Algae for Fuels and Chemicals
ID: 3935

Abstract: Steve Gluck

The unprecedented volatility of petroleum has placed pressure on the chemical industry to diversify to new sources for carbon feedstock. As a result, opportunities have emerged for non-traditional agricultural industries to feed emerging biofuel and bioproduct pipelines with renewable carbon. One opportunity is algae.

Algae have received a lot of attention as a potential biological option because of their independence from food production, and high productivity rates leading to serious speculation about their industry disrupting potential. Algae can be grown virtually anywhere, providing the flexibility to meet the geographical needs of chemical supply chains that address market demand rather than petroleum supply.

Companies are advancing research with the scale and economics of algae for fuel as targets. Chemical products are commonly seen as a derivative of the fuels’ value chain. Research is being invested to enhance algae biology with functionality tailored to the needs of the new value chain. New traits and technologies for developing optimized sources of biomass create the promise of a low cost raw material starting point. From these feedstock starting points, algae are capable of producing high-value materials (nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals), low-value commodities (e.g., bulk feed, oils and glycerol) and energy feedstock (fuels). These outputs can be altered with breeding and genetic engineering tools, in conjunction with thermochemistry, to produce surfactants, lubricants, polymers, esters, olefins, acids and alcohols. Whether any of these materials will be realized in the near future depends on technical breakthroughs to achieve competitive economic.

Historically, algae operations have started with the low volume and high margin opportunities in nutraceuticals. A migration to the high volume and low margin fuel opportunity passes through the specialty and bulk chemicals opportunity. For example, in 2005, global dried microalgae biomass production was 10,000 tons which is about 10% of what a single chemical manufacturing plant needs and is about 0.1% of a single oil refinery size. In addition, similar to chemical feedstocks, bioproducts have highly controlled, and usually consistent, compositions. The economic and scale barriers for chemical feedstocks, although daunting, may be less of a challenge than those for providing a fuel. Therefore, given the specificity of the product and the scale of the opportunity, it may make more sense to focus the algae industry effort towards chemical feedstocks before the fuels challenge is met.

However, there are significant barriers for algae as a newly introduced crop. Some of these barriers include:

Growth of algae to commodity scale

Land and water requirements

Nutrient requirements

Understanding the true CO2 sequestration amounts

Regulations

Introduction of a new crop and a new way of growing the crop

Energy Return versus Energy Input

Water and wastewater management

Extraction, isolation and purification of materials

Productivity and related growing area needs

Process monitoring and control or automation

Material supply chain

Materials of construction

Feedstock composition and downstream utility

Management of growth rate limiting factors

In summary, we have a long way to go, but there are good possibilities for new, large scale, algae opportunities. Scaling from low volume production through operations for chemical feedstocks to fuel may be the most achievable pathway.



Ben Cloud

A report on the operations of a commercial scale algae production system called Super Trough. Photos and production experiences of the project will be part of the presentation.

XL Renewables, Inc. has developed a revolutionary platform for the production of algae biomass that is economical and highly scalable based on proven components and processes. The Super Trough System is superior to known open pond/raceway systems and is expected to be adopted as the ideal for algae biomass production.

The Super Trough System provides a breakthrough in the barrier of production -vs.- capital cost to achieve a sustainable, large-scale supply of algae biomass. The agriculturally based production approach provides greater control of the production process, low labor requirements, mechanized operations, in-field harvest technology, and inoculation methods.

An emphasis will be placed on the knobs to turn for optimizing production to support downstream processes. Also the adaptability of the system to support biotech approached to algae variety development.



Dean Tsoupeis

The BioFence is a highly efficient and reliable method for producing high density monocultures of marine and freshwater algae. Algae can produce up to 33,000 gallons of lipid oil per acre a year.

Algal Lipid Oil Extraction Utilizing Ultrasonic Cavitation:

Culturing Solutions has developed a novel process to extract the oil from the algae. This is done with very low Kw consumption. This process is very GREEN in more ways than one, it utilizes the water that is remaining in the algae slurry as a solvent along with a reactor to rupture the cell walls releasing the lipids. The downstream process further separates the remaining Biomass, algae oil and water. From that point the oil may be dehydrated and is ready for transesterfication.

Algae protein is a complete protein and contains all branch chain amino acids. This protein is fit for human consumption and has very high nutritional value



Edward Legere

Changes in public opinion and government policy over the past ten years has led to an increasingly accelerated path to the taxation or cap and trade (C&T) of industrial waste CO2 in the major industrialized nations of the world. The debate about the humankind’s role in the causation of global warming, or even the very existence of global warming, will rage on for years to come. But, it appears that some form of waste carbon taxation or C&T is very likely in the near future. This reality and what to do about it is being discussed in corporate boardrooms across the industrialized world. Carbon taxation will start the development of a cost structure for the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, thus eliminating carbon’s “free ride”. This nascent cost structure will enable industrial companies to evaluate and compare, from a cost perspective, various means for dealing with CO2 emissions. Of course, the taxation of industrial waste carbon will generate many opportunities for companies that are developing technologies to capture, transport, sequester and recycle this carbon. Therefore, the birth of the multi-billion dollar “carbon recycling” industry has already begun.

Although carbon capture is currently feasible through a few industrial processes, it is not necessarily economically feasible for most industrial processes, especially those that have a low percentage of CO2 in their waste streams, such as electrical power generation from natural gas. Carbon capture and geologic sequestration is currently the most developed concept for industrial waste CO2 management. Currently, some natural gas and fertilizer plants capture, compress and sell their waste CO2 for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations throughout the US and world, thus turning a waste product into a revenue stream. For these industries, this “business model” is feasible, but this model works for only small fraction of the 44 million tons a year used for EOR, and an even smaller fraction of the 3000 million tons of U.S. CO2 emissions.

The EPA currently identifies 14,200 stationary CO2 emitters in the U.S. alone. It is relatively certain that as more human intellectual and financial resources are focused on this vexing problem, major technological breakthroughs will provide the means to capture CO2 from most industrial processes cost effectively. The result of such technological breakthroughs will be a massive “glut” of captured industrial waste CO2. Enhanced oil recovery will continue to be utilized as a way to sequester this CO2, but even planned EOR projects only predict the capacity to sequester 120 million tons of the industrial waste CO2 that will be captured. This leaves a massive opportunity for other means of “dealing” with the rest of the CO2, such as biologic sequestration or CO2 recycling. The most efficient means of CO2 biologic sequestration or recycling is to use the very same process that sequestered the CO2 in the first place, photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is the major energy starting point for biological processes on earth and is essentially a carbon recycling process through which inorganic carbon dioxide (CO2) is combined with solar energy, water, other nutrients and cellular biochemical processes to synthesize carbohydrates and other compounds critical to life. The most efficient biological organisms that perform photosynthesis are algae. Algae can survive, grow and reproduce with energy derived entirely from the sun. Algae have simple growth requirements, grow in salt water, grow to very high densities, and use light, CO2, and other inorganic nutrients very efficiently. In addition, blue green algae (cyanobacteria) are simple organisms that can be hybridized to create useful industrial compounds such as ethanol, other alcohols, and monomers, thus combining the process of photosynthesis directly to the production of common feedstocks used in the chemical and biofuels industries. Much like the bacteria E-coli is used in the production of enzymes and numerous other useful industrial compounds and Chinese Hamster Ovary cells are used in the production of proteins for pharmaceuticals, algae holds enormous potential to help solve one of the major problems of our times as well as become a platform for the efficient production of useful industrial compounds.







Moderator: Steven Tuttle, The Dow Chemical Company (United States)

Presenter 1: Opportunity and Assessments of Commodity Chemical Feedstocks From Algae
Steve Gluck, The Dow Chemical Company, (United States)  [Confirmed]

Presenter 2: Algae Biomass Profitability 
Ben Cloud, XL Renewables, Inc, (United States)  [Confirmed]

Presenter 3: Continuous Algae Production for Biofuels Feedstock and Protein Biomass for Animal and Human Consumption 
Dean Tsoupeis, Culturing Solutions, Inc, (United States)  [Confirmed]

Presenter 4 (if necessary): Comprehensive Industrial Waste CO2 Recycling through Algae Based Platforms 
Ed Legere, Algenol Biofuels Inc, (United States)  [Confirmed]

Panel Organizer:
Matthew Carr, Biotechnology Industry Organization, (United States)

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