Jatropha and algae, as different as they may seem, have the ability to produce large amounts of vegetable oil and wouldn’t displace food crops. Jatropha is a low-input, labor-intensive crop, which could prove to be a boon for developing countries burdened by high unemployment and pricey refined fuel imports. Algae’s path has been more high tech, rising through the labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Colorado State University and from entrepreneurial ventures such as Canada-based Valcent Products Inc. These sophisticated systems could prove their worth in industrial countries where labor and land are expensive.
No single feedstock is likely to solve the supply issues facing the biodiesel industry. As it diversifies beyond traditional oilseed crops—soybeans and rapeseed—exotic solutions such as jatropha and algae could play a vital role in biodiesel’s future.
Algae as an Alternative
Algae are ubiquitous around the world. They can be found in just about any environment from the standing water in a backyard swimming pool to Utah’s Great Salt Lake. There are perhaps 2 million varieties of algae in the world, says Glen Kertz, chief executive officer of Valcent, and scientists have only studied a fraction of those. Many of the species being studied contain oil, sometimes up to 50 percent. That, coupled with algae’s potential to produce tens of thousands of pounds of biomass per acre, has peaked the interest of researchers and biodiesel producers.
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2007 was a year of announcements for algae as a feedstock for biodiesel. Many universities and organizations affiliated with universities announced new or expanded research and development or pilot-scale demonstrations of technology to grow and harvest algae. The list of institutions is impressive. It includes MIT in partnership with Greenfuels Technologies Corp., Colorado State University along with Solix Biofuels Inc. and Utah State University.
Several companies claim to be on the verge of commercializing their algae production systems. California-based Solazyme Inc. signed an agreement with Imperium Renewables Inc. in Seattle Wash., to develop a biodiesel feedstock from algae. PetroSun Inc., with headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz., announced plans to build algae farms in several states and in Mexico, Brazil and Australia in 2008. Valcent entered into a partnership with Canadian-based Global Green Solutions Inc. to commercialize Kertz’s Vertigro algae system and plans to start building pilot-scale plants for customers before the end of 2008.
Incremental Progress
Much of the industry’s knowledge of algae’s potential and drawbacks comes from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Aquatic Species Program. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the program examined hundreds of species of algae for their oil-production potential, and studied possible production and harvesting techniques. It was determined that while algae could produce an eye-popping 50,000 pounds or more of biomass per acre, actual production was fraught with problems. Open ponds were the most economical means of production, but contamination by undesirable species and population crashes were too common. Enclosing the algae in photobioreactors solved the contamination problem and gave researchers a good deal of control over the algae’s environment, but the equipment was prohibitively expensive—especially when petroleum prices dropped below $10 a barrel.
Materials science has come a long way in the past 20 years and companies such as Solix and the Vertigro algae system have used their expertise to take photobioreactors closer to economic reality. They replaced the rigid glass or plastic tubing with flexible film that can be manipulated and formed into tubes and pipes. In the case of Vertigro, the plastic was developed with the company’s suppliers to create a system that could stand up to years of exposure to the blazing Texas sun. The photobioreactors hang from racks while the algae culture is pumped through them. The current design calls for 20,000 bags in one-acre modules capable of producing 100,000 gallons of algae oil per year. “We have an operating prototype,” says Craig Harding, chief operating officer of Global Green. “It hasn’t been optimized for costs, energy utilization, hydraulics, etc. Those are the commercialization challenges. We are confident on the scale of it, that we can define a module that’s functional and that our scale up will be relatively simple because all we do is replicate that module. Engineering the module will be a pretty significant problem including the process control strategies and parameters that have to be defined.”
Solix completed its first-stage photobioreactor testing and is working on its second-generation pilot plant, says Doug Henston, the company’s chief executive officer. The company intends to build a demonstration-scale plant and use carbon dioxide from the New Belgium brewery in Fort Collins, Colo., as a nutrient for their algae culture. “We’re probably at version 2.6,” Henston says. “That reflects that we have engineering and design upgrades and improvements in control systems. With respect to New Belgium, we are moving forward with that. We are in the process of doing the required permitting and engineering. That’s on track for us for the first half of next year (2008). Other than that, we’ve been working hard on the biology and identifying strains and looking at oil production and getting some results that we’re pleased with.” He says the company has moved to model-based control systems that will reduce the need for equipment to monitor the state of the culture inside the photobioreactor. The company’s engineering team has also come up with lower-cost designs that will make the technology more competitive.
An Open Approach
Not every algae entrepreneur is pursuing the photobioreactor approach. Several prominent players continue to develop open-pond technology—usually in the form of a ring-shaped structure termed a “raceway.” Among these companies is PetroSun Drilling Inc., which announced a three-year plan to produce more than 2.5 billion gallons of algae oil a year. Another notable effort is being undertaken by Aquaflow Bionomics Corp. in New Zealand. Aquaflow plans to harvest wild algae growing in effluent ponds and to extract the oil for biodiesel.
Another innovative approach comes from New Mexico, where the Center of Excellence for Hazardous Material Management uses brine from saline aquifers to grow marine algae species thereby avoiding contamination by local freshwater algae species. “We have moved from lab bench-scale testing to pilot scale where we are doing proof of principal testing of several technologies we think are good candidates for commercializing the algae-to-biodiesel process,” says Ron Reeves, project manager for the CEHMM. “We have two one-eighth acre raceway ponds built and operational. We are in the final phases installing our harvest and extraction equipment for that pilot facility so soon we will be making algae at a fairly high rate of production.” The next stage in the process will be to analyze the information generated by the pilot-scale facilities. “We will be using that to evaluate both the energy and economic potential for this type of system,” he says. “By the end of June we expect to have good numbers on the economic feasibility of a larger-scale commercial facility using this technology. If it proves economically feasible then a lot of this data will be used for the next phase, the design and construction of a commercial-scale production facility. It won’t be a commercial facility but it will be commercial scale to demonstrate to the world that this scale of production will work.” The size of the commercial-scale facility would be about 100 acres.
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