The algae revolution

Professor Greg Skilbeck: Welcome to UTS Science in Focus, The Algal Revolution, with Peter Ralph and Janice McCauley presenting tonight. Without further ado, let me get on to introducing the first speaker. Professor Peter Ralph is a professor of marine biology and he is the Executive Director of the Climate Change Cluster – C3 – in the Faculty of Science at UTS. Within C3, Peter leads two research programs: one on algal biosystems and biotechnology and the other one on seagrass health. Peter is very definitely a thought leader in the area of sustainability, but more than that, he’s also an implementer. He makes things happen. And on that line, he’s also founder of Deep Green Biotech Hub, which actually brings together researchers, small-to-medium enterprises, industry start-ups, students and other stakeholders as they work to bring New South Wales to the forefront of algal-based biotechnology and innovation in Australia. Currently, Peter is conducting his own research in the area of bio-optics and photosynthesis in order to develop new sensors, diagnostics and cultivation systems in order to further develop the algal biotechnology sector, as well as mitigating the impact of dredging on seagrasses. So please join with me in welcoming Professor Peter Ralph to the stage.

[Applause]

Peter Ralph: Thank you Greg, and thank you all very much for coming this evening. It’s really a great pleasure to be here, part of the National Science Week, and an awesome audience for engaging you in some exciting science. It’s always interesting not knowing quite what the person who’s going to introduce you is going to talk about. Sometimes they steal your thunder. I had a presentation a couple of weeks ago and Attila did a similar thing where a few of my first lines were stolen, so as Greg – as a long-term colleague, part of that is I want to describe, I suppose, what he said the beginning 20 years of my career has been about. It has been about understanding climate change and the impacts on a wide range of environmental conditions. We’ve contributed to coral bleaching; Greg and I, as he said, have presented on the loss of sea ice. Now, tonight, as Greg said, I don’t want to talk about doom and gloom, the demise of planet Earth, but I want us to be cognisant of the challenges ahead of us. And we’ve run through retreating glaciers; ocean warming; advanced, elevated CO2 levels; shrinking ice caps – all of these are major problems. But the link I want to make tonight is the hockey curves. I want you to – we’ve seen them hundreds and hundreds of times before, but I want you to think about the hockey curves: what are the hockey curves telling us? I can’t use my laser pointer because it doesn’t work on this screen, but if you look here, we’ve got 2000 years of gases – greenhouse gases. CO2 red, nitrous oxide black and methane blue. The importance here is there’s been this dramatic increase in the hockey curve, and that curve is just showing it in the last hundred years, at that scale. Now, that’s what we’ve all heard about as the problem. What I want to talk about tonight is taking that to other parts of society, not to just the ecosystems, but I want to start looking on how manufacturing’s going to go forward. What is the impact of climate change on our society? I want to take you through a journey through some tipping points that I’ve identified that I’m worried about that’s going to change industries. Then I want to take you on a journey to 2050, and reflect on how’s that going to affect these industries, society, not just planet Earth. We know what’s going to happen to planet Earth. And then Janice is going to come through, and as Greg said, we’ve got solutions now. We’re not going to be talking about death and destruction; we’re going to be talking about how we can change society to work more sustainably. Now this work is by Will Stefan – came out in 2015. He’s part of the Climate Institute, and there’s a whole bunch of new J-curves here. And what they’re showing, the top ones up the top there are exactly the same: CO2, nitrous oxide and methane. Keep in mind the impact of the other gases, methane is 25 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than CO2; nitrous oxide 300 times more effective. So these are gases that if we’re producing, they are going to increase the temperature of the earth. But here’s a wide range, okay, [inaudible] – it has happened. The timescale down the bottom here is from 1750 to 2010, so we’re looking at from the Industrial Revolution to now. I’ll draw your attention to marine fish culture, shrimp aquaculture and nitrogenous or fertilisers going into the coastal ocean. These are all changes that society has rapidly modified in the last 50 years. That’s the ecosystem. Now let’s look at what’s happening in society. Population – we’ll come back to talk population again; 7.5 billion people on planet Earth now. 2050, 9 billion. Real GDP’s going up, foreign investment’s going up, fertiliser – interestingly, fertiliser’s going up and we’re also putting more fertiliser into the coastal zone. Water use – we’re increasing our water use rapidly. How are we going to use water more efficiently to make the products and the food that we need? Telecommunications – everything else is going up. So what this is telling us is our society and our manufacturing is unsustainable given these rapid increases. I want to talk about three tipping points: the first tipping point you’ve all heard about is peak oil. Then I want to talk about peak phosphate, and the third thing I’m calling peak meat. So I want to talk about three processes that I think are important to society that is rapidly changing. So, peak oil. We all know about peak oil – it has massive implications for energy security. I don’t want to talk about that tonight; I want to talk about everything else that oil does. Now, peak oil, this bottom graph shows how over time we have increased exploration, a resource becomes cheaper, we exploit it more, we reach a peak use of it and then it declines once you exploit the resource, start running out of the resource, prices start going up, we find new ways of digging those resources out of the ground. Peak oil, we’ve already passed. We’re using new sources of fossil fuel to support energy, but I don’t want to talk about energy – I want to talk about manufacturing. And that’s all the other stuff that we make as by-products of petroleum production. There’s a barrel of oil. Ninety-four per cent of a barrel of oil is used in making petroleum, jet fuel, diesel – all the things we expect. But it’s this six per cent in the middle that I’m interested in. The six per cent is a by-product – that’s where we make the stuff that unfortunately fills the bargain discount shops, the two dollar shops we all go into. All of that plastic junk, and other important things, are made from six per cent of the petroleum we’re extracting. Now, we’re extracting 96 million barrels of oil a day. Six per cent of that is six million barrels of oil to make all of these things here. There’s a couple of hundred things on that list there. There’s about 6000 products that are made from petrochemicals. Janice is going to talk about fabrics, vitamin capsules, dyes and surfboards, a bunch of stuff that we just came up with that we can make sustainably and not use petrochemicals. Leave the petrochemicals in the ground for other more important things, not necessarily making plastic stuff. As a biologist, I’m always fascinated when I can find an economic proof that my fears, that my problems, are being solved by policy. And this is some recent work that’s come out talking about fossil fuels being seen as a stranded asset. Now, a stranded asset is if you invest in it and its price goes down, you’re stuck with a massive loss. Now, fortunately, the support of the Paris Accord means that if we stay under two degrees elevated in temperature, we’re going to have to recognise that a lot of our fossil fuels cannot be mined. Now, APRA, the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority, which is basically the boss of the insurance industry, has now stated that for all companies, you’re going to have to recognise that 80 per cent of the leftover, the existing fossil fuels have to remain in the ground if we’re going to stay under two degrees elevated temperature. That’s a massive risk for a whole range of manufacturers that are dependent upon using that six per cent of petrochemical that’s a by-product. Banks and ASIC is now asking all companies that set up new business, they have an environmental risk assessment and they also have a fossil fuel asset risk, so they know whether or not they’re exposed to this as a potential flaw in their business plan. As a biologist, this is great: I don’t have to keep telling people that you have to de-carbonise your atmosphere, you have to de-carbonise the economy. The economists are telling us that. So that’s peak oil. Next one is peak phosphate. Phosphate’s in every cell in your body, but more importantly, phosphate is a fundamental macronutrient for growing our food. Nitrogen and phosphorous we get from the atmosphere that’s easily recyclable and reusable; phosphate is a defined resource. It’s rock phosphate. Now, same kind of curve again: increased exploitation of the rock phosphate, it looks like we’ve stabilised at our use and we haven’t come down the other side of the tipping point yet, but all of the phosphate has to come from basically one country. One country on the northern tip of Africa. Does anyone know where all rock phosphate comes from? Morocco. So that’s where all our rock phosphate comes from. We need a tonne of rock phosphate for 130 tonnes of any of the grains. We need a bucket load of phosphate, and it all – and I can kind of read there, one of the tiny little bars is Australia, so as far as sustainable raw material for every single crop that we want to grow, we need phosphate. Where are we going to get this from into the future? Now, the problem that I’ve got is we’re wasting it. This is what we’re doing with that phosphate – this is an image from down in the Gulf of Mexico. You’ve got beautiful green pastures and all the phosphate – see the phosphate they’re putting onto the pastures to grow runs straight into the estuary, wonderful algal blooms in the middle. Not very helpful, algal blooms. That’s a micro algal bloom, and this one here’s a shot from the South China Sea. Due to all of the phosphate and nitrogen that’s running off, we’re having massive, massive macro algal blooms. Now, in my classes, I teach them about things called dead zones. It doesn’t matter what the little icons on the bottom here are, but that image, every year I teach I have to get a new image, because there’s so many dead zones around the globe. A dead zone is an estuary where you’ve had too much nitrogen and phosphorus run into it – lots of algal blooms, lots of bacteria sucks all the oxygen out and fish can’t exist there. Ten years ago, that image had one dot on it in Australia: the Swan Estuary was the only dead zone in Australia. Now there’s a dozen estuaries around Australia that are dead zones. These are all the agricultural run-off that we’re having from our super phosphate that we’re putting on. We need to recycle it and use it, not have it as run-off, because we need it for our food production. Now, the green revolution too is where we’ve been able to rapidly increase our food production for the elevated population we’ve had. We’ve got a 200-year graph here, and this is wheat yield tonnes per hectare. And you can see that Europe is up around eight tonnes per hectare when you’re looking at a 200-year scale. But when you zoom into the details and you look at a 50-year scale, Europe has plateaued so we’ve reached the maximum yield we’re going to get out of wheat, certainly using fertilisation, pest management, modification of species – we can’t get any more food we can produce. There’s an alternate source of protein we could be using. I’m not going to be talking about meal worms tonight, but we are going to talk about alternate ways of feeding the population, and that’s certainly one of them. So the third tipping point I want to talk about is peak meat. Have we reached peak meat, and should we be thinking about alternate sources of protein for human consumption? I’m a carnivore, by the way, but I must admit I’m starting to eat and try alternate protein sources. They still taste like meat, they still work for me, but the thing is, they’re not having the environmental impact that beef is having. I want to talk about water consumption and carbon footprints of meat production. There’s our curve for meat consumption in the US, and you can see that back in the ‘80s, they even hit peak meat. And you would have thought American is one of the worst places for consuming massive levels of beef protein, but the red curve is coming down, poultry is going up. And poultry, as far as the planet’s concerned, as far as water consumption and CO2 emissions is a much better form of protein to be eating than beef. Globally, you can see that beef has plateaued, and it’s not increasing. Interestingly, farmed fish – and this graph actually finishes at 2010, we – in 2017, we hit the point where farmed fish and wild-caught fish met. So that as a source of protein, fish is going to outtake beef production for sure. So some of the problems with beef consumption: this is the carbon footprint of a range of different food products, so they all have a base carbon expense and transport, they all have a base cost in wholesale retail. But the interesting thing is the carbon cost of production. So the problem with beef is the methane emission. So beef has a massive, massive production of methane from the digestion and the ruminant. They also, with a lot of the corn, we – well, we, Americans actually produce seven times more corn for beef production than for human consumption, so most of their corn production goes into creating beef. And that has the carbon footprint in it. Same thing with the nitrous oxide coming from fertilisation. Let’s look at water now. To make a tonne of protein, if I had a tonne of protein coming from beef, it’s going to take 20,000 tonnes of water to make that tonne of protein. If I make a tonne of protein from algae, it takes 25 tonnes of water. So it’s 800 times more efficient to have a tonne of protein than to have a tonne of protein coming from beef. We’re starting to have technologies where we can shift where we take our protein from, and if we start taking it from algae as opposed to protein, I think we’ve got some opportunities there. Now, this slide is just to remind us that I think we hear a lot about sustainability. Sustainable energy is critical, and that’s what everyone’s focusing on, but we’re missing the fact that we’ve got to have sustainable food production and sustainable manufacturing. If those don’t come along with us, we’re going to have major, major increases in cost into the future, when petrochemicals and a lot of the resources I’ve spoken about become more expensive. So, let’s all jump into the Tardis, and now let’s go to 2050 and look at how these problems that I’ve described now are going to occur in 33 years’ time. 2050, I won’t be around but a lot of people in the audience will be, and we’re going to have to deal with these challenges. So, 2050, we’re going to have 9 billion people on planet Earth. Now when you first think about it, you go, ‘Oh my god, that’s an awful lot of people.’ But we’ve already got 7.5 billion now – it’s only a 20 per cent increase; it’s not doubling in the next 33 years. But when we have 20 per cent more people, we need 50 per cent more fuel. We need 70 per cent more food, and 50 per cent more fresh water, all while we’re reducing our CO2 emissions by 80 per cent. That’s a tough call, and that’s what sustainability’s all about. That’s what the next 33 years are going to be – how we’re going to change our manufacturing and our food production systems so that we can support 9 billion people on planet Earth. Now, we’re 33 years into the future, and is Australia going to be capable of making that extra food? Climate change is going to take its effect. Now, this figure has got a three-degree warming. Let’s hope that we’ve all agreed to the Paris Accord and we only have two degree warming. So this figure will be slightly out, but look at the whole of Australia. The whole of Australia is at least 50 per cent worse in arable land production. So we haven’t increased with climate change CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t made agricultural crops work more, we’ve lost water, we’re less capable of producing the food. Certainly Australia – there is parts; New Zealand’s very fortunate. New Zealand’s going through the roof. Russia and North America have got increases in their arable land. Can we also take more of our land and make it for food production? This is really going to be important: how much land area do we have available? The African continent has room to expand – they can put more agriculture in their continent, whereas North America is completely full. There is no space left that is arable that they can grow production on. Australia’s down in Oceania; we’ve got a little bit of room to increase, but we’re not going to be able to do that much. So the temperature’s going to beat us, and we don’t have the room. So what are we going to do? How are we going to feed 9 billion people? So the way I see it, we’ve got three options. We can say to hell with what’s happening, we can grow more food, more fuel, we keep manufacturing the way we are, and basically we warm the planet and it won’t last much longer. Option two: now, this could be an interesting one, it could be a bit controversial: we could embrace GMOs; we could embrace opportunities for alternate food production. There is a wide range of GMOs in our food production already. That’s one way of improving our resource efficiency. The third one is to find a new sustainable resource, and this is what Janice and I are going to be talking about, so we are suggesting a new raw material for all those industries, all that food production. So, obviously you’re here for the algae revolution. We’ll now talk about algae. So what I’ve got up the top there is the tree of life. Tree of life has got every organism based on its genetics, and there’s bacteria, there’s whales, there’s trees; everything is listed there. I’ve put two arrows. The top arrow is pointing to all plants, so trees all the way to micro-algae. Down the bottom is biomaterial, or animals. Everything else is part of the tree of life. Now that same tree of life, its replicated here, and I’m going to put plants and humans again, so the [inaudible] the trees; down the bottom, the biomaterial, the animals. Every other branch of that tree that’s got a red dot on it has got algae in it. That tells me we’ve got massive, massive genetic diversity. That means that we’ve got infinite biochemical capacity to make all of these raw materials that we need. Every single red dot is a different group of microalgae we can use. It’s not just one little genetic package. And each of them have got phenomenally complex biochemistry. That’s what our research at C3 is doing, so we’re looking at mining this resource. So, my challenge to you – and this will be the segue to Janice – is what’s the future going to hold? Are we going to have more and more of these paddocks, or are we going to consider ponds and vats and other ways of making our food and our manufacturing products? Young Greg.

[Applause]

Speaker: Thanks Peter. Thanks for setting the scene there for us. I’m sure the next speaker is going to really move us forward into this revolution. Janice McCauley is a relatively new member of the UTS staff, but knowing Peter, one of his other special attributes is he knows who are the best people in the community he works in, and he’s pretty tireless in going and finding them and bringing them to UTS. Janice is a research fellow in C3 Institute in the Faculty of Science, and she’s currently researching the development of novel foods and ingredients, specifically derived from algae. Her PhD is in analytical chemistry, and it had a strong molecular biology focus. And it also resulted form a collaboration with industry partner Venus Shell Systems, which is a macro-algae based company. At C3, Dr McCauley is currently working on industry-focused bio products as a part of the expansion of the bio products research program. This program’s emerged from recent research into the potential industry uses for algae, such as – among other things – enzymes and pharmaceuticals, and I’m sure we’re going to hear more about the other uses. So please join me now in welcoming Dr Janice McCauley to the stage.

[Applause]

Janice McCauley: Right. Thank you all for coming this evening, and thank you Peter for taking us on a journey to 2050, where he has highlighted some of the future challenges that we’re going to have to face and overcome. So he left us with a question, and he said, ‘Is our future production of food and energy going to come from paddocks, ponds or vats?’ So hopefully today, I would like to convince you that it’s going to come from ponds and vats, and how algae can revolutionise the way we use our energy, the food that we consume and the medicine we take. So I’m going to start with a quote that I found, and it said that ‘When we gaze at our beautiful blue planet, as seen from space, it’s amazing to think of the profound effect that one single species has had on Earth’s climate.’ And this is the bit that I found interesting. He said that humans have been too creative and too reproductively successful, and that has brought about the four major challenges that we face today. So that is food insecurity, loss of biodiversity, pollution and climate change. This has all been driven by a fossil-based economy, and that is increasing the risk of us facing a global ecological tipping point. So that’s a point beyond which there’s irreversible change; for example, extinction of a species – that species might have been prey for another species. So it’s got huge cascading effects. So this is where I found that interesting, where he said that humans have been too creative. We’ve been successful, yes. We’ve made huge advancements in technology, science, medicine, but I don’t think we’ve been very creative in where we’ve sourced our initial energy to derive all of these wonderful products and things that we consume today. So we need to do things differently. We can’t keep going the way we’re going. We’re already at a point where what we are doing is unsustainable. We’re at peak level. So we have to do – we have to [inaudible] that the APRC has already said – that 80 per cent of our resources need to stay in the ground. So we need to go to a sustainable [inaudible]-based economy, and this is one where it’s non-polluting, conserves our energy, conserves our resources, and it’s still economically viable to give us the products that we utilise in our everyday life. So how do we do this? Well, we can utilise the nine circular strategies that are promoted in such a concept – it’s pretty common sense. It’s all about re-use, re-think and re-utilising what we’ve got. And of course we’re going to add some algae into the mix. So before I go any further, I need to define algae, because I’m going to say microalgae, macro-algae, algae – so what are they? So microalgae, for example diatom, which is a very significant group within microalgae; single cell organisms; we’ve got a beautiful array of shapes, and essentially all algae are able to, they’re photosynthetic: they can use sun, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and create sugars. Diatoms are part of a group of organisms known as phytoplankton, which you may be more familiar with, and they’re very ecologically significant, and they produce 50 per cent of the world’s oxygen. So they’re at the base of our food chain as well, so we’re actually using them in aquaculture hatcheries as a live feed. So essentially, as I said, microalgae are all single cell organism, and microalgae is the ones that we have on display today. We’ve got four species – we’ve got the red one is [inaudible]; we have the brown one, which is our diatom, a [inaudible] species; and we have pirella, a microalgae; and we also have a cyanobacteria and a [inaudible]. So macro-algae, on the other hand, are complex, multi-cellular tissues, so you might be more familiar with these seaweeds as they’re washed ashore on your beach. If you go down to any of our local beaches, you’ll find them washed ashore, or in the intertidal rock pools. So what about spirulina, blue-green algae? So it’s marketed as a microalgae. There’s lots of products on the market; you may be using it, you may be aware of it. It’s readily available, but it’s not actually a microalgae. Microalgae are grouped in what we call eukaryotes. Spirulina, on the other, is a prokaryote. It just means it’s much more simple. Eukaryotes have got much more complex internal machinery. But it is important, nevertheless, and there’s a huge variety of products – you can even get it from Woolworths. So back to the issues that Peter highlighted. So he said we’re at peak oil – so what are we going to do? We could reduce our fossil fuel consumption, but then we have to supplement it with something else. We can refuse – start saying no to plastic straws, plastic bags, but we need to think and find an alternative solution. So algae have three main primary metabolites – all algae. And that’s protein; carbohydrates, which are your sugars; and lipids, which are your oil. And microalgae in particular, we can manipulate the regulatory pathways so that we can accumulate one of these over the other. And so what these main primary metabolites we can then utilise and process using a number of techniques to create fuel, food, and a variety of products. So I’m just going to start with an example of oil. So microalgae are full of lipids, and that’s our oil. And from that oil we can create biodiesel. So oil consists of triglyceride molecules, and that is a glycerine molecule attached to three fatty acid chains, so what we can do chemically is just break that bond and release those fatty acids, which become methyl esters, and that’s our biodiesel. So basically what I want to highlight ere is that algae can accumulate lots of oil in its biomass; it doesn’t require much land to grow; the land that we need to grow it on doesn’t have to be arable land, and compete with our agricultural crops; and what I’ve highlighted on the screen is that you can generate an awful lot of oil that’s quite efficient compared to the other organisms. That’s not the only way we can generate fuel from algae. We can do another technique, called pyrolysis. This is a heat degradation technique in the absence of oxygen, so we mainly utilise this for woody plant biomass. And the main thing I want to highlight on this slide is that if we do this same technique on microalgae biomass, we’re generating all the necessary elements, such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur, so they’re all present. That means that we’ve got all the necessary molecules to be able to utilise this oil for energy and to derive other products, because currently we will do this, and we can integrate it into petroleum refineries. So that leads me to this slide. So not only can we generate an oil from our biomass, the biomass has actually got lots of biochemical components that we can use to derive our products. So I just mentioned the process of biodiesel, and I told you that we were separating the glycerine molecule from three fatty acid chains. We can actually utilise this glycerol now, and react it to give us polyglycerol sebacate. So have you heard of this molecule? Probably not, but it is polyester. So polyester is often mixed with other natural fibres and natural fabric, so we can actually generate fabric using algal biomass, rather than a petroleum-based product. And what this illustrates nicely is that from a whole algal cell, we actually can generate multipole products. So this is our bio-refinery concept for the sustainable processing of biomass into a spectrum of marketable products. Because the other thing here is that we can take that glycerol molecule – now you don’t really need to to focus on all the chemistry that’s there, but it’s just showing you that we can derive lots of fine chemicals from that glycerol molecule. For example, you may not be familiar with ethylene glycol, but that’s an antifreeze, so it’s in your coolant; your engine. We can also look at the sugars. I mentioned that carbohydrates is a significant portion of our algal biomass, so we can ferment those sugars, just like we do for any other agricultural crop to generate bioethanol. Or we can utilise those sugars a little bit more creatively. We can actually take those sugar molecules such as glucose – again, you don’t need to focus on the reaction; just notice that we can get a starting product, we can do some processing, and we can get a product. For example, here I’m highlighting levaulinic acid. This levaulinic acid can go into another – again, we can react it, change the functional group to get a variety of fine chemicals with industry applications, so to illustrate this, levaulinic acid itself has a range of market potential. It’s in your personal care, your health care, your agricultural products. And today, fi you go home, maybe look at one of your skincare products, you may find the sodium salt of this compound on the back in your ingredients. So when I show all these chemical molecules, these are the things that’s listed on the back of your skincare and all those ingredients. The other one I want to highlight that we can get from algae is amino acids and omega 3s. So from these starting materials that we can derive from microalgae biomass, we can create plastic and foams. For example, we can take an omega 3 fatty acid, we can do a particular reaction, and we’re going to get polyurethane. Polyurethane is in insulation foams etcetera, and we can actually modify the properties of these different foams – you can have soft foams, rigid foams; we just have to take a different starting product. So we just have to go to the amino acids that are present in the microalgae. We can do a different reaction – again, don’t worry too much about the details – but we can actually make what we call a [inaudible] which is like a building block of the polyurethane molecule, and it’s actually going to become more rigid and it’s actually got a high compatibility for blending with other [inaudible]. So again, rigid foams and polyurethane are used in construction, you’ve got them in your mattresses, adhesives, sealants, furniture, and yes, we have made a surfboard from microalgae biomass. So carbon neutral plastics from algae, yes it’s possible, and yes it has been done. Another area that Peter mentioned today was that we’re at peak phosphorous, and we also need 50 per cent more water to accommodate our needs in 2050. So again, essential element – we need it for crop growth, global security, food security depends on it; we’re depleting it rapidly, but as Peter highlighted, it’s the wastage. We’re not using it very effectively. So up to 80 per cent loss is actually occurring, and a lot of this is basic run-off from our farms. It’s going into our water; it’s causing [inaudible]. So what are we going to do? We need it, we can’t make it synthetically, so we need to close the anthropogenic peak phosphorous loop. We need to use it more efficiently, we need to recover it, we need to recycle it, and algae is the answer. So algae have this ability to what we call luxury uptake phosphorous as polyphosphenates, so this means it can just take a phosphorous molecule and join it to another phosphorous molecule. So what you can see here is we have phosphorus that’s in our wastewater. The algae can uptake that; it can go into a function and be utilised, or it can be stored as a polyphosphenate. But the other interesting thing here is that we can then take that biomass that we’re growing in our wastewater, so it’s actually remediating our wastewater and cleaning it up – you take that biomass, and then we can put it back onto our crops as a source of phosphorous, because the microorganisms that are in the soil are able to break down these bonds in the polyphosphorus molecule, and release that phosphorous and the plant can utilise that. It could also overcome the challenge of over-supplementation. So if you over-supplement your crops with phosphorous, whatever’s not going to be utilised is going to run off and go into your waters. So because it’s slow release, you’re not going to get as much wastage. So we’re actually closing that phosphorous anthropogenic loop. So, in summary so far, we can think about the market areas from algae in four major areas: food security, global nutritional deficiencies, chemicals, medicines and skin care. We’ve looked at chemicals in detail, a little bit on food security with the phosphorous, and a little bit in skin care on how we can utilise a fine chemical in a skincare product. But what about peak meat? So where are we currently getting our protein from? So we get it from our meat, our animal meat, but we also utilise protein isolates – we concentrate the isolate and we use it for other products, so we islolate the protein. So we have a number of vegetable sources – soy is very common. And we also have the animal-derived products, such as your gelatine. However, algae can have up to 70 per cent protein in their dry weight, so what this means is that one, they’re a source of the essential amino acids, the building blocks of protein,s o that can address human and animal deficiencies. We can isolate those protein, so protein isolates have numerous desirable qualities to them that we can add to our food for emulsification, foaming, gel firming – it gives it that nice texture. So it can have potential for additives. We can also encapsulate extracts and supplements, like as a gelatine property. We can also have a non-soy-based vegan meat alternative. So what we will be eating in 2015? Well, maybe instead of cracking open that egg, you’ll be using an algal-based egg. So as you can see here, it’s already been done from a native microalgal species in the Netherlands. So it’s derived from algal flour and algal protein and plant-based ingredients, and they advertise it as being full of essential carbohydrates, micronutrients, essential amino acids and dietary fibre – it’s a really healthy food. We have a local company, so we have [inaudible], which is the supplier of your goody bags this evening. So they have a number of products that utilise an endemic Australian species. For example, we’ve got fettuccines and sea spirals, so pasta where they use 100 per cent Australian seaweed extract. We also utilise this extract to coat and flavour your macadamia nuts, and we also blend it with a sea salt from Margaret River. They also have a fica bar, so they actually do a specific processing to generate a high protein extract to give you a high protein fica bar generated from an Australia seaweed species. Other companies are doing a similar thing, so maybe in 2050, alongside your flour, your self-rising flour, you might have a lipid-rich algal flour, or a protein-rich algal flour that you can incorporate into everyday life into your baking of goods and cakes and biscuits, as demonstrated on the slide. You may also have an algal oil next to your olive oil, which is at a high level of monounsaturated fats with high heat tolerances. Again, another company is utilising the oil from microalgae and promoting it as a healthy monounsaturated fatty acid oil. But what will we be drinking in 2050? Hopefully it’s more beer – seaweed beer, that is. So the originator of the seaweed beer is actually a brewing company in Scotland. They use the big, brown kelpy seaweeds to make their Kelpy Seaweed Ale, and as described on their website, they describe it as a rich, dark chocolate ale which has the aroma of the fresh Scottish sea breeze and a distinctive malty texture. We’ve had people in Australia try to develop their own beers, so for example, we have Murray’s short supply, so they only do this every now and then, and they have the Sea Monster Seaweed Beer, again based on a brown seaweed, a macro-algae – and that’s at Bob’s Farm. That’s a place actually – it sounds like a farm, but it’s actually a place in New South Wales. And there’s another one, Sailors Great Brewing, and they’re in Victoria. They’re unique – they’re using a green seaweed, so they’re differentiating themselves away from the other. And also in the USA, Maine, on the coast – they’re doing one as well. So what does it taste like? I haven’t tasted seaweed beer – I can’t give you an honest answer. But I did find someone that blogged about it, so he said that he was surprised by both the dark and decadent liquid and the intoxicating aroma. While subconsciously expecting an in your face punch of seawater, iodine and peat smoke, he was met with something that defied association – a flavour combination undeniably sourced from the sea. It’s very poetic. But also a deceptively creamy constitution – clearly one of the most interesting and delicious beers he’d tasted this year. He’s a beer connoisseur. Thank you, Matt. So algal beer, clearly delicious. So should we drink more beer? Sorry – eat more algae. So I’m just going to do a little fact: did you know that most of your synthetic vitamins are derived from petroleum? Because of all the synthetic environments, we take – in synthetic reactions, so the chemicals that we’re using to get those are all derived from petroleum. But algae can actually are a great source of all your essential vitamins. So essentially they have the ability to be a nutritional supplement. We can either concentrate those down into a concentrated extract, we can eat the whole algae and benefit from all the natural vitamins, minerals and essential amino acids as well. Now, I’d just like to highlight that if you look at life expectancy versus health expenditure, two of the largest seaweed consumers – Japan, South Korea – they’re not doing too bad. So while we’re on the topic of food, we’re going to need to talk about some high value products that we can get from microalgae, and that’s pigments, food colourings, dyes. So phycocyanin is a blue pigment that we’re actually getting from our spirulina, that cyanobacteria that I mentioned this morning, and a cyanobacteria that we also have growing here on the end; the dark green one. So this is a source of phycocyanin, and this is your blue Smartie. So spirulina is what we call an FDA-approved grass species, certified safe for human consumption. It’s unique because we can extract this pigment using water. It’s non-toxic, safe, efficient, and it’s a natural blue colourant with huge market potential. We also have [inaudible]. This is the colour responsible for your lovely salmon, so in the environment, the natural environment, it’s consuming microalgae. It’ll accumulate and concentrate those pigments, and give you that bright red colour that you see. And then when we farm it and given them artificial feeds, they don’t have that beautiful colour anymore. So algae are an excellent source of [inaudible]. Synthetic [inaudible] is currently produced by BASF. It’s a very high value product, and the [inaudible] market is expected to be about worth $1.4 billion by 2019. So all these pigments, not just the two that I’ve mentioned – we’ve got beta carotene, lutene, lycopene – they’re all present in algae in good abundance. So we’ve talked about food and global nutritional deficiencies, we’ve talked about chemicals, talked a little bit on skin care, but we can’t go too much into it, because of time. But what about medicine and therapeutics? So microalgae are an excellent platform for us to develop what we call high value compounds and pharmaceuticals. So what does this mean when I say high value compounds? So this means protein vaccines, therapeutic antibodies and industrial enzymes. So where do we currently get these from? Well, we can use mammalian cells for the more complex enzymes – one of the more common is the hamster ovary cell. We also utilise bacteria for the more simple proteins such as proinsulin. Both of these combined are worth 55 per cent and 29 per cent of $100 billion per year [inaudible] protein market. They both have pros and cons, but [inaudible]’s very interesting, because it kind of represents the best of both worlds. Because it’s a eukaryotic cells, it has the ability to do the complex enzymes that the mammalian cells can do. It grows like a bacteria, so we get really high yields and we’ve got excellent scalability, and it’s very safe. So with that, so what I hope we’ve shown you today is that we can go from a non-renewable manufacturing. So think about those 6000 petroleum-derived products that we are sourcing unsustainably, and hopefully I’ve shown you that we can go to a renewable manufacturing using algal, an algal bio-economy where we can generate food, we can generate the chemicals and energy we need. So we revolutionise the energy we use, the food we consume and the medicine that we take. And with that, I’d like to pass on to Peter.

[Applause]

Peter Ralph: Thanks. Thanks Janice. I’m just going to have two slides – this slide and the final slide. I think what Janice has outlined is massive, massive market opportunities, and the science is developing, some products are industry-ready; others need a little bit more research. State government has invested in the Deep Green Biotech Hub. We’ve now got funding for three years, and what we’re trying to do is find opportunities to engage with industry. We’re looking for SMEs, we’re looking for entrepreneurs, we’re looking for people with good ideas, things that you might have seen tonight and you go, ‘Oh, how could I bring this idea together? I’ve got a manufacturing concept – is there a potential algae that could source that?’ The Deep Green Biotech Hub is a vehicle to promote that. We’re looking to engage, as I said, entrepreneurs, researchers, SMEs, industry start-ups, all of those people. Now, we run the hub; we’ve had about three or four meetings now. If you look at our webpage, just at the top here, Deep Green Biotech Hub at UTS, if you send us an email address we’ll notify you next time we have one of the meetings. We had a meeting about two or three weeks ago. The other thing that I’m interested in, or that the hub’s going to do, is we’re going to invest and leverage in these ideas, so we’ve got an advisory board of experts in the field and once we get some projects coming into us, we’re going to allocate funds to work with industry to solve these problems. So we want to bootstrap and fast-track making these industry options work, so if you’ve got any ideas from what Janice mentioned, please talk to us, look us up on the webpage there, we are wanting to grow this economy and I think state government is backing us, which is really exciting. So with that, we’ll finish off, so thank you.

[Applause]