ec-Aventureros - Space Apps Challenge

ec-Aventureros| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?

Global Warming Between Reality and Hope

Summary

Since the world suffers from an increase in the percentage of Co2 in the air, we have thought of establishing a closed algae farm next to the factories, the algae feed on Co2, ,the result of the farm will be an increase in the rate of algae growth by 40% through Exposing it. For Co2 directly.Then we thought of exploiting the large amount of algae in the production of biofuels Which is an alternative to fossil fuels so we would have solved the problem another way by increasing the percentage of fats in them, and based on our laboratory experiment, the fat percentage became 45% of the algae's weight by stimulating the enzyme responsible for activating the lipids within the algae.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our idea addresses the challenge by reducing the carbon level in the atmosphere and reducing global warming and air pollution in two ways:

The first method is to establish a green algae farm next to a complex of factories so that we exploit the gases produced by the factories that cause a large increase in carbon in the atmosphere and also cause global warming and air pollution by a large percentage as food for algae and the result was:

1- According to our experiment, an increase in the rate of algae growth by 40% compared to normal.

2 - Preventing polluting factory gases from spreading into the atmosphere and benefiting from them, which reduces global warming, air pollution and the percentage of carbon in the atmosphere.

After that, we thought about developing our project further by taking advantage of the huge amount of algae produced during one day, so we thought of exploiting the fats inside the algae cells in the production of biodiesel, so we worked more to increase the rate of fat, and the result is that we stimulated the enzyme responsible for activating the fatty acid inside the algae cells .. The result is according to our experiment showed that the rate of lipids inside the algae cells was estimated at 45%.

The result is the use of these resulting fats as biodiesel (clean, non-polluting energy).

And this was the second way, which is to significantly reduce the spread of gases from transportation by using biodiesel instead of polluting by fossil fuels.

We have developed a culture structure where it is directly connected to a source of carbon dioxide in addition to the development of stimulation of the lipid-producing glands by injecting algae with salt water.

And we hope to develop the farm so that it produces a greater amount of algae saturated with fats through genetic techniques and breaking the links of the fat-producing enzyme.

How We Developed This Project

We thought that we would not be able to reduce the carbon dioxide produced by the factories, knowing that algae feed directly on carbon dioxide, this was a great solution in addition to that it produces biofuels that are an alternative to fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide.

We developed the project by building an algae farm by combining the three methods of growing algae, which will be cheaper in price and larger in production, and we have worked to increase the percentage of fats in algae, which in turn will increase the amount of biofuel.

We faced several problems, particularly in performing practical experiment, in reaching accurate results, and in determining the appropriate environment for the growth of algae.

Through this project, we will have reduced the percentage of carbon dioxide produced by factories and fossil fuels.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We know that NASA is very interested in preserving the environment and that preserving the environment is one of its challenges every year. We searched the scientific sources for NASA and concluded that global warming, increasing the carbon footprint and the use of fossil fuels are global problems linked to each other, so we went to search for an equivalent solution to these problems, and NASA's sources helped us to know scientifically and accurately the problems such as identifying greenhouse gases, their proportions and their presence in The atmosphere and its emission sources such as factories and transportation. We have confirmed from scientific sources at NASA that carbon dioxide is a major contributor to the problem of global warming, and through that we concluded that our solution, which is an algae farm, is the best solution to these problems because it feeds on carbon dioxide It produces biofuels, and thus contributes to solving the global warming problem significantly

ODIAC Fossil fuel emission dataset: Center for Global Environmental Research. (n.d.). National Institute for Environmental Studies Retrieved October 03, 2020, from http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/dataset/ODIAC/DL_odiac2019.html

The Causes of Climate Change. (2020, August 18). Retrieved October 03, 2020, from Site

Editor: Holly Shaftel , Managing Editor: Randal Jackson , Science Editor: Susan Callery

Science Editor: Daniel Bailey https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data. United States Environmental Protection Agency (2020, September 10). Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

Project Demo

https://www.slideshare.net/secret/qNSOTX8Z63vT0G

Data & Resources

Staff, S. (2017, April 19). By Kobe University Making oil from algae – towards more efficient biofuels. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://phys.org/news/2017-04-oil-algae-efficient-biofuels.html

Allaboutalgae.com. 2020. Algae Basics by the Algae Biomass Organization, which advocates for the US algae industry - All about Algae. [Online] Available at: http://allaboutalgae.com/algae-cultivation/ [Accessed 3 October 2020].

وقود الديزل الحيوي. (2020, August 24). 2020, By Salman Zafar | Biomass Energy, Renewable Energy Retrieved October 03,from https://www.ecomena.org/biodiesel-ar/

الطحالب - معمل وقود حيوي. (2018, May 07) By Salman Zafar Biomass Energy, Renewable Energy. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://www.ecomena.org/algae-ar/

Wells, M., Potin, P., Craigie, J., Raven, J., Merchant, S., Helliwell, K., . . . Brawley, S. (2017). Algae as nutritional and functional food sources: Revisiting our understanding. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5387034/