360° Algae Lab Tour at NREL – Narrated (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video "360° Algae Lab Tour at NREL – Narrated."

This is an interactive video that lets the user click on the screen to spin in 360 degrees to view the algae-growing lab at NREL.

[Music plays. Text on screen: Move around 360 to explore. Nick Sweeney is growing algae at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He and other NREL researchers experiment with algae as a renewable source of food, consumer products, and biofuels.]

Nick Sweeney: Algae are actually all over the globe, from fresh water to very brackish waterways and tide pools, and from very warm climates to very cold. They need to be isolated and then grown in conditions that reflect their original habitat.

Right here what we're looking at is the roux bottle station for growing algae at a one-liter scale. It's a flat panel bottle. It allows more light to penetrate through than compared to a round flask.

[Move view 180 degrees. Text on screen: Incubators.]

So, in the back there, I'm inside these incubators. The incubators are a controlled growth environment for the algae.

[Move view 180 degrees. Text on screen: Photo bio-reactor.]

This is our low-cost solution to a photobioreactor. We're using this plastic bag material to grow cultures at a 30-liter scale.

[Move view 180 degrees. Text on screen: Growth chamber.]

We're looking at a growth chamber where we can control the light and we can control the temperature and there's humidity in the chamber.

[Move view 90 degrees to the right]

NREL is known for the compositional analysis, so we want to develop protocols for measuring the individual components in the cells and we need to have biomass to work with to answer those questions. So, that's specifically what our lab does is provide that biomass.

[Text on screen: These technologies will create an estimated 12,000 new jobs by 2021.]

[Narrator stops, screen fades to black, music stops.]