From Jalopnik - "It was when the oil light came on that I started to run through the appropriate next steps in my head...and realized that there aren't any appropriate next steps when warning lights start going off in a 1982 VW Vanagon camper. Particularly one converted to run on a mixture of vegetable oil and algae biodiesel grown and refined by a group of Chicago high school students. As the Sears Tower, our goal, loomed in the distance, a question loomed in my mind: Was our shared belief in the future of petroleum alternatives and, more importantly, in the fuel processing abilities of public school students and their teachers, strong enough to convince us to push further into the knot of congestion forming around the city?
The Idea
David Levine, a second-year teacher placed in Chicago through the Teach For America program, faced a common problem: how to get students to take the same interest in their studies as in Grand Theft Auto IV. His school, the Al Raby School for Community and Environment, serves populations from the predominately African American neighborhoods on Chicago's West Side, a place where the median income is more than 40% lower than the city as a whole. How could he motivate his students to invest their time and interest in the scientific process?
Levine settled on one of the biggest issues facing this generation of students: the impact, both environmental and political, of our dependence on foreign sources of fuel. According to the UN Human Development Reports, the US emits 21% of the world's carbon dioxide despite having only 4.6% of the world's population. We're currently engaged in our second war in the oil-rich Middle East. Using these issues as a starting point, Levine sought a project that would address the problems while at the same time providing an educational and compelling experience for his students. Thus the Algae Biodiesel Van was born.
The goal was to create enough biodiesel from algae, grown and processed in the classroom, to power a vehicle from the school to Chicago's Sears Tower and back, an approximately 20-mile round trip. Because algae sucks carbon out of the atmosphere, it is relatively carbon neutral to produce and, unlike corn or soybeans, isn't a food crop. But how do you turn single-celled plants into viable fuel within the confines of a classroom?
You can't miss the algae-processing unit that occupies the corner of Levine's science classroom. Giant bags filled with a specific strain of fuel-producing algae are stacked on top of one another, connected by a series of tubes that pump the bright green organic slime around a stack of fluorescent lamps to encourage photosynthesis. This would actually make a great lighting fixture for a trendy LA sushi place.
Students have been working with Levine to cultivate the algae in their classroom and refine it down to fuel. Almost all the work was done on-site, though at one point the solution had to be taken to a centrifuge at the University of Illinois Chicago for final separation, an event which afforded students a chance to see a fully operational lab.
After spending a large portion of their junior year working through the process, the students were able to create what they hoped was enough fuel to power a vehicle the full distance: one gallon. Right before the trip one of the students showed off their beaker of algaediesel, which I can attest smells much better than petrodiesel. Though that's not saying much.
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