This is a great paper, work undertaken by Hannah Leflay at CBE and led by Dr. Sol Brown and his magical mathematical brain. Some significant take home points are here:
1. Directly measure CO2 uptake if you are investigating carbon capture- seems kind of obvious right? Funnily enough the World of algae doesn't buy it a lot of time. Here, a nondispersive infrared sensor showed 17.5% CO2 removal over 2 weeks. Thats a lot more than many studies where the numbers are inferred.
2. Ok, so its more efficient than we thought, but we need more. Yes, find a strain that can capture more CO2, whether it is bioprospecting or cell engineering, we need to find more efficient strains to make the process more viable
3. Photobioreactors simply cost too much for this sort of application. Surely there are cheaper options? Are we over-thinking (engineering) PBR's?
4. Our governments need to step in with better incentives. How many more reports are needed to convince the people in control that a global crisis is on its way unless we take immediate action? Perhaps we need to put it in a more "directly measurable" way - we are going to lose A LOT OF MONEY VERY SOON.
Hope you enjoy the read
Results for the techno-economic analysis carried out under different financial and operational scenarios. The bars represent the cost breakdown for each scenario (left y-axis). The black points in each bar represent where the cost of capture (CoC) lies for each scenario (right y-axis).