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My hypothesis is that nitrogen-fixing Cyanobacteria can be a cost-effective, natural method of carbon sequestration.

The primary obstacle is sufficiently cost-effective bioreactors. Therefore, my ultimate goal is to develop extremely cheap, large scale Cyanobacteria biotech reactors. Hawaiian spirulina cultivation is the cost/yield target to beat.

My initial research program is:

• get to basic Cyanobacteria culturing competency
  • have a stable of inoculates that can be used for reactor tests
• reactor tests
  • yield - this branch attempts to increase yield without optimising for cost/m^3
  • Scale - this branch attempts to make progressively larger reactors

There are a wide variety of interesting further work that will hopefully come from this, mostly around finding useful products for the Cyanobacteria besides just sequestration, like

• fertiliser - might as well extract the fixed nitrogen
• fuel - the fully saturated hydrocarbons of Cyanobacteria phospholipids would make decent biofuel
• plastics - hopefully eventually much of the bioreactor can be made from the cyanos themselves.