, it's new in the sense that

we are ramping up efforts into studying like biofuels and stuff like that. But the Japanese have been cultivating algae for a long, long time. Yeah. Something like 1200 years or more? Yeah, exactly. So it's always been a big thing there.

In the British Isles, like in 16th century Mexico with the Aztecs, people have been eating algae, using algae. We're going to talk a lot about spirulina, which has been consumed and harvested for thousands of years. And so, you know, we've been eating it. We've been using it for fertilizers, thickening agents for food, like you said, with mayonnaise and things like toothpaste.

It's a big, big business. I believe about a $6 billion worldwide business, a couple of billion of which is for seaweed paper alone, for Nori. Yeah, just for the stuff they wrap sushi in, it's $2 billion. $2 billion for those delicious green sheets that look like paper that you eat.

Yeah, so as it stands, even without the idea of it being like the next alternative energy, it's still a $6 billion business, right? Yeah. So there's a lot of reason for people to keep paying attention. There's money to be made in algae, in other words, right? Yeah, but you can, you know, like we said, with the biofuel, and we'll get into this more,

one of the cool things about algae is how versatile it is, beyond the fact that you can eat it, and you can, we'll talk about all the myriad things you can do with it, but you can squeeze oil out of that stuff that can be turned into gasoline or jet fuel, which is amazing. Yeah. Yeah, you can replace kerosene with biofuel from algae.

And you can use the waste product that you get as a result. It's really sort of a wonderful thing, and here it goes. It sounds like a big long setup. So it was, it was a beautiful one, man. Way to go. So with algae, with either type, what we're talking about are plants, right?

Yes. And just like any other plants, they produce, they produce their own food through photosynthesis. Yeah, green plants. Mm-hmm. They use chlorophyll and sunlight, and they convert, they also use carbon dioxide, and they convert all that into energy stores,

and they give off as a byproduct oxygen. So you can start to see why algae is a bit of a darling of the environmentalist set, because first of all, it's drawing CO2 from the air, and it's putting out oxygen as a byproduct. And then it's a darling of the energy set. These are two different sets that sometimes overlap, because you can actually take the energy store,

which is stored largely in the form of oil, but we'll see other kinds, and unlock it, like you said, in different types of fuel. That's easier said than done, but you can also do a lot of this stuff with lamb-based plants, too, right? And there actually was a big push. Algae represents the third generation of biofuels.

The first generation was basically cellulosic ethanol, using corn to turn into fuel, which a lot of people were like, this is really great. And then, as Phil remember those food riots in Egypt and Haiti in, I think, 2008, diverting corn from the food supply over to the energy sector is really, really bad.

So people said, okay, we don't want to mess with our food supply. We can't use food for energy, but we can use waste from that stuff. So you can take the corn stalks that nobody's eating and turn them into a biofuel, which is great, but it requires several extra expensive steps, so it's just not cost efficient. Now, algae came along, and it has a lot of things going for it,

compared to lamb-based plants, that made it really, really attractive for a number of reasons. Well, yeah, for sure. And when we say something is fast growing, algae, we need a new word for how fast algae can grow. Ultra-fast growing. Yeah, I like that.

Turbo growth. That's good. Land plants like you were talking about, sometimes it takes years or months, maybe to reach maturity. Algae can do this, that can complete a life cycle sometimes in a day. Yeah.

Algae can, well, some algae, because I think they're more than 70,000 species. I saw 100,000. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. And 30,000 this morning. Probably. Some algae, though, can double their biomass in an hour.

Right. Super efficient, as far as converting solar energy to biomass. I believe land plants use like 95% of their energy, just building the structure, like root structures and stems and things, needed to support the plant itself. Right. You don't need this with algae,

it's just floating out there. Right. So, I mean, if you're using 95% of that sunlight and carbon dioxide nutrients, just to build the structure you need to keep doing that. Just to be a dumb plant. That's extraordinarily inefficient, at least compared to algae.

For sure. It just floats in the water. It doesn't need roots, it doesn't need much structure. It's a single-celled plant. So, basically, all it is is a little solar-powered energy-producing factory. Yeah.

And that's what it does, so it's extraordinarily efficient compared to land plants, for sure. Compared to land plants, you can grow algae in very, very tight concentrated spaces. I have here that they produce up to 100 times more oil per acre, 100 times than land plants. Yeah. That's remarkable.

Yeah, that's pretty substantial, too. Plus, there's different types of algae that produce oils or edible for food. I don't think they very frequently overlap, but from all these different types of algae, you can say, well, all I have is this salt marsh pond to grow algae in. Great.

What kind of algae can I have, God? And God goes, here, take this algae, it's pretty great. It'll give you a pretty good buzz, too, if you dry it out. And the guy takes it from God, puts it in a salt marsh pond, harvests it, saves a little bit for his head stash,

and then sells the rest to Rex Tillerson. That's right. And that's the end of the Bible. The end. The other cool thing is algae doesn't compete. It's not like an either or with land plants. It grows in the water, so it's not like, oh, I need all this land

that you need for corn to grow my algae. It's a big one. Don't even need fresh water. It can grow in gross water, dirty water, polluted water, salt water, and not all algae, but certain kinds of algae. Right. So it's not like they can coexist.

They can all just be friendly. You can still have your corn fields in your algae ponds. Yeah. And again, it's unlike the first generation of biofuels. It's not competing directly with the food supply. It's not saying, well, we need this land to grow algae, so we can't grow corn on it. We've got all this land to grow corn,

and we've got this stupid pond that's not doing anything for anybody. Let's grow algae in there, too, baby. And then you've got a farmer that's growing both. One of the other things about algae, too, Chuck, is that a lot of those things overlap, right? Yeah. You can actually set up a kind of algae that is not only producing oil.

You can use the leftover stuff after you've extracted the oil to feed your cows on your land, or to feed the corn that's going to feed the cows. And then all the while, you're also drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So it's pretty great. It's pretty versatile, and there's a lot of reasons people like it. So on all that, I think we set it up pretty well. You want to take a break?

Yeah. You know how excited I get when we talk about efficient systems. I know you do. You get jazz. I need to go calm down. All right. Back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we set up that algae is basically the miracle of miracles here on planet Earth. Yep. If you've got water, you've got a sun in the sky, and some nutrients, then you can harvest, I mean, you can harvest algae, but algae, you don't, like, it'll grow on its own.

Right. Oh yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, it grows naturally. It's not like we created this stuff. But you can grow it on your own. You can. I think what you're saying was, like, there's techniques you can do to improve the growth of algae, right? Yeah, or like, you can, you know, you can harvest this stuff from the ocean. Right, right.

But there are many, many ways to actually, like, have your own little algae farm. Right. Especially if you're making, if you're doing micro algae, like the tiny single-celled stuff that you actually can't see. It's just, you know, when water turns green, that's algae in it. It's not like you can see it or anything. The stuff you can see, that's considered macro algae. Micro algae is, again, single-celled microscopic individual plants that there's so many of them,

they just tint the water green. So if you want to grow those, there's a few different techniques available to actually farming algae. Again, it's called alga culture, which is not a beautiful word, but it's... I like it. It works, do you? I do. I like how it looks more than I like how it sounds. Alga culture, I like it.

Yeah. It's not like you choked on something in the middle of the word. Alga culture. All right, so we have the three methods, like you were saying. You have your standard open pond, your standard closed pond, and your standard bio-photo reactor. An open pond is exactly what you think. That's the cheapest way to do it, obviously. The simplest way, the sort of old-fashioned way, is in a big, shallow pond.

It's not just willy-nilly, they will usually divide this thing up into almost like... I mean, they say raceways, which is really kind of dumb in this article. I would say it's more like lines of planted rows of corn, let's say. Yeah, kind of. Except it's algae, and the thing is, sunlight is great for algae, but once you get a lot of algae going, it only penetrates so far into the water. So what you need to do is you need to agitate it and stir that algae up to make sure everything gets a little taste of that sweet, sweet sunlight. And in the case of an open pond, you have a system like a paddle wheel system,

agitating the stuff, exposing everything to the light all the while. It's almost like composting in a way. You're mixing in nutrients and CO2 into the liquid. It's a great system, but it's the one that produces the least biomass. It loses water to evaporation, so you continually need to add water. And this is the one where contamination or predators can come in and eat. Pea. Pea or eat.

Yeah, I guess either one would be a problem, huh? Yeah. You've got a wolf peeing in your algae pond, or eating the algae. You don't want either one of those. Yeah, so that's the open pond. A closed pond is about the same, but you've covered it up sort of like a greenhouse. Right. Which means a little more cost, but you have a lot more control.

You do. And the cost would be mostly upfront if you build the greenhouse correctly. It's not too expensive to build a greenhouse. Although if you're doing it on a very, very large scale, you either need a lot of ponds with a lot of greenhouses or one big pond with a massive greenhouse over it. Either way, the point is, is you're exerting your human right to control nature over the pond that you're growing algae in.

Your wolf friend can't get in. It's not going to get contaminated by other algae. It's just a lot easier to control. And I would guess not too terribly much more expensive than the open pond method. Yeah, if money is no object, if you're a person of means. And you want to wow your friends. Yeah, and you really want to show off and annoy your neighbor. Although I think these things look really cool, actually.

I do, too. It looks like something that the ghostbusters were to trap some ectoplasm in. It looks like ectoplasm. It does. It's very bright green. The bio-photoreactor method, this is completely closed. Basically, you're growing algae in these tubes. It's all, I mean, I say artificial.

It's not artificial because it's still water, but you're completely manipulating what's going on with pumps and nutrients and water and light in these clear tubes. Sometimes it's like an automatic system that's all completely set up. It's a lot of money, but it's the most efficient way to do it, even though it's the most expensive. It is, but if you're growing algae for commercial purposes and you got a little sweet VC money,

it might as well set up a bio-photoreactor. VC juice? You've got light coming from all directions, and you have a controlled closed system. One of the things about algae is it grows and it grows really fast, but if you make sure it has nutrients it needs, the pH is just right, like it likes slightly alkaline water of a pH between 7 and 9, I believe,

with a temperature of 60 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. You can control all this stuff very easily with a bio-photoreactor. Again, the problem is the upfront costs. Yeah, for sure. But the thing is with these three methods, you can grow algae. Some methods are better than others, but you know that you can grow algae in here. The problem really comes in getting the algae out of the water

and getting the oil or whatever you're trying to get out of the algae. There's a lot of steps you need to take, and the more steps you add, the more involved each step becomes, the more expensive the process is, and when the process gets expensive, those VC guys start to walk away. You have to figure out this process, and that's kind of where it's at right now, in part. That's kind of where the at least algae biofuel industry is stalled out right now.

Yeah, so those three methods, that's for cultivating the microalgae. The macroalgae that we talked about, which is kelp and sea lettuce, and the stuff that, like when you're in the ocean, you're like, oh, get that stuff away from me. I don't want the miracle plant on my leg. That stuff has been cultivated for centuries, thousands and thousands of years in the open sea, the ocean, the sunlight, everything that it needs is in there,

and it grows like crazy. It's great. Harvesting this stuff is a little tough. They've been doing it, like I said, for thousands of years in coastal areas, all over the place, all over the world, but they began to think like, hey, we maybe want to cultivate this stuff, so what do we do? It'll attach to a rope, like the spore attaches to a rope, and it grows on that, so let's just throw these rope lines down on anchors,

and it's basically a vertical growth rope, the same like with a large net, it grows on that rope, and they basically can just like anchor this stuff down, have it grow along these rope lines, and then pull those in when you want to harvest it. Right, exactly. That's a traditional way of cultivating it. If you're Japanese, you think, well, I guess I'll just invent a really awesome machine

that mows the lawn of a kelp forest underwater, and just harvest it like that, so there's that technique as well. Pretty cool. And then you also, like there's just walking out into the water and grabbing, whether it's kelp or floating kind of mucky algae, you can just harvest it as simply as that. The difference is you're talking about macro algae, something you can put your hands on and just kind of put into like a bucket

or a bag or a basket or something, some receptacle of some type. Whereas with micro algae, if you try to do that, it's just going to, you've got a bucket full of water. You still have this harvesting technique that makes micro algae so much more difficult that you can't just use traditional techniques to harvest it. You have to basically set up some big time machines. Yeah, so let's talk about the harvesting and processing a little bit. Like you said, with the micro algae, you're just pulling this stuff off,

but ultimately what you want to do is end up with an algae paste. Yeah, that's the good stuff. That's the real good stuff. So in order to do that, you need to, obviously you need to remove the moisture and that will leave you with this dense biomastic paste. Micro algae presents a unique problem, like you said, because it's just like, it looks like a bucket of water, like green water. So it makes sense that one of the methods is filtration.

You just feed it through a filter and it's got the tiniest little membrane that these pores won't fit through these algae cells, and so it just filters it out. And the problem with that is, probably what you would think, is it's really easy for that stuff to become clogged up. Right, I don't even know why they would try this. It would just clog immediately, you know? Yeah, but I'm sure it takes that into consideration with its design.

Sure, I guess. You want to talk about flocculation? That sounds dirty. It really does. It's not, though. It's just basically clumping algae. Like some algae naturally clumps, but not necessarily the algae you want. So if you throw in the algae that clumps with the algae you want, it can make the other algae clump. There's also chemicals that will make algae clump.

And then you're basically taking micro algae and converting it into something you can manipulate like a macro algae. So that helps, that's good, but then now you have micro algae that has some sort of clumping chemicals, or algae that you don't really want mixed in with it. It's not a 100% foolproof method. Right, and the other problem with flocculation is, if you do it too much, you will grow hair on your palms.

It's true. It makes the saints cry when you flocculate. Flotation is another method. So this is when you use compressed air, and you put it in the water and you bubble it up, and that makes the micro algae kind of go to the surface, where you can just sort of skim it off like a grit chaff. What is grit chaff? Like, you know, when you make slow cook southern style grits,

you ever do that? Oh, yeah, yeah. You got to rinse it. And then with like sushi rice, you rinse it in cold water, and the husk, I guess it is, I guess it's the husk, kind of floats on the top. That's starch. And you get a little, yeah, you get a little strainer

and skim that stuff off, so you can end up with good soft grits or good soft rice. What do you do with the stuff you skim off? You stow it away? Yeah, I wonder if there's a use for that. Surely, I'll bet people feed it to their pigs or something like that. Well, that'd be a lot of grits that you're cooking.

Well, no, it's not like you're making the grits to feed the pigs, but rather than just throwing it out, you can throw it to the pig, you know what I mean? All right. There's also chuck. I love this one. There's also the centrifuge method.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's where you get that bucket, but your bucket spins around and has tiny holes in it. And it's basically, do you remember the salad spinner? Remember, I've got one. Okay, so it's a salad spinner for your micro algae, basically. Yeah, it just flings it all to the outside. The thing is, is it unlike your salad spinner,

you can't get it at a discount at Marshalls or TJ Maxx. You probably have to bill it yourself for buy one that's very expensive. When you start adding the word centrifuge, rather than salad spinner, the price just automatically goes up. Yeah, and here's the thing. The cool thing is you don't have to do just one of these.

A lot of times they might be like, well, let's flocculate for a little while, but I don't want my palms to grow hairy. So I will then throw it in a centrifuge because I'm drowning in VC juice and they bought me one. So they can combine methods. Yeah, a lot of people will combine methods. And I'm sure they combine methods out of necessity

because none of the methods work by themselves. Yeah, for macro, you'd really just need to dry this stuff out. And I get the sense that a lot of it is sort of the old fashioned way just by kind of laying it out or hanging it out in the sun. Is that about right? I would guess, yeah. Surely that's the traditional method, you know? What was the one that we did?

Oh, coffee beans, right? Did they just lay those out in the sun? Yeah, I think we did a show on that. And the traditional method is just like, just beans just laid out, baking. Gotcha. Am I wrong? You remember that?

I don't remember at this point. I just remember that goats eat them and some people pick them out of the goat's poop and then sell them for a million dollars a pound. Should we take a break? I think so, Charles. All right, well, let's do that. And then we'll talk about some of the many, many uses of algae

right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, dude, we're back, Chuck. And I have to say, I'm a fan of algae now. Yeah, me too. So there's a lot of different things you can use it for. We'll talk first about the ways you can use algae for fuel. And you might think at first like, whoa, how are you going to use algae for fuel? Again, that energy store that some types of algae,

not all algae, but some types, and then other types, even more than others, take the energy that they're converting sunlight, CO2, and other nutrients into these energy stores. They convert it as an oil within their tiny little single cell body. It's great. And if you get enough of these single cell bodies together

in the form of these algae that you've gotten the water out of, you can extract that oil out of it. And there's a lot of different ways to do it. You can break the cell walls, basically, is what you're trying to do, either chemically or shaking or... Or physically, yeah. Yeah, physically. You could also hit it with some sound waves.

There's a lot of things you can do. Hit it with some sound waves. You can't, some Ted Nugent. Yeah. I think really, really causes them to split open. And then you get the oil. So when you take that oil, you then have to refine it. And depending on what you want to do with it,

there's different techniques. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've been championing the biodiesel. Well, that's really not true. We've been saying it would be great if they could figure this out. Right. And the key to all this stuff, anytime we've done anything, we've done other episodes on other biofuels,

it's all like, it would be the one of choice if you could figure out a way to do it and make the most money. That's the only stumbling block ever. Yeah. Is when are you going to get the big companies involved? It's when you can say, hey, we've really figured it out such that it's a genuine threat to whatever, crude oil. Well, what's crazy is up until very recently,

ExxonMobil and Chevron were both like invested in this. Yes. So, I mean, the big companies were involved and they all just kind of walked away because it wasn't happening like in the next 10 or 20 years. Yeah. I mean, you get that in a certain way because they're there to make money, but I don't know.

Sometimes it'd be nice if someone sort of went out on a limb and maybe that's how it ends up happening. Well, they are. It's the little guys in Hawaii who are doing it, you know? I guess so. Who deserve to be billionaires after this for trying to save the earth. So, we talked a little bit about biodiesel.

It can also be refined as an additive, right? For gasoline and jet fuel? Yeah. The cool thing about that is if you're going to convert it into jet fuel, you can actually use existing refineries. And that does something very important. It cuts down on cost. Oh, yeah.

Big time. Right? When cellulosic ethanol was huge in like 2007, 2008, 2009, there was a one huge problem with it where if you were just pumping pure ethanol through existing pipelines, they were going to wear down in like just a few years. That is not true apparently with refined biodiesel from algae or jet fuel from algae

because it does not corrode the pipes and it doesn't corrode the systems that you use to refine it. So, you don't have to build entire new pipelines or entire new refiners. You can just switch over to algae at some point. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that's a huge mark in its favor. And I think like seven years ago,

there was a flight from Houston to Chicago, an entire commercial jet powered by algal oil. Algal? Oh, man. I hate this. I guess algal. Algal oil? Yeah.

Okay. I would say that. They delivered the Rangers to get beat by the Cubs. But it's not algae. It's not algae culture though. It could be if we make it. We have a lot of listeners. All right.

By the way, Houston is the Astros, not the Rangers. Oh, where do the Rangers play? Are they out of Dallas? I know it's the Texas Rangers, but where are they? Yeah, they're like a Dallas metropolitan team. Yeah. Well, sorry Astros fans. Now, I should know that too

because I think they have the greatest uniform of all time, the 70s one. Oh, the orange stripes. Man, it's just beautiful. It was pretty good. So, okay. So you can turn it into jet fuel. Ethanol, I don't think we've talked about ethanol really, have we?

No. So ethanol again, it's basically just breaking down the cellulose. Remember how you said plants like spend 95% of their energy building the structures that support them and let them live? If you take those structures that support them and let them live and break them down, you can turn that, that's what cellulosic ethanol is. So it's basically plant material that those carbohydrates

are what they use to build those walls and you can break them down and use them for energy. And you can do the same thing with algae too. Yeah, and the great thing is, aside from the oil, because algae is made up from carbohydrates and cellulose, you can actually ferment this stuff into grain alcohol. Yeah. What would that taste like?

I don't know, like seaweed that gets you wasted. I don't know. I would try it. Sure. You mean I were coming back from Hilton head this past weekend and there was a billboard for a liquor store outside of Savannah. And it said corn whiskey, but in the Coca-Cola font for some inexplicable reason.

Oh, really? Yeah, it was really weird to see. How was Hilton head? Was it storm ravaged or not bad? No, it must have hit above it because it was totally fine, beautiful, not a leaf out of place. And you know because of your Hilton head leaf journal? I counted them before.

You mean they're all here? They're all present and accounted for. All right, be back in six months. Right. No one move. And the methane I think is the final, one of the final uses. Everyone knows we talked about methane plenty. That's one of the main ingredients in natural gas.

And it's what cows make when they have a 2D booty. It is. And it says here that it's a clean fuel. I don't understand that at all. Methane is like one of the worst greenhouse gases there are. It's worse than carbon dioxide as far as trapping heat. It's just there's less of it than carbon dioxide. I just thought that was really weird.

But the thing I love about producing methane through algae is that you're not actually using the algae. You are using the algae. You're using the algae as a feedstock for bacteria. Because when bacteria consume algae, they produce methane. So you're taking the algae and feeding it to bacteria, which seems pretty cold and calculating. Perfect for an oil company.

Yeah, that's a good point. We also talked earlier. I think I teased out that algae even loves really gross polluted water. It thrives in polluted water. So they could use it potentially. And I think they may be, or are they? They are. They're using it for wastewater treatment in certain places.

Yes, you can use it for wastewater treatment. They're using it. I think there's an experiment in an old tin mine in Cornwall in the UK where they've added some algae to see if they can bio-remediate the cadmium and the arsenic in the water that's flooded the mine. And the great thing about algae is some of it just absorbs heavy metals and pollutants. It just absorbs it and hangs on to it.

And then you go just put it away for a billion years or something like that. It just kind of sucks it up. Others actually use this stuff for metabolism. So it will break down a heavy metal like cadmium that's toxic to us into something that's totally inert to us. Which is just mind-bogglingly wonderful. So they're starting to really kind of look into the idea of using, again, there's like 100,000 different strains of algae

to using some of them for bio-remediation, which is a huge plus. Because right now we use chemicals to stop up chemicals. Another thing you can use algae for is for oil spills. And there's something called herders, herder chemicals, which if you add to an oil spill, it actually moves them together and turns it from this little thin sheen on the ocean into a much more concentrated thicker sheen that you can actually skim off or burn or something.

Well, there's types of algae that do that too. But the plus of algae is that it's not some chemical that stays in the environment like the stuff we currently use, the chemicals we currently use, that we're not quite sure what the long-term effects are. Right, like okay, no more oil, but now we've got this unknown, not unknown, but a chemical with unknown damage down the line. Exactly. Just replacing the oil.

Right. With algae, that's not the case. We know what algae will do. We're pretty much, I mean, I'm sure there's invasive species situations that we could accidentally get ourselves into, but that's the last thing you're thinking of when you're cleaning up an oil spill. You know what I'm saying?

And that baby penguin comes over and is like, help me please. And then earlier in the show, you know, we talked about the quote-unquote waste product. We're talking about if you're extracting that oil, what you have left over after you've squeezed all that oil out of it, you can use that as fertilizer or as a supplement for animal feed. And that's the leftover, even if you're not using it for biofuels. It's really good for you.

Like humans eat it, cattle eats it, marine like shrimp and shellfish. Love the stuff. It is chock, like if you're talking about spirulina, it is chock full of protein, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins, iron, beta-carotene. I think it's got more protein than meat. So for 100 grams, spirulina has 57 grams of protein, steak has 25 grams of protein. Amazing. And spirulina has 158% of your daily iron.

Steak has 13% of it. Steak's like a high iron food. I believe spirulina has far more iron than spinach even. It also has tons of calcium, like you said, omega-3s. And like I think in the 70s, the UN called it a superfood of the future. And it is extremely good for you. But again, the idea of calling it a superfood of the future is kind of ironic because in the 16th century, the Aztecs were eating it as little cakes of spirulina.

The Welsh have been eating something called lava bread, which is just basically spirulina algae on toast. I bet that tastes so good. I want to try it. It looks like overcooked mass of spinach. But they say like you can tell like the different terroirs depending on where it was harvested. But I would love to try that. Yeah.

And you mentioned very early on the reason that I guess people like Exxon have put it on hold. You sent this great article where I would figure the limitation would be like, well, it's in the processing. It's too expensive or we haven't figured it out yet. Apparently what's sort of the big holdup is in the biology itself. It's just, I think it just you need too much of it to go to scale. Is that about right? Yeah.

Yeah. Because here's the problem. This stuff, if you're growing it in a flask in a lab, it really does like all this amazing stuff that people are saying. The problem is when you extrapolate that into the real world, real world conditions kind of start to take over and it doesn't necessarily translate like it should. And one of the big things they ran into is when you start getting algae on a massive scale,

when you start growing it on an industrial scale, the algae starts to compete with other algae for things like sunlight and nutrients. Yeah. So you're left with, well, then that means let's say that's having the amount of algae I'm trying to grow or the amount of oil I'm trying to harvest. That means I have to double the surface area of the pond. I have to grow twice as much algae as I thought. Yeah.

And there was some prediction I think a few years ago that biodiesel from algae or biofuel would be running about 10% of the EU's transportation sector, which is just an enormous amount. That would be amazing if it could do that. But they found that for that to happen, you would need a pond basically about three times the size of Belgium to grow that much algae as it stands right now. So again, that's not to say that like it's just never going to happen.

It's just, well, here's a really big wall that we've hit. Now let's figure out how to get over it because algae really could do this. Yeah, for sure. You just need a pond three times the size of Belgium. But here's the thing is maybe don't like baby step it, you know. Yeah. I think that's what they do. Like what about upon the size of just one Belgium and not three Belgians?

Now we said Belgium so many times it sounds funny. Well, we could just flood Belgium. Oh man, that'd be so mean. Belgium's lovely. They've been asking for it for years though. What's this other one here? In 2010, a scientist based at Wageningen University. I bet they don't have a mascot.

The flying tongue twisters. They published findings that suggested an area about the size of the state of Maryland. But if it was sea lettuce, you could provide enough protein to feed the entire human population. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. But it's sea lettuce. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I would try it. I've never had sea lettuce as far as I know. No, I would try it too.

It's just the article does say that like, you know, part of the problem then is like convincing everyone to eat sea lettuce all the time. Right. And it's absolutely true. I mean, it'd be foolish to think otherwise, you know. But if you're trying to solve world hunger, I mean, you know. Well, that's the thing you could also, and a lot of people use spirulina powder is like a dietary supplement because it's so good for you and it's so energy dense. But there are, there's also, there's a couple of other things I wanted to mention though before we leave about the kind of greenness of algae. One, it's carbon neutral.

Yeah. I don't think we said that, but the, the CO2 that the algae uses to produce it to do its thing, and it's actually sucking it right out of the air. So it releases CO2 when it's burned as biofuel, but that CO2 was just in the air like a month ago. So it's not like it's coming from a sequestered sink of CO2 like fossil fuels that we dig up that are not part of the carbon cycle right then that we're actually adding to there. So it would make it a carbon neutral thing. And then the other thing, if we replaced soy with algae is livestock and fish feed. We would no longer have to do any wild caught fish because apparently they go out and catch wild fish, grind them up and feed them to farmed fish as feed to get the Omega 3s. If we just supplemented that with algae, we wouldn't have to catch any wild fish whatsoever.

And then if we replaced cattle feed made of soy with algae, we wouldn't have to cut down forests to grow soy to feed the cattle on. Yeah. So it could be, I mean, if we, if we really just keep looking at algae and don't walk away from it, don't walk away from algae. There's a bright future ahead of us with it. There's so much, so much promise in algae, baby. Yeah, there's a lake in Georgia that I go to a lot and there has been a member of the Facebook page where people complain about stuff basically. Sure, yeah. That's what most of those are for.

That's what they're for. And a lot of people are complaining about these grasses in the lake now and algae blooms and they're spraying chemicals in the lake to get rid of this stuff. Oh no, you're kidding. No, and it's a Georgia Power Lake, so they have like an approved list of vendors that will do this. And my whole thought is like, if there's an algae bloom, it's like, isn't that nature trying to work something out? I think it's nature trying to work out fertilizer runoff. So the problem isn't like, the problem isn't in the lake, it's up on land somewhere in some like a farm that's just using too much fertilizer. But I mean, that's what my whole point though is that like the algae is there for a reason.

Yeah, right. It's not just there to tick off a jet skier. Right. It's kind of like, if you've hit your knee on something, just cutting your leg off so you don't have any more knee pain. That's basically what the people at that lake are doing. Yeah. Yeah, it's not the best analogy ever, but I'm all right with it. You got anything else?

No, up with algae. Up with algae. I like ones like this because we're basically just like, what about this? Oh yeah, what about this? What about that? Yeah, and we always have the rosiest colored glasses, which, you know, if that's our fault, I'll take it. Yeah, I'm with you, man. If you want to know more about algae, go swimming.

And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this flying by the seat of my pants and just pulling up an email. Oh, that's good stuff. This is on color blindness, though. It's a good one. And it has a picture of a cat, so. Hey guys, my dad has color blindness and it has led to a few embarrassing mishaps in his life. This past weekend, my brother got married.

Congratulations, Peter and Jackie, she says. Congrats. And all the men were supposed to wear blue suits. However, my dad couldn't tell the difference between the colors and he packed his black suit. I wonder why your dad didn't get in help at this point with something this big. Because dad doesn't care that much. I think you're right. And nor should he.

Not a huge deal, but he definitely stands out in the pictures. The story that cracks me up the most, though, is that I have an orange cat with matching amber eyes. My dad likes to say how he has the most beautiful green eyes. And I really want to ask if he thinks my cat looks like the Grinch. So I attached a picture of Raja. So you can see how his eyes match his fur. And that is one cute cat. Look at that.

Sure. A little fake mouse in his mouth. A little cutie. Nothing green about it? No. And she also finishes with, like you mentioned, my mom has always done the grilling. Because my dad says he can't tell when it's done or burning. So there's a mom around.

So mom, you should have, or maybe she knew about the suit color and just didn't want to embarrass her husband. I think so. Or just didn't really like the groom or the bride. I don't know. Somebody did not like somebody else in this wedding. I think is what happened here. Well, that cat doesn't like that fake mouse. I'll tell you that.

It's funny. The cat is like holding a fake mouse, but it looks like it's looking at a real mouse off camera. It's a good picture. It's got a cat condo and everything. And she finishes. Thanks for the relatable episode. That is from Andy. That's from Andy.

All right, Andy. Thanks a lot for that. We appreciate you writing in. Good luck with your family. Yes. And Peter and Jackie, once again. Congratulations. Way to go and get married.

Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us to let us know a hilarious family story, we love those. You can go to our website, www.stuffyoushouldknow.com, and find all the links to our social media accounts. You can find us there. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.