Algae to the rescue

mheslep

Quote by Ivan Seeking

When the oil or biomass is burned, the CO2 is returned to the system in the form of exhaust gasses to be absorbed by the next batch of algae.

Oh that system, the big system, sure.

Ivan Seeking

Quote by mheslep

Oh that system, the big system, sure.

Hey, we only think big around here!

To me the idea of using algae for the remediation of coal gasses is a bit ironic considering that we might be able to replace the coal with algae and close the loop.

Ivan Seeking

Quote by mheslep

Perhaps that is one of benefits of Venter's claim in this announcement that he has created a strain that directly ejects the lipids into the solution instead of self containing the lipds inside the cell. Once in the solution the lipids should be separable from the water without destroying the crop, that is, the water and algae stays in place while the energy containing lipids are siphoned off.

If true, that is huge because it would not only eliminate the step of separating the algae from the water, but also removing the oil from the algae. Separating oil from water is relatively easy. Also, depending on the doubling time of the algae, it could drastically improve the rate of production per acre. Some of the best oil producers are also slow growing. For example, the "Algae 101" strain, Botryococcus Braunii, which has reportedly been measured at 80% oil by weight in one case, has a doubling rate of something like once every two or three days. Other strains with low oil yields - say 15% oil by weight - can have a doubling rate of one every few hours.

Interestingly, one scientist claims that no matter what strain is considered, the rate of oil production [for good oil producers] is nearly a constant, which may make sense from an energy standpoint. But there is no doubt that growing the stuff from a pure culture is a limiting factor for continuous production.

mheslep

Here's only blurb available on the SGI site regarding the synthetic strain:

Current methods to produce fuel from algae include processes that resemble farming. Algal cells are grown, harvested, and then bioprocessed to recover the lipids from within the cells. In contrast, in one of our solutions, SGI has engineered algal cells to secrete oil in a continuous manner through their cell walls, thus facilitating the production of algal fuels and chemicals in large-scale industrial operations. Our first product in this area is a biocrude to be used as a feedstock in refineries.

http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/wha...ablefuels.html

mheslep

Here's a particularly articulate explanation of the state of algae technology and barriers to exploitation from the venture capitalist guru Khosla:

General business model goals for any tech business:

—Relevant cost. Energy technologies are only scalable if they’re competitive without subsidies in places like China and India (what he calls the “Chindia price”)

—A scaling model. The technology’s growth has to be exponential and highly distributed (”we saw this in the Internet,” he says).

—Low adoption risk. “The only thing that solves the carbon-reduction problem in transportation is a liquid fuel-based solution,” he says. Something like hydrogen fuel requires too much development in infrastructure to make it go mainstream.

And algae specifically:

So why hasn’t he invested in algae yet? Khosla first gave his broader “venture rules of investing.” First, a company should “attack manageable but material problems.” Second, its technology should achieve “unsubsidized competitiveness”—which in the case of algae, would be prices competitive with oil prices of around $50 per barrel. Third, the tech has to scale to large numbers of users, and have declining costs with scale. And fourth, it should have “manageable startup costs and short innovation cycles. He pointed out that algae satisfies all of the above (”I can do a new strain of algae in 6 months”), except for the cost competitiveness.

Looking ahead, Khosla said, “To predict the future, invent it. It’s not what it is, it’s what it can be.” He proceeded to give a detailed reality check for algae, in that it is competing with things like biomass methods for producing ethanol and oil. Calculating a theoretical maximum output of 2000 to 6000 gallons of oil per acre per year for algae (based on solar energy availability and current conversion systems), he said, “Algae clearly has the potential to have very high miles driven per acre, but today it’s pretty low.”

Adding up the production costs for algae-based fuels—carbon dioxide, harvesting, containment, and energy, as well as systems to move, mix, and add light to the plants— he concluded, “I think algae can get above biomass in total gallons per acre, but the reason we haven’t invested is we haven’t believed the plans we’ve seen so far meet the [cost] criteria.”

To break through, Khosla advised pursuing “black swans,” technical approaches from outside the realm of traditional experience, with game-changing impact. “The strategy is more at-bats, more shots on goal,” he said. “Most of your approaches will fail, but a few will succeed. You will build from each others’ experience, and get better and better.” The examples of possible black swans he gave were companies like Algenol Biofuels (ethanol-producing algae) and Sapphire (oil-producing algae), and the idea of ocean farming for algae.

As for advice to startups in the space, Khosla said, “Don’t try to get to market quickly with a small improvement. Even a good process isn’t good enough, you have to be truly great to compete. That’s the right vein to build an algae company. I’d say we need to work on more fundamental breakthroughs in algae…Take your time, don’t be in a hurry where you’ll reduce your technical risk, but increase your market risk. Take two more years and do the research. The day you have good fuel out of algae that’s cost-effective, it’ll get into the market.”

Ivan Seeking

Obviously Exxon sees it a little differently.

Ivan Seeking

While there were and are a good number of practical engineering challenges for algae-fuel production, as far as I know, there is one and only one reason why we didn't do this long ago: The price of crude was too low.

When the Aqautic Species Program concluded, http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24190.pdf it was estimated that biodiesel from algae might be competitive when diesel was over $2 per gallon. At that time, diesel was about $1 per gallon. Now that the price of crude has a floor near or above the critical threshold for biodiesel to be competitive with petrodiesel, we are seeing a growing interest in viable alternatives to crude oil.

I have yet to see any alternative that offers the range of benefits found in using algae derived biodiesel as our primary energy source. After studying this option for about six months, I began to see that it is truly the elegant solution to our energy problems:

1). Does not need to compete with food crops
2). Does not need to use fresh water
3). Highest energy conversion rate of any plant [with qualifer stated earlier]
4). Greatest yield per acre-yr of any biofuel option
5). About 1.6 times the energy density of ethanol, and as good as gasoline
6). High lubricity of biodiesel allows for more efficient operation of engine [as seen in the Boeing test flight]
7). Diesel engines are about 1.4 times more efficient than internal combustion enginers
8). CO2 neutral
9). Clean diesel cars are already sold in Europe. The Honda diesel gets better mileage than the Honda hybrid. The proof in in the pudding!
10). Compatible with existing energy infrastructure.
11). The conversion to a biofuel economy can be implemented relatively quickly
12). Algae can be used to produce diesel, ethanol, and Hydrogen. So the development of algae technologies could be a stepping stone to a Hydrogen Economy.
13). Having a value of ~ $600 Billion annually - money sent to foreign oil suppliers - a domestic algae program would eliminate at least 60% of the trade deficit [depending on the current price of crude].
14). Can be used to remediate CO2 as well as toxic and other waste products from agriculture, industry, and municipalities.
15). While not necessary, it could be scaled-up to provide 100% of the required energy for the world.

mheslep

Quote by Ivan Seeking

Obviously Exxon sees it a little differently.

Now. The Khosla speech was last October. Khosla said earlier in that same talk that he'd looked at 100 algae plans, so he clearly recognized the potential, but had yet to find anybody to carry the ball across the finish line, a line he defines clearly. No one else was giving money to Algae either last year. But this summer, we suddenly have the algae bloom of Dow Chemical, Solazyme, etc, and now Exxon/SGI.

Ivan Seeking

The problem that I saw that led to my own efforts was that far too many people were taking high-tech, high-cost-per-unit-area approaches in the form of exotic bioreactors. In some cases it was nothing more than a scam. In others, the people developing the systems didn't have even a fundamental understanding of the limits on production as determined by the solar energy input. In others, it was impossible to know because the information was proprietary. The bottom line is that the cost per unit area for the bioreactor must be very low. In my own plan, I was driven to a price of less than $1000 per acre with a three-year life for the hardware, in order to be competitive at around $3 per gallon [retail]. But this was for a fresh-water, land-based system, and assumed only traditional methods of production and the known strains of algae at that time. Needless to say, this required some very innovative approaches to bioreactor designs.

I think there is little doubt that closed, batch systems, are the way to go. At the least, we know that contamination problems in open systems are generally prohibitive to that approach. The only exception may be when indiginous and dominant strains are acceptable oil producers. But even then, there is no way to be certain that an existing strain, say in a lake, won't be replaced by another or simply die off. Also, strains can mutate quickly. Apparently there are effectively algae wars in the wild, in which each strain mutates until one has an advantage and displaces the other.

Probably one of the best ideas that we came across was that of using batch bags, if you will, that are suspended in water; say for example, in the ocean. This all but eliminates the problems of temperature regulation and contamination.

mheslep

Quote by Ivan Seeking

...The bottom line is that the cost per unit area for the bioreactor must be very low. In my own plan, I was driven to a price of less than $1000 per acre with a three-year life for the hardware, in order to be competitive at around $3 per gallon [retail]. But this was for a fresh-water, land-based system, and assumed only traditional methods of production and the known strains of algae at that time. Needless to say, this required some very innovative approaches to bioreactor designs. ...

Yes, needless to say. I can't imagine a material or method of any kind that could enclose an acre for $1000. Perhaps there's something that amortizes out to $1000 per year over its lifetime.

Ivan Seeking

It is possible, but just barely. It took months to come up with something that might be mangeable. Part of the solution was to recognize the value of innovative land preparation. Would it have worked? It worked well at small scale, but things fell apart [financing] before we got any farther. My best hope for a major investor just went bankrupt due to the economy - he was heavily dependent on the auto industry.

Some designs out there can't even hope to be competitive until the price of fuel reaches $15 to $25 per gallon, retail.

However, if the processing costs can be reduced as in the example you gave [no need for dewatering or oil extraction], the cost per unit area can be increased signficantly. This because there are both high startup costs as well as high operating costs for the processing equipment.

One real advantage to using ocean-based systems, beyond the issue of water, is that the cost of land evaporates!

PRDan4th

Why not just harvest kelp and other natural occurring algaes in open ocean or tideland areas and process in land based plants. Use solar energy to dry the kelp then process to extract the oils and other combustible components. I grew up in Southern California and saw kelp harvesting all the time. I think they were after Iodine and soda ash, but I'm sure there are a good source of energy products even methane. This would solve the land and water problem.

mheslep

Quote by PRDan4th

... but I'm sure there are a good source of energy products even methane. This would solve the land and water problem.

Why are you sure? Do you have a rough estimate as to how much a mass produced barrel of kelp oil or ethanol would cost to make?

Ivan Seeking

To the best of my knowledge, as for kelp, there is absolutely no evidence that would work. Also, as stated earlier, most wild algae strains tend to be poor producers of oil. This in turn means that the processing costs [dollars and energy] would be exceedingly high for each gallon of oil. While it may be possible to use wild strains of algae as biomass for the generation of electrical power [burned directly], this has yet to be demonstrated. Only in very rare cases would an indiginous and dominant wild strain be appropriate for oil production.

Ivan Seeking

About the Exxon numbers: I just noticed in another news release that they claim corn ethanol produces 250 gallons per acre-year. This is almost certainly a net yield - includes the energy required for processing - not the gross yield, which is normally cited as being 400 gallons per acre-year. If we assume the same is true for their number for algae - 2000 gallons per acre-year as a net yield - then that is about what I would expect as well. While I think there is reasonable hope for higher numbers over time, for now, 2000 GPAY net is probably reasonable.

All in all, an order of magnitude better than corn is a good start.

baywax

Thank you for keeping on these developments Ivan!

joelupchurch

According to the calculations by Dr. David JC MacKay in his book "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air", it looks like CO₂ enriched algae is about 20 times better than corn based ethanol per square meter. The numbers were:

Bioethanol from corn: 0.2W/m²
Bioethanol from sugar cane: 1.2W/m²
CO₂ Enriched Algae Biodiesal: 4W/m²

The calculations are on pages 284-285

You can download the whole book here:
http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html
Or go straight to the html page here:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/w...page_284.shtml

The printed version actually says 0.02 for corn but there is a errata entry in the html version that says:

Page 284 Bioethanol section: "0.02 W/m**2" should be "0.2 W/m**2".

To make this section more informative I would rewrite
it thus:

1 acre produces 122 bushels of corn per year, which makes
122 x 2.6 US gallons of ethanol, which at 84000 BTU per gallon would
mean a power per unit area of {0.2 W/m^2}; however, the energy
inputs required to process the corn into ethanol amount to
83,000 BTU per gallon; so 99% of the energy produced is used up by
the processing, and the net power per unit area is about
{0.002 W/m^2}. The only way to get significant net power from the
corn-to-ethanol process is to ensure that all co-products are
exploited; including the energy in the co-products, the net power per
unit area is about 0.05 W/m^2.

Similar Threads for: Algae to the rescue
Thread	Forum	Replies
Algae: The Next Biofuel	Earth	0
Algae To Biodiesel	Biology	20
Algae and pH value	Biology	2
algae	Biology	3
Algae?	Biology	6

Ivan Seeking Recognitions: Gold Member Science Advisor Staff Emeritus	Obviously Exxon sees it a little differently.

baywax Recognitions: Gold Member	Thank you for keeping on these developments Ivan!