Norway’s StatoilHydro (NYSE: STO), the largest offshore energy company in the world, is fighting the bad public relations besieging its sector peer BP (NYSE: BP) with $3 million in funding for algae-based biofuel research in the U.S.

The College of William and Mary is the oldest American institution of higher learning besides Harvard, and its environs in Williamsburg, Virginia are as important to U.S. history as any spot in the former British colonies.

Right next to the William and Mary campus sits Lake Matoaka, part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed less than five miles from Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in what became the United States. Despite tourism and shipbuilding-related economic activity and the palpable sense of history throughout the region, Lake Matoaka has become polluted in recent years with agricultural and industrial runoff that threatens plant and animal life.

Specifically, high levels of nitrogen and phosphorous are causing the runaway growth of algae on the lake’s surface. When massive algae blooms die, they sink and leech oxygen from the water. The result is high numbers of fish and reptile deaths that university officials say puts the lake “a day or two away from a fish kill.”

To avoid the ghastly scene of all Matoaka’s wildlife someday floating on the lake’s surface, W&M physicist Karl Kuschner is using $80,000 of grant money administered through StatoilHydro’s Chesapeake Algae Project to build a flume.

That flume–an artificial water channel–was floated out onto Lake Matoaka in early July to begin collecting nitrogen and phosphorous and other nutrients. That way, those normally beneficial fertilizer components can foster algae growth on the flume instead of on the water.

Kuschner tells the Hampton, VA area Daily Press that 6-8 gallons of dry algae can be gathered from the flume every two weeks.

While that amount isn’t enough to drive an algae-based biodiesel revolution in the former British colonies, William and Mary researchers can join other local colleges like Old Dominion and the Virginia Commonwealth in looking for ways to optimize the algae-to-fuel conversion process.

StatoilHydro is hoping that its grant money pays off in technological advances and in preventing more “dead zones” in Lake Matoaka where algae hurts rather than helps.

The website for ChAP, the Chesapeake Algae Project, points out that the regional initiative will not limit itself to one or a couple of high-yield algae strains but instead will work with blooms that grow naturally in the area.

That approach should bring down startup costs and give a more realistic picture of how polluted local ponds and lakes can be turned into biofuel feedstock with little more than a collector and a conversion station.

-Chris Hunter

What can actor Kevin Costner do for the oil-soaked Gulf Coast? Last week, the movie star told Congress that Ocean Therapy Solutions, a company he got started with the purchase of a Department of Energy-developed centrifuge technology in 1993, has a device that can separate oil from water in a safe, clean and effective manner. Costner, who probably had to contend with a few fuel spills during the filming of his massively overbudget sci-fi epic Waterworld, told the House Committee on Science and Technology that the invention he’s backed to the tune of $24 million can clean up to “99.9 percent purity� water that is thick and sludgy with spilled oil.

The largest device, the V20 centrifuge, can clean up about 200 gallons of liquid per minute, or about 288,000 gallons per day, and BP is reported to have ordered 32 of them so far. Once they’re built and in the water, that could have a capacity to clean 9.2 million gallons per day.

But can a few dozen centrifuge filters, no matter how big, make a dent in the worst oil spill in American history? It’s hard to say, but the sheer scale of the disaster would suggest that BP, the Coast Guard and everyone else involved could use all the help they can get. According to latest estimates, the ruptured deep sea well is spewing between 20,000 and 40,000 barrels of oil per day, or up to 2 million gallons per day. That oil, in turn, is both rising to the surface in massive slicks that now threaten the Gulf Coast and spreading out in hard-to-track underwater plumes.

And that’s just the oil coming out of the ruptured well. How much oil-laden seawater does that add up to? It’s difficult to say, but according to a Monday post at the White House blog covering the spill, the recovery operation has captured about 19.9 million gallons of an oil-water mix so far. That’s no doubt a fraction of the total amount, and it’s taken the efforts of more than 5,400 seagoing vessels and some 5.4 million feet of containment and absorbent booms — as well as the use of about 1.26 million gallons of dispersant chemicals — to break up the oil before it reaches shore. The dispersant also has a potential environmental cost that could match the impact of the oil itself, experts warn.

The Washington Post reported Monday that BP’s latest plan calls for capturing 1.2 million gallons of oil a day by the end of the week, up from a current capacity of 756,000 gallons a day, and has plans to capture 2.1 million gallons per day by the end of the month. BP has also said it will continue using dispersants, despite concerns as to their potential harm to the gulf’s wildlife and ecosystem. Costner, who made a point in his testimony before the House committee that one of his main goals was to reduce the use of dispersants, said that if the V20 had been around for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, about 20 of the devices could have cleaned up about 90 percent of the spill within a week.

But so far, Costner hasn’t had gotten regulators to approve the device, despite some 45 attempts to do so, he told the House committee. “In order to receive approval, technologies must be tested on actual spills, but the agencies charged with approval will not deploy untested equipment in a spill scenario,� he said in his prepared testimony. “We were dealing with a classic and very unfortunate example of a Catch 22.� Perhaps the unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could give the technology a chance to prove its claims.

For more research check on the oil spill check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Social Media Works, Just Not For BP

Images courtesy of marinephotobank’s photo stream, Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com ‘s photostream, and Ocean Therapy Technologies.

For NASA’s Spirit rover, the days of roaming the Red Planet may now be in the past, but the observations the wheeled bot made in its travels are still paying scientific dividends. A new analysis of geologic data gathered by the rover nearly five years ago finds that a rock outcrop on Mars is rich in carbonates, which are minerals that form readily in watery, carbon-rich environments. According to the study, the finding lends more credence to the hypothesis that Mars may have once had a wetter, warmer climate thanks to a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. What is more, the aqueous processes implicated in the carbonate formation point to a neutral environment more hospitable to life than the acidic waters thought to have existed elsewhere on Mars . [More]















Mars – NASA – Red Planet – Spirit rover – Water

A bird from the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar called the Alaotra grebe ( Tachybaptus rufolavatus ) has been declared extinct by conservation group BirdLife International. BirdLife contributed to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species with a major update on the world’s bird species, which was released on Wednesday.

The grebe, previously found only on Lake Alaotra in eastern Madagascar, was driven to extinction in part by the introduction of snakehead murrel, a carnivorous fish, to the area. Fishermen’s modern nylon gillnets, which caught and drowned the birds, also contributed to their demise. The bird was incapable of long flights, so it had a limited range and was vulnerable to attack.

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Madagascar – Bird – Lake Alaotra – Indian Ocean – BirdLife International

Traces of chemicals known to cause human cancer lurk everywhere. But after decades of research, figuring out how many people might contract cancer because of them remains an elusive goal.

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Cancer – Health – Conditions and Diseases – Research – Human

Traces of chemicals known to cause human cancer lurk everywhere. But after decades of research, figuring out how many people might contract cancer because of them remains an elusive goal.

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Cancer – Health – Conditions and Diseases – Research – Human

Two years ago, the world’s smallest water lily, a plant known as Nymphaea thermarum whose pads reach only one centimeter in diameter, disappeared from its only habitat, a few square meters near a hot spring in Mashyuza, Rwanda. Local agriculture had drained the spring of most of its water, and as a result, the water lily became extinct in the wild.

Luckily, a few samples had been collected 10 years earlier by the man who discovered the species in 1985, botanist Eberhard Fischer of Koblenz-Landau University in Germany. But unfortunately, the tiny plant proved almost impossible to propagate.

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In his 1776 work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith identified the cause in a single variable: “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Today we call this free trade or market capitalism, and since the recession it has become de rigueur to dis the system as corrupt, rotten or deeply flawed.

If we pull back and take a long-horizon perspective, however, the free exchange between people of goods, services and especially ideas leads to trust between strangers and prosperity for more people. Think of it as ideas having sex. That is what zoologist and science writer Matt Ridley calls it in his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010). Ridley is optimistic that “the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialize honestly for the betterment of all.”

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An obscure family of chemicals – important to the metalworking industry but virtually unknown to the public – is suddenly the subject of scrutiny from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: Oceans are in big trouble and I understand President Obama is creating a high-level ocean council to address them. What are the major issues? –Steve Sullivan, Bothell, Wash.

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