Dr James Morris, Physicist
Dr James Morris, Physicist
Following in the footsteps of Dartmouth’s Thomas Newcomen - whose steam engine spearheaded the industrial revolution - a Blackawton physicist is at the forefront of the race for a viable alternative to oil.
Dr James Morris, of Enlightened Designs Ltd, is building a mobile unit to demonstrate his resource efficient solution to the world’s fuel crisis – growing and harvesting algae to turn it into biofuel.
James, who has a PhD in Laser Physics, is very passionate about this project. A self-confessed “greenie” he clearly sees the solution to the oil crisis as a switch to algae biofuel. The Technology Strategy Board – the UK’s national innovation agency – has recently awarded his company £25,000 to make a triangular portable demonstration unit, complete with control and experimental systems.
At the moment the trailer is at Barr and Paatz mechatronics engineering firm in Totnes, who are making the control panels to go inside the unit. Once completed, the unit will spend three months being tested at the Plymouth Marine Labs, following which the project will be up scaled for the commercial market. After successful testing it is hoped the panels will be made for fuel companies such as Shell and BP.
James is very much at the cutting-edge of “green” technology. He advised the Dartmouth indoor pool committee on water and heat conservation issues about how to use fewer resources and therefore reduce money and environmental costs. He has also spoken to Sainsbury’s Sustainability Team about their greener supermarket in Dartmouth, whose features include wind turbines, LED freezer lighting and rainwater harvesting.
James grew up in Moreleigh and went to KEVICC in Totnes before going to university in Essex. After a masters at Herriot Watt, Edinburgh, he did his PhD at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He moved back to the South Hams in 1995 and now lives in Blackawton with his wife and two children. He also plays in the Blackawton Fat Dads’ five-a-side football team!
Recently he worked as Iris Energy and looked at wood automated systems fuel, and solar kilns to dry out wood for resource efficiency. The difficulty of using wood fuel for engines encouraged James to look at algae as the way forward.
He said: “I started thrashing ideas around about three years ago and then spoke to Exeter University bio sciences department, who have money to look at biofuels.
“Up to now biologists have been in charge of this process but we need to apply the principles of physics theory as well, particularly the interaction of light and matter which I researched for my doctorate.”
The closed panels to be attached to James’s unit are designed to constantly circulate algae, which then double in size every four hours. The doubled half of the algae is then harvested, filtered and turned into biofuel, which is then blended with traditional oil and diesel.
James said that currently around five per cent of all fuel at petrol pumps is biofuel, blended with 95 per cent regular petrol and diesel. The EU has a target to increase the biofuel mix to10 per cent by 2020.
James said: “I firmly believe sustainable biofuels are the answer. Money is being pumped into Brazilian sugar ethanol projects, as there is proven technology there and markets for it. Big companies are buying up agricultural land to farm biofuels. Environmentally this is a disaster as these crops need intensive farming and fertiliser and should be used as food. Even worse is the use of palm oil for bio diesel, which is creating further Brazilian rainforest deforestation to turn land into palm oil plantations.
“The US uses three times as much water and oil energy as Europe and is desperate to get biofuels working. The first generation of biofuels have been under huge debate as they have focussed on using food crops and agricultural land, such as sugar, maize and soya – even resulting in food riots in South America.
“From a moral standpoint it is totally inappropriate to grow biofuels on agricultural land. There are huge saline aquifers in the desert now from intensive agriculture and the attempt to green the desert near the Arral Sea in Russia has been a complete disaster.
“Algae for biofuel can avoid these issues. It can be grown on marginal land such as steep valleys, swamps and deserts and is much less intensive and cheaper to manufacture. And, more importantly from a humanitarian point of view, doesn’t interfere with food crops and prices. It’s production, however, is still non commercial and on an unproven scale.”
James said that most algae trials have concentrated on growing algae in open pond systems. However, the algae evaporate quickly outdoors and get eaten by wildlife that also brings in spores of zooplankton, which ravishes the algae further. A closed system, such as the one that James is developing, keeps out wildlife and limits the evaporation rates.
There are many trials happening now around the world, including a huge Seambiotic algae pond in Israel and, closer to home; Exeter University is experimenting with an Algae PBR (photobioreactor).
Oil giant Exxon has given J Craig Venter – the biologist famous for the human genome project – a $500 million grant to create a “super algae”.
The race is on to both maximise algae growth and minimise cost per square metre to make algae an economically viable resource, and James’s invention is most definitely in the running.
First Published September 2011 By The Dart