World's first biologically-activated aerosols: for carbon capture without the need for storage

我们雄心勃勃的目标是用能够从工业中捕获二氧化碳的光合藻类制造“生物激活”的气溶胶。炼钢对每个人的生活都至关重要，从我们吃的食物容器到我们驾驶的汽车，再到我们居住的建筑。为了维持我们的现代生活方式，每年要生产超过18亿吨的钢铁：我们的生活离不开炼钢，但它产生的二氧化碳可以说是炼钢所产生的二氧化碳的两倍（每吨钢铁大约产生2吨二氧化碳）。每台高炉的碳足迹相当于35万人的碳足迹，全球约有900台高炉。炼钢被认为消耗了全球8%的能源。这些事实使炼钢成为造成气候变化的主要因素。在英国炼钢行业中，有一个新兴的战略是利用生物工程率先捕获二氧化碳，我们在塔尔伯特港的合作厂里进行了小规模的试点。虽然生物二氧化碳固定提供了捕获碳和生产生物质资源的潜在解决方案，但相关的效率和成本目前令人望而却步。例如，如果扩大规模，目前基于藻类的二氧化碳捕获技术将需要多个足球场大小的水箱才能对典型高炉的二氧化碳排放产生重大影响。因此，需要一种全新的管理生物碳固定的方法。我们知道，有三个不同的基本方面为我们提出的解决办法提供了灵感。首先，最近的一项研究利用经验证据和模型将巨型藻华的产生与澳大利亚海岸野火事件产生的7.15亿吨二氧化碳联系起来。这意味着，在自然环境中大规模捕获二氧化碳是可能的。其次，我们知道生物气溶胶存在于自然界中，细菌可以在其中长距离传播——尽管这项工作主要是为了研究病原体的传播。有研究表明，呼吸系统疾病可能与海洋和湖泊中蓝藻繁殖的毒素有关。这就提供了一个与塔尔伯特港目前在钢铁制造过程中使用的粉尘捕获技术的联系：气溶胶。我们提议重新利用我们价值50万英镑的“Optomec AJ300”印刷电子机器，并使用其墨水室将微藻“雾化”成气溶胶。这些腔室成为我们研究气溶胶藻类和气体之间相互作用的实验室。这些腔室具有用于高光谱成像和气体传感的光学通道。由机器提供的印刷将允许气溶胶的有效回收，将它们“印刷”到玻璃载玻片或我们想要的任何其他基板上，以供进一步研究。这项工作是非常高风险的，因为我们不知道使微藻能够在雾化过程中存活的参数，使用什么菌株，它们能够固定二氧化碳的时间等。然而，如果成功，潜在的回报是很高的，因为“生物活性”气溶胶可以用于捕获二氧化碳以外的其他气体，挥发性有机化合物甚至战争剂。

Our ambitious aim is to make aerosols that are "biologically activated" with photosynthetic algae that can capture CO2 from industry. Steelmaking is critical to everyone's lives in everything from the containers for food we eat to the cars we drive and the buildings in which we live. Over 1.8 bn tonnes of steel are produced annually to maintain our modern lifestyles: we cannot live without steelmaking, yet it is arguably twice as much about making CO2 as it is about making steel (approximately 2 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel). Each Blast Furnace has the same carbon footprint of around 350,000 people and there are some 900 furnaces globally. Steelmaking is thought to consume 8% of the world's energy. These facts make steelmaking a major contributor to climate change. There is a nascent strategy within UK steelmaking to pioneer the capture of their CO2 using biological engineering, with small-scale pilots taking place at our collaborator's site in Port Talbot.Although biological CO2 fixation provides a potential solution to capture carbon as well as produce a biomass resource, the associated efficiencies and costs are currently prohibitive. For example, if scaled up, current algal-based CO2-capture technology would require multiple football pitch size tanks to have a significant impact upon CO2 emission from a typical Blast Furnace. Hence, a completely new way of administering biological carbon fixation is required. We are aware of three separate fundamental aspects that have provided inspiration for our proposed solution. Firstly, a very recent study used empirical evidence and modelling to link the generation of a mega-algal bloom to 715 million tonnes of CO2 produced during a wildfire event off the coast of Australia. This means, CO2 capture at high scales is possible in the natural environment. Secondly, we know that bio-aerosols exist in nature, where bacteria can be transported over long distances- although this work has been undertaken largely to look at pathogen transport. There has been work to show that respiratory illnesses might be linked to toxins from cyanobacteria blooms for oceans and lakes. This then provides a link to the current dust capture technology used at Port Talbot during steel manufacturing: aerosols. We propose to repurpose our "Optomec AJ300" £0.5 M printed electronics machine and use its ink chambers to "atomise" microalgae into aerosols. These chambers become laboratories for our studies of the interaction between aerosol algae and gasses. The chambers have optical access for hyperspectral imaging and gas sensing. The printing afforded by the machine will allow efficient recovery of the aerosols "printing" them onto glass slides or any other substrate we desire, for further study. The work proposed is very high risk, as we do not know the parameters that would enable microalgae to survive the aerosolization process, what strains to use, how long they would be able to fix CO2 etc. However, if successful, the potential reward is high- as "biologically activated" aerosols could be used beyond CO2 capture, targeting others gases, volatile organic compounds and even warfare agents.