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Turning pond scum into oil isn’t easy, but as a hypothetical energy system, it’s elegant. The theory is that algae will produce more burnable fuel on less land than regular crops, perhaps something like a thousand gallons of oil per acre instead of a few dozen from conventional plants.

The food-versus-fuel debates that plague biofuels like corn-based ethanol would disappear. As about a third of U.S. corn production is now transformed into ethanol for blending with traditional gasoline,10 that’s a large enough percentage that critics have questioned the use of a food crop for energy production. One UN official called turning food crops into fuel “a crime against humanity” in 2007. Others have attacked corn-based ethanol as requiring too much fossil-fuel energy to actually make any sense as a replacement for transportation fuels.11

Conversely, algae could be cultivated on nonarable lands with briny water unsuitable for agriculture, using the carbon dioxide emitted from power plants as a food source. Oil produced with algae would neatly sidestep the problems that ethanol and other biofuels have run into.12 Some energy researchers had long supported the development of mass algae culturing, particularly of the species chlorella pyrenoidosa.

Vannevar Bush, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s science adviser and a key character in another chapter of this book, lent his full-throated support to the chlorella research from his perch atop the Carnegie Institution in the years following World War II. The organization, particularly scientist Herman Spoehr, played a key role in funding researchers and promoting algae as a human food, energy, or medicine source.13 One study fed “plankton soup” flavored with a little salt to lepers in Venezuela who, the researchers reported in 1953, “drank it willingly. The taste, which was not unpleasant, varied with the species complex.”14 The Arthur D. Little Company’s Flavor Panel, a group of American food testers, had a less pleasant experience. “The thawed, undried material alone showed vegetable-like flavor and aroma and was rated as ‘foodlike and food satisfying’ but with some of the ‘notes’ unpleasantly strong,” wrote one of Little’s consultants. “There was, however, a noticeable tightening at the back of the throat (‘gag factor’) and a lingering, mildly unpleasant aftertaste.”15 Further studies considered using algae as food, but perhaps with a little less verve than before. Eating algae became one of those things people might have to do in the sci-fi future, when the population of earth is so large that “a new source of foods or feeds is mandatory regardless of cost.”16 Still, the Carnegie-supported work had laid out some of the basic groundwork of what a system might look like for growing algae in large quantities.

Meanwhile, phycologists discovered that when they restrict algae’s nutrients, some start cranking out far more oil than normal. Unfortunately, they also stop growing.17 If the scientists could keep the algae multiplying and pull the “lipid trigger” anyway, they’d be in fat city. But their understanding of the biology was incomplete, and the task wasn’t easy. Algal genomics were but a twinkle in the scientific eye. It would take some time and effort to know if and when the process would become cheap enough to compete with crude.

Another challenge was getting the algae to keep growing without injecting a lot of energy into the system. The government scientists installed large open ponds near Roswell, New Mexico, and began trying to produce tiny algae at oil tanker scales. It worked, but there were engineering problems. In retrospect, Roswell was less than ideal; it was just too cold.18 Even under ideal conditions, though, the operation would have needed time to get all the bugs ironed out. Then the researchers could have begun to assess the real costs of growing algae.

But the program did not get that time (or money). By the time Bill Clinton took office, its funding had dwindled to a trickle, and in 1996 the