Slime power: A technician monitors algae-to-ethanol bioreactors at an Algenol test facility. The company has teamed up with Dow Chemical to build a demonstration plant that could end up producing 100,000 gallons of ethanol annually. The photosynthetic algae turn sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into sugars that are synthesized into ethanol within the algae cells.
Algenol Biofuels
Startup Algenol partners with Dow Chemical on a demonstration ethanol plant.
Florida startup Algenol Biofuels says that it can efficiently produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands--a novel approach that has captured the interest and backing of Dow Chemical, the chemical giant based in Midland, MI.
The companies recently announced plans to build and operate a demonstration plant on 24 acres of property at Dow's sprawling Freeport, TX, manufacturing site. The plant will consist of 3,100 horizontal bioreactors, each about 5 feet wide and 50 feet long and capable of holding 4,000 liters.
The bioreactors are essentially troughs covered by a dome of semitransparent film and filled with salt water that has been pumped in 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.
There are dozens of companies in the market trying to produce biofuels from algae, but most to date have focused on growing and harvesting the microorganisms to extract their oil, and then refining that oil into biodiesel or jet fuel. Instead, Algenol has chosen 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.
Blue-green algae do produce small amounts of ethanol naturally, but only under anaerobic conditions when the cyanobacteria are starved or in the dark. Paul Woods, cofounder and chief executive of Algenol, says that his company has modified its algae so that it can produce ethanol under sunlight through photosynthesis, first by turning carbon dioxide and water into sugars, then by boosting and controlling the enzymes that synthesize those sugars into ethanol.
Another big difference for Algenol is that it doesn't have to harvest its algae to extract the ethanol, eliminating a step that has proved costly and complex for other algae-to-biofuel startups. John Coleman, chief scientific officer at Algenol and a professor of cell and system biology at the University of Toronto, says that the ethanol produced within the algae will seep out of each cell and evaporate into the headspace of the bioreactor.
ExxonMobil invests $300 million in Synthetic Genomics to develop algae biofuel.
Amyris's large-scale demonstration plant will make diesel from sugarcane.
An Israeli startup says that it has a cheap process to make biofuels from cellulosic materials.
Well, the point is that they can do three useful things with this technology:
1 - Sequester C02 industrial output
2 - Generate ethanol at a price point comparable to where we will be with cellulosic fermentation
3 - Desalinate salt water
While I agree that electric vehicles are where we are headed, and liquid fuels unecessary (at least for cars), this is still a very useful platform they have developed.
It brings up another interesting point - if they can sequester carbon into plastics, while desalinating water, then perhaps we should move back to non-biodegradeable plastics. Sure, it will litter the landfills permanently, but at least the carbon is out of the atmosphere.
Does anyone else here see a problem with scale? We're talking about 3100 tanks on 24 acres to produce 100k gallons. At that scale it would take 240,000 acres to produce 1 billion gallons of ethanol and 31 million of these tanks.
To produce food in the US, we use 94 million acres of farmland. My back of the napkin calculation says it takes .35 b bushels of corn /billion gallons of ethanol w/ an average of 183 bushels/acre == 1.9m acres/billion gallons of ethanol. 240k acres/billion gallons of ethanol doesn't sound bad to me (375 mi^2 or 971 km^2.) The land doesn't have to be arable land either - you just need access to sunlight and some kind of water source. Heck, it doesn't even *have* to be land at all, does it?
Compared to growing corn for ethanol, if the figures quoted in the article actually pan out, it sounds like a much better option from both an efficiency to produce standpoint, and number of acres to produce.
Yes, there are 3.7 million square miles in US.
http://www10.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=united+states
so 375 square miles is approx 1/10,000 th of the total land area.
Sounds good to me!
sequestering this as plastics can be expanded to ANY carbonaceous compounds. Carbon fibers are incredibly strong and a car panel made of carbon fiber weights only 20% that of metal equivalent.
I forsee that we will use the carbon compounds created this way in a huge variety of ways. Not only plastics but reinforcing fibers for concrete, carbon based or reinforced 'sheet rock', carbon girders for homes that are not only lighter than steel but don't rust and are more quake resistant possibly.
If we put carbon emitted into carbon materials then this could balance out CO2 in the atmosphere. With 3 teratons of Co2 in atmosphere, reducing it to the historic recent average of perhaps 2 teratons gives around a teraton or more that could be put into building materials for houses, planes, cars, bikes,, maybe even ships.
heck ships have been made of concrete, and fiberglass so carbon is a natural.
There are millions of square miles of useless land that can be used for these bio-reactor farms to be placed. The lands off the Salton Sea near San Diego offer access to the brackish for salt water (oil exploration tools could drill a "well" to the Gulf to get more), lots of bright sunny skies unfettered with towering sky scrapers and it's cheap! There are millions more acres south of Yuma too, but they're in Mexico's Sonora Desert on the bay. Building a pipeline from the shore area to Yuma would be pretty simple (except for the violent criminals controlling the border towns). We did this for OPEC, why not Mexico?
Besides, our Military could patrol this region of the world a heck of a lot more effectively than what we do in the Middle East, and the troops could drive home on weekends to relax!
I agree Eric - see my comments below on Yuma, Salton Sea and Mexico.
This is a much better solution than fuels derived from farm crops like corn, barley and other grains. Plus this produces fresh water that in itself is a much more valuable commodity.
Land use isn't the issue with algae bioreactors. The most difficult barrier to overcome is capital cost.
Comparing acres of cropland to acres of bioreactors doesn't address capital cost. It's cheap to scatter seeds over a 100 acres of land. The cost of building the bioreactors, pumps, plumbing and other systems to cover the same 100 acres is very high.
Story is missing the number that would make it interesting-- How efficient the algae is at converting sunlight to useful products? Answer is usually around 4%. Solar panels are 24%, so you don't want to do this for electricity. It makes sense if you need ethanol-- it should be way better than using corn and coal to make ethanol which is the primary way it is done now.
You don't want to do this long term for transportation fuel if you can use solar power to run electric cars though it could make sense as a range-extension fuel for a PHEV. The existing transportation fleet could be run longer with ethanol from this source until better vehicles can be built.
Note that you don't need land- you are using free sunlight. If you had a coal plant in Illinois with CO2 and free waste night-time electricity, and limited sunlight in the winter, it might make sense to supplement the sun with LED light tuned to match the algae's absorption spectrum. (No green light!)
Mr. Thermo punishes you if you try to use the electricity from a coal plant to undo its work to make C to CO2. But if you are "storing waste electricity with a big dispatchable load that produces ethanol" you may make peace with the gods of thermodyamics and economics.
FYI, compare this to Solzyme, that is one of the more effiicent algae to oil companies. I don't think they bother with light at all-- feeding cellulose to the algae.
I'm a big fan of renewable energy but at the risk of sounding a little naive, is it safe ecologically to make algae that can live in the oceans, thrive in sunlight, and secrete a toxin(ethanol) into the environment? It seems like one flood that breaches the facility could inoculate the ocean and create a self-sustaining oil slick--what are the risks and the controls to prevent this?
Risks of Ethanol secreting algae?
maybe they WOULD escape into the ocean with the next hurricane.
I guess the ocean would then end up like the Duffworld aquarium episode of the Simpsons where the fish are all swimming drunk in beer.
Then the phytoplankton might start producing alcohol instead of oxygen, collecting in the 'headspace' of the oceans, flooding the world's atmosphere.
Great way to die??? :)
I'm not a plant-guy, but here's my thoughts...
If they're let loose in the wild, these hybrid Algae strains may be a biological hazard (like kudzu is in the South), but I think this particular variety of algae is similar to the stuff that grows naturally in the Louisana Gulf area. Over millions of years, the natural occuring algae that grows in the gulf has settled on the bottom of the sea floor and built up the natural "oxegen-less" enviroment which spawns the process where the dead algae decays and leaves behind those petroleum reserves.
This variety appears to leave behind ethanol instead which is water soluable and would dilute in the oceans to the point it's not a hazard. I suspect that it would eventually evaporate into the air, so it may become a noxious pollutant or green house gas-like product in the atmosphere.
So the free byproduct of this process is fresh water? I'll take it, bottle it and sell it to the grocery stores. I'll call it "Algae Water". Hmmm, that doesn't sound to appetizing. Never mind.
I would like further clarification on the claim that one gallon of fresh water is created in the process using one gallon of sea water. If there is embedded in this effort an efficient way to turn salt water into potable water, that would be a much bigger story than creating ethanol. What is missing here?
Thats all good, but what happens when this little GM makes it out of the cage and into the open ocean - no more global warming.
Oops a single cell escapes into the ocean. After that wave action should push the ethanol, preferentially onto certain coastlines. Does ethanol float? Kaboom!! Or does it mix well with water? In which case we would have a totally dead ocean after about ten years. Except for the ethelalgea of course. About 30 years after that the atmosphere should be saturated with enough ethanol to cause total blindness in all mammals. Eventually most plant species will also go extinct. It being a hydrocarbon it is probably also an effective greenhouse gas. I guess we could live in hermetically sealed plastic domes, in Canada and northern Russia.
Someone please explain to me where I have erred in my logic. I really like this technology, except for the whole possible dead earth thing.
It is going to be a few years until the internal combustion engines are phased out so it will be a good thing we have algae to replaced gasoline pollutants.
You don't have to worry about the algae ending the world. It does not survive outside it's reactor and it is not harmful to humans. Once it's life cycle is over it can be used as fertilizer. You should check out Algenol's website.
http://www.algenolbiofuels.com/
fresh water from algae ethanol process
Using halophyte micro-algae is great and skipping the fermentation/distillation steps from what I understand is a giant leap, but how exactly is 1 gallon of water produced with 1 gallon of ethanol? Please enlighten me with the details. Thanks.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
johnsonha143
6 Comments
Ethanol from Algae
This is all fine and well, but what will we do with the ethanol? The article says that Dow plans to use the ethanol in the production of plastics, which is good as it will keep plastics cheap as oil goes out of favor.
My concern, however, is that we will try replace gas/oil in the internal combustion engine (ICE). The ICE is far too inefficient and should be replaced by the electric motor. Therefore, I would be a strong advocate of using the ethanol to run turbines to generate electricity.
My main fear is that cheap ethanol will interfere with the conversion of our transportation infrastructure from ICEs to electric motors. THIS CAN NOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN! Electric motors are far more efficient than the ICE and we should vigorously pursue this conversion!
HJ
WALDORF, MD
Reply
bertibus06
1 Comment
Re: Ethanol from Algae
The engine itself may be more efficient, but everything else in the chain is not - and by a long way.
In addition, bio-fuels will be needed for other forms of transportation such as aviation where the weight and energy retention capacity of batteries renders them useless.
When things change, we can, as you suggested, burn the artificially produced fuel to create electricity.
Reply
MakeSense
99 Comments
Re: Ethanol from Algae
The "well-to-wheel" efficiency of electric vehicles is purported to be about 77% by NREL; whereas the same metric for ICEs is about 16%. Electricity is efficiently transported with about 7% losses on average.
Even though conversion of chemical energy in coal to electrical energy is only about 35% efficient, production, refinement and distribution of refined gasoline is about the same at 45% efficiency.
The huge advantage to electric vehicles is the roughly 90% efficiency of electric motors at producing work from electricity compared to about 20% for ICEs using hydrocarbons.
That being said, efficiency matters less when an energy product is abundant. We rarely cared about efficiency when oil stocks were sky high. If this ethanol could be produced cheaply in vast quantities, then it might save us all a lot of effort and expense in converting to electric vehicles. Algae has the "potential" to produce truly vast amounts of diesel and ethanol fuels.
It would be impractical to produce electricity from biodiesel or bioethanol, simply because they are already useful - and likely expensive - energy products. Only 35% of the energy would become electricity after much initial energy expenditure.
I'd like to see electric vehicles take over as the best way to reduce dependence on oil. Afterall, over 40% of oil has non-highway uses, which will grow another 35% by 2030. If we eliminated oil use for highway transportation, we would still import over 60% of our 2030 oil. Perhaps algal diesel and ethanol can offset industrial, residential and commercial needs (nominally) for oil.
Reply
kstauff
130 Comments
Re: Ethanol from Algae
While I agree with you on the electric motor's efficiency at converting electrical energy to mechanical energy, I still see a place for ICE's in series hybrid vehicles like the Volt. If an ICE can be used to turn a generator in an optimal power band, then it can run far more efficiently than if it is used as the vehicles power plant directly. This arrangement allows for all of the benefits of electric propulsion (torque, braking recovery) with the benefit of energy dense fuel that can extend the range of the vehicle.
Reply
HowieSeattle
1 Comment
Re: Ethanol from Algae
Think fuel cells. Ethanol is a prime candidate for use in fuel cells.
Like it or not liquid fuels are here to stay.
On top of that this Algae seems to grow in Salt water, meaning you can put these farms on floating platforms and not only produce fuel, but Fresh water, which is something that So. Cal. needs badly. This technology seems to be the Hat Trick of biofuels.
Doesn't compete with food crops
Makes Fresh Water
Provides Ethanol and at a reasonable price.
Reply