OriginOil Among Eight “Technologies to Rock the Bio World”
Posted: 12 Apr 2011 10:44 AM PDT
Today in Biofuels Digest, Jim Lane writes about “Transformers: Eight Technologies to Rock the Bio World.” Two are closely algae-related and one covers the extraction work we’re doing at OriginOil.
Here they are:
5. Algae extraction.
While we are on the subject of the special challenges of growing algae, there’s the problem of getting the algae out of the water, or the water out of the algae. Given that a decent microalgae concentration is around 0.1 percent, you have to remove 1000 gallons of water per gallon to get a gallon of dry algal biomass, which has about 50,000 BTUs or so. So even if you are expending just a handful of BTUs per gallon to move the water, you’re dangerously close to using more energy to produce algal fuels than the fuel contains.
That’s why consortia such as the NAABB have made this is high priority, and it ranks near the top of the problem chart in the Algal Technology Roadmap developed by the DOE. Companies such as Solazyme and Aurora Algae say they have proprietary solutions, and companies like OriginOil and AlgaeVenture Technologies have been developing solutions for license. For sure, no algae fuel company will emerge at scale without a solution to this one.
And the other:
6. 30 ton per acre (per year) sustainable biomass production.
At 40 tons per acre per year – generally at this time only achievable with a handful of terrestrial plant forms, and algae – opens up the potential capacity of systems. Remember, key to making renewable fuels economical is scale, and key to scale is how far you can affordably transport biomass, and how much production land can be sustainably put to work to deliver biomass to a given plant. A 20-square mile plantation, at those production rates (assuming you can locate all the nutrients), yields 192,000 tons of biomass, enough, for example, to supply 50 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol.
Algal growth technologies are, generally, well on the way to making this an every day reality. 25 gram per square meter per day systems equate to about 36 tons of biomass per acre per year, and that’s becoming table stakes in algal development. But not everyone can use, or grow, algae, and that form of biomass has its own set of special challenges. A 30 ton per acre, sustainably produced, wood or terrestrial crop? Game changer.
Hydrogen, another area we are working in, is also mentioned as a Transformer, and we certainly agree.
