Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [70]
Finding and growing the best algal strains for producing fuel out of carbon dioxide and sunlight was the essence of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Aquatic Species Program. For nearly twenty years, in search of the few strains out of the millions on earth that might work the way humans wanted them to, the lab built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms. Phycologists like Johansen who study algae fanned out across the country looking in thousands of highway ditches, Southern estuaries, Hawaiian rivers, and everywhere in between. The best performers, though, came out of the tough neighborhoods of the playa lakes, where being able to produce fat may have helped save them from dying of desiccation. One of the very best species at converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into fatty fuel came out of a lake twelve feet across.3
The program was a bioprospecting effort like no other in our nation’s history. Despite meager funding, the Aquatic Species Program, initiated under President Jimmy Carter, laid the scientific foundation for making diesel-like fuel from the fat that microscopic algae accumulate in their cells.4
Three thousand species were eventually isolated and cultivated. Now, nearly all of them are gone. Less than half of the fifty-one varieties that were carefully characterized as potential high-value strains remain in labs for study.5 “Just when they started to succeed is when the plug got pulled,” said Johansen, now a professor at John Carroll University. “We were growing them in ponds and we were going to grow enough to have them made into a diesel fuel.”6
The program was part of the large investment that the Carter administration made into alternative energy in the late 1970s. Between 1977 and 1981 energy research and development accounted for more than 10 percent of the federal government’s total R&D budget. Almost 25 percent of all the money the government spent on energy research between 1961 and 2008 was doled out between 1974 and 1980. In the overall context of the federal budget, defense spending, or even other government R&D, these investments, which peaked at $7.5 billion in 1980, are a pittance. But they provided energy researchers of all kinds a tremendous boost. The very idea that the United States should have a diverse energy portfolio was born during the era and provided a framework for investing in alternative energy sources outside nuclear energy and fossil fuels. Although it is certain that there was some waste involved in the Department of Energy’s duct-tape and bailing-wire funding mechanisms, the R&D push made all kinds of progress on the energy problems that remain with us today.7
But when Ronald Reagan came into power in 1981, energy R&D funds dried up like a playa lake, leaving experts to find other work. As a result, knowledge seeped out of the nation’s energy innovation ecosystem. The serious whiplash caused by the Carter-Reagan transition highlights the problems created by inconsistent funding for energy research. Even when money does flow into the coffers of energy researchers, those researchers worry. Most recently, President Obama has trumpeted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus package, as the largest increase in scientific research funding in history.8 Scientists roundly applauded the billions of dollars that went into energy research, development, and deployment. But what about when the stimulus money runs out in 2011? “We’re going to have to see what happens after these next two years, because what we need is not a drop, but a further increase in R&D commensurate with the task at hand,” said Ernie Moniz, head of MIT’s Energy Initiative at a Google-hosted panel on energy in late 2009.9 The task at hand is transforming the American energy system, and Moniz