Novel Algae Fuel-Farming Method Gets Big Backing

Al writes "Dow Chemical has given its backing to a Florida startup called Algenol Biofuels that hopes to produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands. Dozens of companies are trying to produce biofuels from algae, mostly by growing and harvesting the microorganisms to extract their oil. Algenol has chosen instead to genetically enhance certain strains of blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, to convert as much carbon dioxide as possible into ethanol using a process that doesn't require harvesting to collect the fuel. Algenol's bioreactors are troughs covered by a dome of semitransparent film and filled with salt water that has been pumped in straight from the ocean. The photosynthetic algae growing inside are exposed to sunlight and fed a stream of carbon dioxide from Dow's chemical production units. The goal is to produce 100,000 gallons of ethanol annually."

Comments

Awesome to hear!

[electrosoccertux]

Lets just hope the corn lobby doesn't catch wind of this...

Re:Awesome to hear!

[religious freak]

My first question after reading TFS is where these little buggers go after the salt water is pumped in. Presumably, the salt water is pumped out at some point in time. ... Oh, don't worry, I'm sure they filter them out after returning them to the ocean - yeah somehow I highly doubt it.

I agree this type of stuff is the least worst choice, but something about genetically modified bacteria designed to produce fuel, in the ocean gives me the creeps.

Re:Awesome to hear!

[Anonymous Coward]

If what you said were true, they wouldn't be able to use unprocessed ocean water as the algae already in that water would outcompete and kill off the bioengineered algae in the farm.

Sources of Ethanol

[Frigga's Ring]

Good for Dow. It's probably about time some company jumped on this. I'm just waiting for one of the big oil companies to shut them down so they can go back to using expensive corn crops for ethanol. I mean, corn? Really? Couldn't they have come up with anything more costly that produces less ethanol? Oh! Coming in 2015 from Shell: puppy ethanol!

Re:Sources of Ethanol

[tsotha]

The use of corn has less to do with oil companies than it has to do with pork barrel politics in farm states. Biodiesel will probably never be competitive with fossil fuels on a purely economic basis, so it's hard to believe the oil companies care.

$1.25 a gallon?

[AnotherBlackHat]

... using a process that doesn't require harvesting to collect the fuel.

Most of the reasonable plans I've read involve growing algae in ponds, sucking it up, and running it through a press (rather like an olive press)
The expensive part of the operation isn't the press - it's the pond.
As I recall, NREL recommended holes in the ground lined with plastic, and the pond was still the most expensive part.

$1.25 a gallon is about twice the spot price for methanol, and $1.25 isn't what they can do, it's what they hope they can do eventually.

Color me unimpressed.

Re:$1.25 a gallon?

[hey!]

I'd say that $1.25/gallon is pretty impressive, given the scale they're talking about, which is tiny. 100,000 gallons of ethanol/year? Production plants being built today have anything from one hundred to, in one case one thousand times that capacity.

Why do people build big plants? To achieve economies of scale. If you built a back yard reactor that produced a thousand gallons of ethanol per year at a cost of $1.25, that would be darn impressive. Clearly, this thing is a model.

Re:$1.25 a gallon?

[tsotha]

$1.25 a gallon is about twice the spot price for methanol, and $1.25 isn't what they can do, it's what they hope they can do eventually.

But remember they're using C02 as an input to the process. If cap and trade goes through this would allow them to sell or avoid buying carbon credits for other processes. I think C02 is a relatively common by-product in industrial chemistry. $1.25 isn't too bad if the cost of one of the inputs is negative.

Also, don't underestimate the value of a continuous process. The big knock on batch processing isn't the cost of the press, but rather the complication (and cost) it adds to scaling the process. It's the biggest reason we see all those little pilot projects that seem promising but never go anywhere.

Where's the downside?

[Gre7g]

So, we could hook up the CO2 exhaust from a coal-fired plant, use that to grow algae, and then turn algae into fuel? And as a "dreadful" side-effect, we get clean water from sea water?

Greenhouse gas reduction, renewable fuel, and fresh water...

Why aren't we focusing everything we have on such a process? It sounds too good to be true.

Re:Where's the downside?

[afidel]

Yes, but if we get twice as many useful BTU's per ton of CO2 we have effectively halved our CO2 output.

Re:Where's the downside?

[CodeShark]

As another poster has noted, reusing the carbon once and reburning it halves the carbon consumption. But when you clean burn an alcohol based fuel, what do you get? Water and Carbon Dioxide. Meaning that you now have two of the three inputs into the fuel cycle, and if you only recycle the carbon dioxide one more time that makes the net carbon hit only a fourth of what it would be from coal fired, etc.

Meaning that given the solar input which drives the algae to produce anyway, that if scalable this seems like it could be a game changer. Here's why: That 100,000 gallons per year [if I calculated this correctly] translates to about around 100KW per of round the clock power. Since most cities and towns have folks that mostly sleep at night, call it double that for the daylight hours and half or a third after most folks go to bed. That's not a bad chunk of power -- for one location -- at the pilot plant size.

The unanswered questions for me in the article are this: given the assumption that scalability were achievable, how much outside the system energy expense is required to operate the system anyway, and how many years would it take the fuel value to pay for a fuel plant both in terms of actual monetary investment and the actual power required to build the thing in the first place?

Re:Where's the downside?

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Don't be so dismissive of bio-fuels. Remember that the purpose of bio-fuel is to replace fossil fuels, and the CO2 that goes with burning them. That advantage holds true here as well. Yes, the carbon is released when the bio-fuels are burned. But (CO2 from industrial process into atmosphere plus CO2 from fossil fuel into atmosphere) > (CO2 from industrial process made into bio-fuel, then burned and released into atmosphere) You aren't just moving around carbon production, you're also producing a lot less of it. To take your CO2 shell game analogy, before, the shell game had a ball under 2 shells, now it's just under 1.

If you read the article, page 2 also mentions using the ethanol to replace fossil fuels in the production of plastics, which would be carbon-negative.

Re:Where's the downside?

[hador_nyc]

It sounds too good to be true.

It is. The CO2 from the coal-fired plant would not go away. It would be converted into ethanol and then released back as CO2 when the ethanol was burned.

The reason some people are so excited about bio-fuels is they are supposedly "carbon neutral." They take CO2 out of the atmosphere, then release it back when burned. If one were to use CO2 from coal combustion instead, then the CO2 stored in the alcohol is coming out of the ground. In other words, inserting algae into the coal -> atmosphere chain does not change the carbon balance, only interrupts it.

It is possible that adding algae into the chain could make energy production more efficient (more joules of energy per ton of total CO2 emissions) and may still be worth doing.

My concern is that the coal plant owner would convince the general public (who by and large do not understand such basic scientific laws as conservation of mass) that their CO2 is a "green energy source" and therefore should not be taxed/capped as a greenhouse gas. In other words, using coal exhaust to feed the algae is basically playing a shell game -- "which one has the CO2 under it now?"

The point to remember is that bio-fuels do not provide a net benefit to CO2 reduction. Ever. They're simply carbon neutral or approximately so.

You're wrong, at least partially. The ethanol does not displace extra electricity production, but could displace extra oil production. Think of it this way. Right now there are A LOT of coal plants. They aren't going anywhere any time soon. Hooking them up to this to make lots of ethanol would enable us to displace a lot of oil that is currently being burned in cars. So, this CO2 does get "burned" twice, but it does save the CO2 from the gallons of gasoline that are not being burned, but would have been if we hadn't done this.

I love how the environmentalist scream here

[Anonymous Coward]

They finally get what they claim they want.
Cleaning the environment while producing fuel and fresh water.
Yet from the reaction, you'd think someone is trying to destroy the planet.
If anyone has any doubt left that radical environmentalists are for crippling the economy rather than saving the planet, read the first post in the article. The guy laments that this must not impede the phasing out of the Internal Combustion Engine...
So sad...

Ding!

[Gary W. Longsine]

Got it, in one! Bioengineering is potentially dangerous. Various analogs of the "grey goo" problem are a real bioengineering risk today, and we're not ready to deal with it any more than the far future hypothetical nano-engineering risk. Corporations, by default, will be inclined to ignore risks like this, and it's not clear how to effectively regulate it. Think the financial crisis was a problem? Wait until we make our first major screw up with bioengineering.

For the record, I think that this type of ethanol production has the potential to replace oil for transportation. We need to make sure we invest properly in risk investigation and management, so we don't completely wreck the biosphere in some disastrous new way, in the process.

Re:Water/Coastal towns, sewage, animal feed?

[Zerth]

I'm sure the EPA or other agency has an "allowable salinity" restriction on water dumped into the ocean. If it is less than, say, double the normal salinity, they'll probably just stick it back in the ocean.

Otherwise, they'll probably sell it as "Organic sea salt, purified by cute widdle ocean organisms".

Re:from a 24 acre demonstration plant

[afidel]

100 barrels per acre per year is NOT at ALL promising! To produce the current US consumption you would need ~137K square miles. For reference that would require the entire east coast be filled to ~55 miles inland.