GEOCHEM

Sigurður Brynjólfsson, ProfessorUniversity of Iceland/Center for Systems Biology

MissionTo develop CO2 from geothermal wells as a feedstock for biologically-based chemical synthesis

CO2 Chemistrybiology

electricity

Goal

• To develop an integrated scalable technology platform to produce a commodity and fine chemicals from geothermal fields worldwide

Photobioreactor (PBR)

Potential Advancements• New light emitting diode technology• Modularity and scalability

LED - Photobioreactor

Biology• Photosynthetic Organisms

– Chlamydomonas reinhardii– Chlorella vulgaris– Dunaliella Salinas– Blue-green algae

• Key factors in organism choice– Natural/adapted vs. genetically modified algae– Range of products achievable

• cosmetics, nutraceuticals, coloring agents, pharmaceuticals, commodity chemicals, fuels, etc.

Feedstocks

• Geothermal power plant gas profile collected– Mostly CO2 - H2, H2S in minor amounts

• Energy cost– Low– Produced on site

• Clean green technology

GeoChem...• Determining the key performance characteristics

of a core unit of a photo bioreactor-based factory• Designing and initiating scale-up of these units into

versatile modules• Determining the spectrum of algal strains that can

be cultivated with this system

• Engineering of Synechocystis– metabolic computational-driven design

of Synechocystis

05/01/2023

Products…

High value molecules

9

Growth rate

Effect of adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) on growth rate and carotenoid accumulation in D. salina. Average growth rate indicated biomass produced per day during one cycle. All the cycles including cycle 0 were performed under a total light intensity of 170 µE/m2/s consisting of 42 µE/m2/s blue LED light and 128 µE/m2/s red LED light. Detailed data were presented in Table S1. The results are averaged from three independent experiments. Error bars indicate SD.

Oils, pigments,…

Systems biology

• Systems Biology is an emerging field which involves the study of an organism, viewed as an integrated and interacting network of genes, proteins and biochemical reactions, which give rise to life.

• This field is a natural response to the various genome projects which have revealed the entire genetic makeup of many different organisms.

• Knowing the entire components that make an organism present novel opportunities for engineering system analysis by integrating this with other types of data.

Power Plants ... Simulation

Network map => Mathematics

Acknowldement• Háskóli Íslands

– Weiqi Fu, – Elin Adda Steinarsdóttir– Ólafur S Andrésson– Zhiqian Yi

• Matís– Sindri Freyr Ólafsson– Sigurjón Arason

• Controlant– Ólafur Guðmundsson– Gísli Herjólfsson