Seaweed is a viable biofuel

Enterprising students made discovery

Maureen Walkingshaw, HR director, BT Ireland, who presented the category award chemical, physical and mathematical sciences third junior group category to Grainne Jones and Orla Mannion, from Skerries Community College, for their project 'Can we use...

JOHN MANNING

As part of their project submitted to the young scientist exhibition, Grainne Jones and Orla Mannion were looking for a non-food renewable source of fuel. The substance could tackle the need for biofuels without using up valuable food producing land to grow the raw material.

Their project claimed third place in the junior group category in the chemical, physical and mathematical science section. So they looked around their environment and deduced that the weed washing up on the beach in Skerries could be the ideal material. The two Skerries Community College students set about investigating the properties of the seaweed to see if it had the potential to become the raw material for a new kind of biofuel.

Like all the projects submitted from the Skerries school, Orla and Grainne conducted their studies under the watchful eye of teacher and supervisor, Katie Corbett.

They also enlisted the help of an expert in the field from NUI in Galway who suggested that brown seaweed offered the best hope of success for the two girls. Then it was time for the chemistry – a kind of alchemy that turned the most ordinary, everyday material into a brand new source of fuel. The project proved a roaring success and the two brilliant students managed to make both bioethanol and biogas from the seaweed material gathered up from the local beach. They exhibited the project to great acclaim at the young scientist exhibition last week and their project leaves open the prospect that in a few years time, we will all be pulling our cars into the service station and filling up on seaweed.