It looks like Mother Nature was wasting her time with a multimillion-year process to produce crude oil. Michigan Engineering researchers can “pressure-cook” algae for as little as a minute and transform an unprecedented 65 percent of the green slime into biocrude.

“We’re trying to mimic the process in nature that forms crude oil with marine organisms,” says Phil Savage, an Arthur F. Thurnau professor and a professor of chemical engineering.

Savage’s ocean-going organism of choice is the green marine micro-alga of the genus Nannochloropsis.

To make their one-minute biocrude, Savage and Julia Faeth, a doctoral student in Savage’s lab, filled a steel pipe connector with 1.5 milliliters of wet algae, capped it, and plunged it into 1,100-degree Fahrenheit sand. The small volume ensured the algae was heated through, but with only a minute to warm up, the algae’s temperature should have just grazed the 550-degree mark before the team pulled the reactor back out.

Previously, Savage and his team heated the algae for times ranging from 10 to 90 minutes. They saw their best results, with about half of the algae converted to biocrude, after treating it for 10 to 40 minutes at 570 degrees.

Why are the one-minute results so much better? Savage and Faeth won’t be sure until they have done more experiments, but they have some ideas.

“My guess is the reactions that produce biocrude are actually much faster than previously thought,” Savage says.

Faeth suggests the fast heating might boost the biocrude by keeping unwanted reactions at bay.

“For example, the biocrude might decompose into substances that dissolve in water, and the fast heating rates might discourage that reaction,” Faeth says.

The team points out shorter reaction times mean the reactors don’t have to be as large.

“By reducing the reactor volume, the cost of building a biocrude production plant also decreases,” Faeth says, though both she and Savage caution they couldn’t say for sure whether the new method is faster and cheaper until the process is further developed.

Current commercial makers of algae-based fuel first dry the algae and then extract the natural oil. But at over $20 per gallon, this type of fuel is a long way from the gas pump.

“Companies know that approach is not economical, so they are looking at approaches for using wet algae, as are we,” Savage says.

One of the advantages of the wet method is it doesn’t just extract the existing fat from the algae—it also breaks down proteins and carbohydrates. The minute method did this so successfully that the oil contained about 90 percent of the energy in the original algae.

“That result is near the upper bound of what is possible,” Savage says.

Before biocrude can be fed into the existing refinery system for petroleum, it needs pre-refining to get rid of the extra oxygen and nitrogen atoms that abound in living things. The Savage lab also is developing better methods for this leg of biofuel production, breaking the record with a biocrude that was 97 percent carbon and hydrogen earlier this year. A paper on this work is currently under review.

Once producing biofuel from algae is economical, researchers estimate an area the size of New Mexico could provide enough oil to match current U.S. petroleum consumption. And, unlike corn produced for ethanol—which already accounts for half that area—the algae won’t need to occupy good farmland, thriving in brackish ponds instead.

The research, “The Effects of Heating Rate and Reaction Time on Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Microalgae,” was funded by the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program of the National Science Foundation. The University is pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.