in the group gathered around the fireplace to watch President Obama give his State of the Union address. So I quickly buttonholed Mitchell to find out more about his work with the ABO. “We were not a specific community,” he said. “Creating that network of scientists, government officials, technologists, economic modelers, that could accelerate our work, that environment is important.”
Mitchell answered my next question before I could ask it: “What is the son of George Mitchell, ‘the father of fracking,’ doing in algae?”
He explained that he started out studying marine biology at the University of Texas at Austin, looking at how sunlight got into the ocean ecosystem. There, he began to focus on algae, and worked with pioneers in the field—Harold Bold and Richard Starr—who became mentors.
Intrigued, he went on to graduate school, though he said he ended up in California largely because the surfing was better than that on the Texas Gulf coast. Over the years, Mitchell worked at NASA in an effort to create the first global satellite maps of algae distribution in the ocean and he helped found the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at UC San Diego.
Greg Mitchell said his focus on sustainability actually does not fall far from his father’s priorities, even considering the elder Mitchell’s Big Oil bona fides. Sustainability, and a desire to solve urban blight, motivated George Mitchell to develop The Woodlands community on 25,000 acres north of Houston and revitalize a historic neighborhood in Galveston. Greg Mitchell points out that his father, who died last year at age 94, also helped to pay for the influential National Academy of Sciences’ report, “Our Common Journey: A Transition to Sustainability” in 1999.
“He told us, all of his kids, that we should do what we know,” Mitchell said.
Just as his father is credited with revitalizing domestic energy production, Mitchell believes the work ABO is doing with algae can also be transformative. “I agree it’s a big challenge,” he said. “But we’ve seen this happen in the market before.”
He points to advances like diesel or jet engines, technologies that took decades to get from discovery to commercialization—but he stresses that they got there. “We need a longer vision,” he said.
