A student’s ‘aha’ moment becomes a nation’s alternative fuel

The problem had been nagging at Brittney McKenzie ever since she began her summer internship.

A microbiology major at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, Ms. McKenzie had been tapped along with a handful of other students to come up with a way to transform Barbados’ transportation sector into a climate-friendly model for the Caribbean. The project was the brainchild of Professor Legena Henry, an international expert in renewable energy systems. And the mission, as Ms. McKenzie describes it, was to develop an alternative fuel source that could power cars and trucks without releasing the greenhouse gases largely responsible for the planet’s rapid heating, and that have been particularly devastating to small island states like this one.

But the young team had run into challenges.

It started off by focusing on sugar cane. Brazil had successfully converted most of its cars to run partially on sugar cane-based ethanol, and the team thought Barbados might do the same. But it quickly became clear that there wasn’t enough of that crop, a legacy of slavery, left on the island. The students knew they could use rum distillery wastewater in their project. But they were stumped on what to mix with it to produce enough gas to power a car.

Then, one morning, Ms. McKenzie was gazing out the window of the van taxi she took to campus, bumping along the pockmarked coastal road that circles this easternmost Caribbean island. Her eyes lingered on the mounds of sargassum seaweed that had been choking beaches in 2019, part of an influx that began around 2011 and continues today. 

She had an idea. By the time she got to campus, she couldn’t wait to share it. She rushed to her lab, pushed open the doors, and hurried up to Dr. Henry. 

“Sargassum,” she said, out of breath. What if they were to use seaweed as the new biofuel base? Island officials had been struggling to figure out what to do about the increasing amount of foul-smelling sargassum inundating their shores, an explosion exacerbated by warming ocean temperatures. Using seaweed to make climate-friendly vehicles would