This is interesting...
Want alternative energy? Try pond scum
By Clifford Carlsen
news.com.com
Story last modified Wed Dec 27 04:00:03 PST 2006
Mounting concern about U.S. dependence on foreign oil and about global warming is causing a surge of interest and investment in biomass, hydrogen, solar power and other alternative energy sources.
But bubbling beneath the surface of this wave--in more ways than one--is a technology that, while lacking an existing market or powerful lobby to advance its profile, may soon emerge as the most promising source of portable liquid fuels and that can offer unique environmental benefits to the electrical generation industry.
Refiners are not committed to any feedstock source, and the market will determine what is successful, but 10 to 15 years from now it is hard to imagine that algae won't be a dominant source of oil for biodiesel.
--Bill Dommermuth, plant manager, Seattle Biodiesel We are talking pond scum, or algae, a plant that for decades has been prized as a possible commodity crop based on its unparalleled ability to photosynthesize solar energy into plant biomass for food. Unlike most plants, algae shares characteristics of bacteria, and its photosynthetic machinery operates much faster in converting inorganic substances into organic matter. And while plants require a lot of fuel to sow and harvest and additional fertilizer and fresh water to nourish, algae can be continuously harvested from closed water-based bioreactors that require little additional replenishment other than inorganic fuel supplied in the form of waste gas.
New research suggests algae may prove even more important as a source of energy than as food. Indeed, to the growing industry of biodiesel and ethanol refiners accustomed to treating biomass and the lipids derived from it as faceless commodities, algae looks like green gold.
"Refiners are not committed to any feedstock source, and the market will determine what is successful, but 10 to 15 years from now it is hard to imagine that algae won't be a dominant source of oil for biodiesel," says Bill Dommermuth, plant manager for Seattle Biodiesel, an emerging leader in the production of biodiesel fuel whose parent, Imperium Renewables, has raised $10 million in venture capital from such investors as Nth Power, Technology Partners and Vulcan Capital.
"Right now we're using soybean oil, because canola is more expensive," Dommermuth adds. "Soybeans can give you 50 to 60 gallons of oil an acre compared to 75 to 125 gallons for canola, but algae is almost limitless because it grows so fast, so potentially you could get 10,000 gallons per acre."
But while corn, soybeans, canola and other common food crops have drawn the greatest public interest in biomass as a source of fuel, those commodities have been championed by a nexus of growers, processors, brokers and powerful lobbying groups looking to boost the value of existing crops by developing alternative uses for excess capacity and waste byproducts. Algae has few such advocates, and market demand has yet to materialize.
That's where alternative energy promoters and their ecology movement allies find common cause. It turns out the best sources of fertilizer for growing algae are the very greenhouse gases of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone that electrical power generators are under increasing pressure to reduce and the animal wastes that are increasingly becoming a problem for industrial-scale livestock operations. A handful of start-up companies and countless academic programs are exploring ways to divert gases linked to global warming or animal wastes into systems for growing algae, which can then be processed into ethanol and biodiesel.
Michael Briggs, laboratory manager at the University of New Hampshire Physics Department, admits that for investors it is daunting to risk large amounts of capital on an emerging technology with no immediate market, noting that large bioreactors covering multiple acres of ponds closed to the open air are expensive to build. But he argues that the advantages of biodiesel as a portable fuel are so overwhelming compared with other new alternative energy technologies that algae will prevail as the chief source of feedstock. He also says that, unlike seed oils and corn, algae would never compete with food crops for agricultural land, as the best locations for algae farms would likely be in desert areas unsuitable for crops or grazing.
Science vs. commercial return
Briggs estimates that the U.S. would require roughly 141 billion gallons of biodiesel to replace the 60 billion gallons of petroleum diesel and 120 billion gallons of gasoline now used in U.S. vehicles. The savings from not having to shift vehicles and fueling infrastructure to an entirely new type of fuel would easily favor biodiesel, which can comprise 20 percent of a mixture with petroleum diesel with no modifications to current diesel-powered vehicles whatsoever, and 100 percent with minor modifications, he says. Briggs also says that diesel engines are well suited for hybrid vehicles operating on both liquid fuel and electricity.
Briggs spent much of the past five years trying to obtain funding to design bioreactors to grow algae with either electrical power plant waste gas or animal waste. But while investors recognize the compelling science behind such technology, he says, they believe it remains several years away from commercial viability.
As a result, Briggs has since turned his attention to landing research grants to advance the technology and to improving algae-based processing and refining. Still, he is confident that a combination of rising oil costs and government environmental and energy incentives will improve the viability of algae as a fuel source, noting that corn and soybean production depends largely on such federal subsidies.
"With incentives, it doesn't need to be as profitable as other sources to begin with--we have to set the bar lower," Briggs says. "The capital costs are much higher than some other things, but the ongoing processing costs could be much lower when you don't have to drive a tractor over a field, or water a crop or rotate crops."
Start-ups that have sought or received funding for algae fuel development include SunSource, XL Tech Group and Algae BioFuels. But the most successful has been GreenFuel Technologies, which developed its product at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company has raised about $20 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Polaris Venture Partners to develop a business model for licensing, developing and operating algae-based biofuel plants in partnership with power generation facilities.
From three to hundreds of acres
GreenFuel CEO Cary Bullock, an energy industry veteran who joined GreenFuel in February 2005, says that business model is anchored in the rising demand for alternative liquid fuels.
"I knew what algae was and that it was the fastest-growing plant, but I didn't really think about the quantification," he says. "People have been making biodiesel out of bean oil for a while and ethanol from corn, but what algae can do compared to other plants is all based on how much you can grow very quickly."
GreenFuel's technology was developed by founder and chief technology officer Isaac Berzin at MIT. The company has built a prototype plant on a rooftop at the institute that pumps greenhouse gas wastes from the school's 20-megawatt cogeneration plant through pipes containing a mixture of algae and water. The system has cut greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 82 percent while accelerating algae growth so that the associated biomass doubles in a couple of hours.
With its initial venture funding, GreenFuel has scaled that pilot project up to a three-acre bioreactor adjacent to an undisclosed utility power generation plant in the Southwest. The company hopes soon to announce plans for a large commercial installation covering hundreds of acres with its partner in the project or with another utility. GreenFuel also has teamed with energy giant NRG Energy to make further headway in recycling carbon dioxide using algae.
Meanwhile, biologists and other scientists are working to extend the already enormous value of algae as biomass. Tasios Melis, a professor of enzymology at the University of California at Berkeley, has created genetically modified strains of algae that speed growth rates of naturally occurring algae and increase its hydrocarbon content, which could boost the biodiesel yield of bioreactors from 10,000 gallons per acre to 20,000 gallons or more.
Melis originally developed the supercharged algae as a way of improving the harvest of hydrogen as a fuel source, and he believes its long-term benefits are greatest in developing clean-burning hydrogen as a ubiquitous energy source. But Melis says genetic information on hydrogen production could enable development of algae for specific types of fuel.
"The potential is really superior to natural algae," Melis says. "It is essentially a problem of biology, but we have a blueprint and I'm confident it can be done."
As far as commercial development is concerned, GreenFuel is counting on being able to soon license its technology to others and to generate research revenue through partnerships such as the one it has with NRG, which is working along with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to study carbon dioxide recycling. But, ultimately, the company expects to generate revenue from developing and operating biofuel plants, and it acknowledges that building facilities costing from $40 million to $60 million will require specialized project financing, such as tax credits and incentives for greenhouse gas remediation.
Bob Metcalfe, a partner with Polaris Venture Partners and a veteran technologist as the original inventor of Ethernet in the 1970s says he invested in GreenFuel, on whose board he sits, after identifying it as a promising early-stage company emerging from a noted academic research lab.
"First and foremost, it's an MIT spin-off, and it's my job to hang around MIT and look for cool technology," Metcalfe says. "And there's no cooler company I can think of than GreenFuel, where you actually feed the pollutants in to grow biomass for fuel. If it makes any sense to use corn as a feedstock for ethanol when you have one crop or maybe two a year, why not algae for biodiesel when you can harvest two or three crops a day?"
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