About This Project

We propose a 1-year research effort to develop an automatable cellular agriculture platform for cultivating and harvesting high-productivity phototrophs for conversion into downstream products. By integrating dynamic sensing, automated control, and energy-efficient harvesting, this system will sustain peak biomass productivity while reducing costs. This project de-risks key engineering challenges, enabling economically viable carbon removal and biomanufacturing.

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Motivating Factor

Atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is essential to supplement decarbonization and emissions prevention in mitigating climate change. Culturing and sequestering aquatic phototroph (e.g., algae and cyanobacteria) biomass has been proposed as a partial solution for CDR needs due to observed CO2 capture rates up to 10-50x greater than to terrestrial plants [Batistaet, 2015] and phototrophs role in natural CO2 cycling (capturing of ~50% of global CO2 despite representing only 1% of global biomass. [In-na, 2022]). However, cost-effectively and scalably maintaining the optimal conditions needed for high phototroph biomass productivity remains elusive for both open raceway ponds and enclosed photobioreactors (PBRs).

Specific Bottleneck

One promising path to economically-viable CDR is the production of valuable co-products, which for phototroph-based CDR consists of biological, engineering, and material science factors. While recent introduction of high productivity organisms like UTEX 3222 [Schubert, 2024], have lessened biological constraints, engineering challenges in maintaining conditions for optimal growth/harvesting and materials science challenges for co-product possibilities remain bottlenecks. To achieve the potential of phototroph-based biological CDR, progress is now needed to realize and sustain the theoretical biological productivity in laboratory, pilot, and industrial settings through engineering advances and to enable the rational design and manufacturing of co-products.

Actionable Goals

To advance the use of high-productivity phototrophs for CDR and co-product generation, key engineering and materials advancements are required. A successful solution must:

- Sustain rapid growth by dynamically sensing and automatically controlling key parameters to prevent growth limitations from self-shading or resource depletion. This is particularly important and challenging for organisms with short doubling times. Parameters should be continuously variable but tailorable to natural organism properties and downstream products.

- Enable downstream creation of diverse co-products to enhance economic viability and thus maximize carbon sequestration potential.

Solving these engineering and materials bottlenecks should lay the foundation for cost-effective, scalable CDR and co-product operations.