Carbon dioxide is the leading cause of global warming. Hypergiant Industries wants to use algae boxes to solve the problem.

Algae plays an crucial role in converting carbon dioxide to oxygen naturally in the ocean. But it's a challenge to replicate for human purposes.

The device is still a prototype, and there's no timeline for production. But Hypergiant is going to make the plans open-source soon.

The problems of global warming are well-documented and focus mainly on carbon dioxide. A new company, Hypergiant Industries of Texas, has unveiled a prototype of what it calls an Eos Bioreactor, a box that uses A.I. to capture and sequester carbon from the atmosphere using algae.

When it comes to lowering carbon dioxide, Hypergiant sees a space somewhere in between reducing consumption and planting trees. "It felt like there had to be more options" than those two, says Kristina Libby, Vice President of Future Science and Research at Hypergiant. (Full disclosure: Libby is a contributor to Popular Mechanics.)

Trees are traditionally seen as a crucial factor to help stave off global warming, due to their ability to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. This reliance has been historically useful, of course, but threats to trees en masse—like the Amazon's recent spate of fires—can show how delicate humanity's reliance on forests could become.

It's not just trees that ingest carbon dioxide, however. Most breathable air in the world originates from the ocean, "where high levels of nutrients fertilize large blooms of algae," writes Scott Denning, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University.

It's that process on which Hypergiant wants to capitalize.

"The research on algae is incredibly compelling," Libby tells Popular Mechanics, "both on the amount of carbon it sequesters as well as its rate of growth. And then, in looking at that, we realized that the biggest problems in algae are things we can solve with artificial intelligence. Let's dive in there and see if we can make that a reality."

Those problems comes with the growth rate of algae. Algae can grow rapidly, but if a group is trying to contain the plant within a tank, that's a problem. These things, Libby says, "are hard to control."

Using A.I. to augment light, temperature, and air flow, the team believes it can optimize algae's intake of carbon dioxide while simultaneously slowing the plant's rapid growth.

Sargassum seaweed—algae—on a beach in Florida earlier this year. One of the difficulties of containing algae is its rapid growth. LEILA MACOR Getty Images

The prototype bioreactor is 3' x 3' x 3', and holds 55 gallons of water and algae. "Algae wants CO2 and light," the company explains on its website. "The light can be from the sun, or in this case, artificial light. The algae and water are pumped through a series of tubes to maximize their exposure to light sources lining the inside of the Reactor."

Inside the reactor, the algae absorbs the carbon dioxide and in the process creates a biomass, essentially dried algae. In the oceans, dried algae has a crucial role: It sinks to the bottom of the ocean and creates food for microorganisms. The company says the algae biomass can then be "harvested and processed to create fuel, oils, nutrient-rich high-protein food sources, fertilizers, plastics, cosmetics, and more."

The Hypergiant team claims the device is 400 times more effective than trees at carbon sequestration.

“With the first generation Eos, we have precise control of every aspect of the algae’s environment and life cycle,” Ben Lamm, CEO and founder, tells Fast Company. “It’s a photobioreactor, but it’s also an experimentation platform. We’ll be using this platform to better understand the environment that best suits biomass production under controlled circumstances, so that we can better understand how to design reactors for the variety of environmental conditions we’re going to encounter in the wild.”

The company has a local vision for the biogenerators. Rather than (at least at first) a field of the algae boxes in an energy grid, Hypergiant envisions HVAC units, close to exhaust and industrial pipes, breathing in the carbon dioxide from a office building.

According to the International Energy Agency, buildings and building construction account for 36 percent of global final energy consumption and nearly 40 percent of the world's total direct and indirect CO2 emissions.

But a prototype is still just a prototype, and Libby says the company has no plans to start selling quite yet. The next step, in spring 2020, will be to make the design for the algae boxes open-source and see what the world will make of them.

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