“Green needs to show economy.”
This is why Eckelberry is so excited about MBD and the use of algae for carbon capture.
In the Money TV February 4th interview, he and Goodall talk honestly about the need to scale up the algae process and about the difficulties and the time and effort needed to do this. And Eckelberry now believes that, through carbon capture, the polluters will fund this effort.
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Q. Now, Riggs, of course in a previous program you were talking about carbon capture, and I understand before coming on the program that there was an event up in Canada that caused some concern. Tell us about that.
RE. Well, I shouldn’t be smiling because it’s actually a disastrous event. The Weyburn carbon storage project in Saskatchewan, has started to release all the CO2 that they pumped into these underground reservoirs, making explosive sounds, contaminating soil and water, asphyxiating small animals, and frightening farmers. This is what happens when you try to store CO2 back in the ground. It eventually leaks back out.
Q. Sure.
RE. And so if anything made that point, we’ve got to do it biologically, take the CO2 from these fossil fuel polluters and turn it into beneficial products like algae and not just throw it back in the ground.
Q. Absolutely. I mean it seems like for many, many years we’ve tried to bury our problems, and bury our waste. And we have to think of a different way to deal with that.
RE. Exactly right. What’s very important about this bio-capture concept is that it gives us a big financial impetus at the start of the whole process. Algae industry’s got to work out the whole transformation thing. We play in extraction, and of course there’s the end products, which Brian, as the former VP of Downstream Processing at Sapphire knows full well, is a big science all by itself. But the financial impetus from the fossil fuel polluters that need this help sucking up the CO2 is going to build these huge algae plants.
Q. Now as we’ve mentioned on the program before, we’ve seen especially, I would say, in the last year an entirely new focus on algae. We’ve seen large oil companies buying TV time to talk about algae. We have also seen that there are many more things that we know can now be done with algae that we didn’t even know a couple of years ago. What do we expect to see in the coming months, in 2011? What’s on tap for OriginOil?
RE. What’s on tap for us really is to complete proving ourselves in the field. We’ve got a chance here to scale up with our big partner in Australia, that’s really the most aggressive carbon capture player with algae in the world today. And so we’re ramping up with them, it’s paying for our pilots. And essentially it’s giving Mr. Goodall here a chance - Dr. Goodall, I apologize – to really prove up the technology and take it to where large-scale distributors are going to take it to the world.
Q. Well, Dr. Goodall, and I apologize. I didn’t know that about you a moment ago.
BG. No problem.
Q. You earned that title, we’re going to use it.
BG. OK, thanks.
Q. What do you see as potentially the biggest roadblock to commercial acceptance of algae as a biofuel feedstock?
BG. I think proving it at scale, because only by proving it at scale can you start to see if it is a commercially viable replacement fuel for today’s crude oil. So all of the things that need to be done – I mean I’ve personally been involved in projects that have made jet fuel that’s flown on a commercial jet, gasoline that’s driven in a car, diesel that’s driven in a car. It can all be done, but it has to be done at scale because only at scale are you going to be able to do it at a cost that means something. And so I think the race to scale up and find those technologies which are most cost-effective and efficient and scalable – those are the obstacles – and not all of those things about going to be addressed in 2011 by the way. That’s something that’s going to take a few years, and the debate among different players is how long that’s going to take, how many years that is. But to do that – Mother Nature did it before us but she took 70 million years to do it, and we’re trying to do it in a lot shorter time than that.
Q. Of course, gentlemen, the company has unbridled enthusiasm that this will indeed be done, correct?
RE. Well, you know you have to remember it’s a vast amount of water handling, it’s a vast amount of infrastructure. You can’t make less of the problem. And previous attempts by sort of algae visionaries have said, “Oh, it’s just around the corner” and so forth. And then of course reality sets in, brick and mortar building sets in. And so we really need to say, “Look, this needs a chance to be built.” And that’s why I love how the fossil fuel polluters are going to provide this, for them, cheap source of funding that is actually going to build their future competitor.
