Research scientist B. Greg Mitchell blows a mean harmonica at the top of the La Jolla cliffs.
He’s swinging, fronting a band of musician buddies from Bird Rock, allowing the occasional talented marine biologist to sit in on drums and violin from time to time. It’s a full-blown, full moon grad student party, the surf crashing far below, with much talk of coral, satellite optics and Arctic expeditions.
Mitchell, 56, is a jack-of-all-disciplines who likes to keep the fun in science. His Pacific Blue Foundation sponsors the return of racing canoes in Fiji. He’s begun to use special underwater cameras to gauge the health of coral reefs, almost the way Google Street View catalogs the world above water. In his spare time, he’s been writing a musical theater extravaganza inspired by Irish politics.
But Mitchell, director of the Photobiology Group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is best-known as an algae pioneer, developing strains of “green crude,” or as some might say, “drop-in pond scum,” that may in the not-too-distant future power some of the ships in the Navy’s new green fleet, anchored off Point Loma.
What separates him from most other algae visionaries, however, is his belief that the way to green crude is through green food. As the feedstuff of the future, algae may well “fuel the pigs.”
We’ll have vegan porkers, chickens and salmon, all raised not on the ubiquitously destructive corn and fishmeal but on the basic green stuff. Carbon dioxide from natural gas power plants helps the algae to photosynthesize, the algae are fed to salmon in Chile and pigs in China, for instance, and the world kills three birds with one stone: food, fuel and remediation of one noxious byproduct — CO2 — coming from the new bridge fuel for America, natural gas.
New bridge fuel for America, natural gas, you ask?
Not coincidentally, perhaps, Greg’s father, George P. Mitchell, who turned 92 last month and is still very much a-rockin’ down in Houston, is an energy pioneer of a different sort. Known as the father of shale natural gas, George Mitchell developed a drilling technique called “light-sand fracking,” which has already changed the world energy equation, as The Wall Street Journal put it in a major tribute to the older Mitchell by oil analyst Daniel Yergin, author of “The Prize.”
“Recent innovations have given us the opportunity to tap large reserves — perhaps a century’s worth — in the shale under our feet,” President Barack Obama echoed in his own energy speech. America sits atop a rocky sea of shale (and other) gas estimated to be some 2,500 trillion cubic feet.
Greg signals the band for a break. He needs to shake some spit out of the harmonica.
“My father would go in with a scientific divining rod and find gas in places folks said none could be found, or none was left. But what most people don’t know, or don’t remember, or choose to forget,” he says in his staccato, loping, take-no-prisoners Texas-La Jollan accent, “is that he was also an early proponent of what is now referred to as ‘sustainability,’ ” and he helped fund the influential National Academy of Sciences report “Our Common Journey: A Transition to Sustainability.”
George Mitchell changed the world in ways America’s politicians, industrialists, and environmentalists are just beginning to wake up to, but he wants the world to listen up, too. The older Mitchell wants the country to get it right with “best practices,” because fracking is a controversial practice in which water, sand and chemicals are forced far beneath the ground to break loose the natural gas trapped in the interstices of shale rock.
“The fracturing of shale can all be done with ‘best practices,’ ” Greg explains. “That’s what my dad wants to do, to ensure the global commons — water, biodiversity, the air — are protected by applying state-of-the-art engineering prowess.”
Later, in a quieter setting down the hill in his lab inside Sverdrup Hall, Greg explains just what “best practices” means:
“You’ve got to protect the groundwater and recover the wastewater, and where possible reuse it in other wells. You don’t want methane (which is what natural gas mostly is) to leak, because molecule for molecule it’s some 20 times more warming than CO2. Then when natural gas is burned to make electricity, you’ve got to guard against leaks at the power plant. But done correctly, natural gas plants pollute far less than coal-fired plants.”
Greg is warming to the subject himself, because, best of all, the CO2 from natural gas plants can be used to grow algae. The little green guys suck up CO2 and — icing on the cake — release oxygen in the process.
Half the oxygen we breathe comes from algae now, mostly from phytoplankton in the oceans. Here, it’s helpful to know that the younger, harmonica-blowing Mitchell, when he ran SeaWIFS, (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor) NASA’s ocean satellite program, was the scientist who helped to create the first global satellite maps of algae distribution in the oceans. He is a founder of the national Algal Biomass Organization, as well as co-founder and associate director of the San Diego Center for Algal Biotechnology centered at UCSD. Naturally, he has a very sustainable idea of how to use a lot of that heretofore waste gas.
“What the world needs besides a natural gas bridge fuel to solar and wind and the rest is a new biomass paradigm,” insists Greg. “Because algae can be raised on nonarable land, using saltwater or wastewater, it is the one biofuel that won’t kite the price of food as, for instance, corn ethanol does.”
Now, like a lot of smart people, Greg sometimes speaks in leaps and bounds. What he means is that the scaled-up commercial use of algae may well help to solve the world’s coming food shortages.
He opens the door to an automated “green room,” a small wet lab full of algae beakers glowing and spinning under artificial lights, all hooked to automated feeders and computers.
“We’re at 7 billion people now, heading for 9. It was what, 3 billion in 1963 when Dad started seriously thinking of these things? In the future, the rest of the world will only need more food and more energy. If this vision is right, in 30 years we could have plenty of both. It will be the private sector that will drive the change, but let me say, few game-changing technologies have ever sprung up on their own, certainly not gas and oil. I’d like to see public and private commitment to the big experiments, the way my dad did 30 years ago. Let’s grab the bull by the horns. It’s time —” He pauses and stares at me.
I’m hoping he’ll say, “time to get frackin’, America — in an environmentally sustainable way.”
But he just grins, the way he did after that break at the jam session on the cliff, before he tapped the mike, and got back to blowing that harp.
Where smart meets money, to change the world, indeed.
He’s swinging, fronting a band of musician buddies from Bird Rock, allowing the occasional talented marine biologist to sit in on drums and violin from time to time. It’s a full-blown, full moon grad student party, the surf crashing far below, with much talk of coral, satellite optics and Arctic expeditions.
Mitchell, 56, is a jack-of-all-disciplines who likes to keep the fun in science. His Pacific Blue Foundation sponsors the return of racing canoes in Fiji. He’s begun to use special underwater cameras to gauge the health of coral reefs, almost the way Google Street View catalogs the world above water. In his spare time, he’s been writing a musical theater extravaganza inspired by Irish politics.
But Mitchell, director of the Photobiology Group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is best-known as an algae pioneer, developing strains of “green crude,” or as some might say, “drop-in pond scum,” that may in the not-too-distant future power some of the ships in the Navy’s new green fleet, anchored off Point Loma.
What separates him from most other algae visionaries, however, is his belief that the way to green crude is through green food. As the feedstuff of the future, algae may well “fuel the pigs.”
We’ll have vegan porkers, chickens and salmon, all raised not on the ubiquitously destructive corn and fishmeal but on the basic green stuff. Carbon dioxide from natural gas power plants helps the algae to photosynthesize, the algae are fed to salmon in Chile and pigs in China, for instance, and the world kills three birds with one stone: food, fuel and remediation of one noxious byproduct — CO2 — coming from the new bridge fuel for America, natural gas.
New bridge fuel for America, natural gas, you ask?
Not coincidentally, perhaps, Greg’s father, George P. Mitchell, who turned 92 last month and is still very much a-rockin’ down in Houston, is an energy pioneer of a different sort. Known as the father of shale natural gas, George Mitchell developed a drilling technique called “light-sand fracking,” which has already changed the world energy equation, as The Wall Street Journal put it in a major tribute to the older Mitchell by oil analyst Daniel Yergin, author of “The Prize.”
“Recent innovations have given us the opportunity to tap large reserves — perhaps a century’s worth — in the shale under our feet,” President Barack Obama echoed in his own energy speech. America sits atop a rocky sea of shale (and other) gas estimated to be some 2,500 trillion cubic feet.
Greg signals the band for a break. He needs to shake some spit out of the harmonica.
“My father would go in with a scientific divining rod and find gas in places folks said none could be found, or none was left. But what most people don’t know, or don’t remember, or choose to forget,” he says in his staccato, loping, take-no-prisoners Texas-La Jollan accent, “is that he was also an early proponent of what is now referred to as ‘sustainability,’ ” and he helped fund the influential National Academy of Sciences report “Our Common Journey: A Transition to Sustainability.”
George Mitchell changed the world in ways America’s politicians, industrialists, and environmentalists are just beginning to wake up to, but he wants the world to listen up, too. The older Mitchell wants the country to get it right with “best practices,” because fracking is a controversial practice in which water, sand and chemicals are forced far beneath the ground to break loose the natural gas trapped in the interstices of shale rock.
“The fracturing of shale can all be done with ‘best practices,’ ” Greg explains. “That’s what my dad wants to do, to ensure the global commons — water, biodiversity, the air — are protected by applying state-of-the-art engineering prowess.”
Later, in a quieter setting down the hill in his lab inside Sverdrup Hall, Greg explains just what “best practices” means:
“You’ve got to protect the groundwater and recover the wastewater, and where possible reuse it in other wells. You don’t want methane (which is what natural gas mostly is) to leak, because molecule for molecule it’s some 20 times more warming than CO2. Then when natural gas is burned to make electricity, you’ve got to guard against leaks at the power plant. But done correctly, natural gas plants pollute far less than coal-fired plants.”
Greg is warming to the subject himself, because, best of all, the CO2 from natural gas plants can be used to grow algae. The little green guys suck up CO2 and — icing on the cake — release oxygen in the process.
Half the oxygen we breathe comes from algae now, mostly from phytoplankton in the oceans. Here, it’s helpful to know that the younger, harmonica-blowing Mitchell, when he ran SeaWIFS, (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor) NASA’s ocean satellite program, was the scientist who helped to create the first global satellite maps of algae distribution in the oceans. He is a founder of the national Algal Biomass Organization, as well as co-founder and associate director of the San Diego Center for Algal Biotechnology centered at UCSD. Naturally, he has a very sustainable idea of how to use a lot of that heretofore waste gas.
“What the world needs besides a natural gas bridge fuel to solar and wind and the rest is a new biomass paradigm,” insists Greg. “Because algae can be raised on nonarable land, using saltwater or wastewater, it is the one biofuel that won’t kite the price of food as, for instance, corn ethanol does.”
Now, like a lot of smart people, Greg sometimes speaks in leaps and bounds. What he means is that the scaled-up commercial use of algae may well help to solve the world’s coming food shortages.
He opens the door to an automated “green room,” a small wet lab full of algae beakers glowing and spinning under artificial lights, all hooked to automated feeders and computers.
“We’re at 7 billion people now, heading for 9. It was what, 3 billion in 1963 when Dad started seriously thinking of these things? In the future, the rest of the world will only need more food and more energy. If this vision is right, in 30 years we could have plenty of both. It will be the private sector that will drive the change, but let me say, few game-changing technologies have ever sprung up on their own, certainly not gas and oil. I’d like to see public and private commitment to the big experiments, the way my dad did 30 years ago. Let’s grab the bull by the horns. It’s time —” He pauses and stares at me.
I’m hoping he’ll say, “time to get frackin’, America — in an environmentally sustainable way.”
But he just grins, the way he did after that break at the jam session on the cliff, before he tapped the mike, and got back to blowing that harp.
Where smart meets money, to change the world, indeed.
