Algae Emerges as DOE Feedstock of Choice for Biofuel 2.0
Chu Pledges $80 Million for Algae R&D
by Amy Westervelt - Jan 15th, 2010
There was a sense of deja vu in the biofuels sector this week when U.S. Energy Secretary Chu announced nearly $80 million in funding for research and development of algae-based fuels.
The dream of turning pond scum into diesel began with a similar flood of government investments by the Carter administration during the oil crisis of the 1970s. In fact, many of the buzzed-about algae-to-fuel startups today are basing their technology on seminal research from that era.
The government spending dried up after Carter left office, and research efforts suffered. Despite 30-plus years of work on a smaller scale since then and the fact that a wide range of backers, from the Silicon Valley venture community to major oil companies such as Chevron and Exxon, have begun investing heavily in the algae-based fuel business again over the last couple of years, a lot remains to be done before the potential of algae as a feedstock is realized.
Last year brought the closure of an early darling of the industry: GreenFuel, which grew out of research at MIT and planned to site its algae bioreactors next to coal plants, essentially using the coal emissions to grow algae that would in turn become fuel. Despite having made deals with several institutional clients in Europe and invested hundreds of millions in building pilot plants in the United States, the company couldn’t make the economics of its business pencil out, particularly once funding for its capital-intensive bioreactors dried up.
The sector still faces some major hurdles: figuring out which strains of algae are best suited to diesel production, deciding whether algae is best grown in giant (and expensive) bioreactors or in open ponds, and bringing down the cost of production.
According to Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones, founder of algae-based fuel company LiveFuels, which has partnered with the NREL scientists involved in the initial work in the 1970s, there are hundreds of thousands of strains of algae, and four algal genomes have been mapped. Each algae strain has particular characteristics that determine the type of fuel it could make: Strains high in fat are suitable for biodiesel, while strains high in carbohydrates are better for ethanol.
By even the most optimistic of predictions, however, actually producing fuel from algae at scale and at a cost that is palatable to consumers is a good 10 years away.
Nonetheless, the Department of Energy showed a preference for algae with this week's funding announcement.
It pledged $78 billion for two consortiums working on algae-based biofuel, including $44 million to the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts to develop "a systems approach for sustainable commercialization" of algae-based gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. One member of the NAABB is North Carolina-based Palmer Labs, which is working with rapid-growth algae and cyanobacteria to produce fuel at a scale to replace petroleum without infringing on fields that can be used for food production — avoiding one of the largest complaints about growing corn for ethanol.
"We take the biggest problems — currently in energy and food resources — and find cheaper and better solutions through innovative combinations of proven technologies," said Palmer Labs President Miles Palmer. "The DOE stimulus funds provide timely support of this pressing goal to us and our consortium partners."
The other group, the National Advanced Biofuels Consortium, led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is receiving up to $33.8 million to develop biomass-based hydrocarbon fuels that can work within the existing refining and distribution infrastructure.
"Biofuels must be compatible with the nation's engines, pipelines and refineries to play a substantial and effective role in reducing carbon emissions and reducing oil imports," explained Dale Gardner, associate director for renewable fuels and vehicles at NREL,making a not-so-subtle jab at ethanol, which is known to corrode engines (part of the reason the automotive industry has lobbied against expanding ethanol blend limits is concerns over the effect on vehicle engines).
"The Department of Energy's investment will allow NREL and the consortium to systematically identify and develop commercially sustainable biofuels from renewable sources for this critical energy supply."
The Other Biofuels
In 2009, it was still up for debate which of the biofuel 2.0 feedstocks would win out, with jatropha and algae jockeying for position as the best biodiesel feedstock and competing against cellulosic ethanol made from plant waste or rapidly renewable non-food crops. But this week, the only mention of another type of fuel was the $1.6 million distributed among the states to install or retrofit pumps at 60 gas stations to facilitate the distribution of E85 or other ethanol blends.
That investment in E85 infrastructure suggests that the EPA may be ready to move ahead with its intention, announced in December, to increase blend limits for ethanol from 10 to 15 percent, a move ethanol and farm groups have been lobbying for. Still, $1.6 million is a small amount compared with the $78 million for algae-based fuel.
Ethanol trade groups are worried about other changes. Ethanol trade groups Growth Energy and the Renewable Fuels Association have joined with state and local farm groups to sue the State of California over its low-carbon fuel standard, which is scheduled to be phased in beginning in 2011 and may set an example for future federal regulation.
The lawsuit claims that the standard unfairly discriminates against corn-based ethanol, and that its “indirect land use changes” component, which take into account shifts in land use elsewhere to grow food when U.S. cropland is used to grow fuel, "penalizes all corn ethanol based on the purported indirect effects of assumed farming practices that occur predominately outside California.” The ethanol groups further claim that “through the regulation, California seeks to curb or eliminate these farming practices throughout the United States and beyond by making the entire corn ethanol market responsible for them."
This is the same issue ethanol groups are raising with the EPA as it works to revise its biofuel rules to better regulate the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of alternative fuels.
The EPA is proposing an international indirect land-use changes component to the rules, which is being loudly protested by agriculture states and ethanol groups. Palmer Labs aims to solve that problem with its biofuels, and NREL also stresses that algae-based biofuel doesn't compete with food or livestock feed, that it can use marginal land and degraded water, and that it can make use of CO2 emissions.
However, ethanol has some powerful backers in Congress. U.S. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) secured a provision in the House-passed energy and climate bill that would block the EPA from regulating land-use-related emissions for six years.
Between the powerful agriculture-state politicians, farm groups and ethanol trade groups lobbying for increased use of ethanol and the genuine obstacles facing algae-based fuels, it remains to be seen whether algae will realize its potential this time around, or if we’ll just be left with another batch of promising research.
See also:
Subsidies Worth Billions at Stake in Battle Over Biofuel Rules
Sugarcane: The Miracle Biofuel?
ARPA-E Bets on Disruptive Technology Synthesizing Fuel from Bacteria
California Puts Fuel on World's First Low-Carbon Diet
Amy Westervelt is the managing editor of Earth Island Journal and writes about clean tech and environmental policy for a variety of print and web publications including Earth2Tech, Consumers Digest, and Sustainable Industries. She recently co-authored a report on sustainable cities for the Living Cities Foundation.
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How About Energy Independence NOW
All of this r&d being spent for technologies years away. Give me a break. How about sweet sorghum? How about farm-scale production of ethanol as an economic development model whereas the farmer (not corporations) sharing the wealth of cost-effective production between 1-3 mgy. How about little to no transportation costs? How about no cost for the farmer to harvest 1,2 or even 3 crop turns per year? The answer is simple: EPEC. We are ready to move ahead to turn our economy around asap and working with other market-ready ethanol production, i.e. Big Oil's expansion of large scale ethanol plants, our reliance on foreign oil can be shelved within a couple of years. Let's think about the farmer, our backbone in the US and worldwide, to share the wealth. BTW, how about ethanol/hybrids? How about Ricardo's 40 mpg ethanol sipper? It's all there NOW...
Translating Research
A critical component of NOT "just be[ing] left with another batch of promising research" is for government agencies and algae researchers to appropriately employ patent and other IP-protecting mechanisms to create and manage properties that are, practically, commercialize-able.
Oil prices are going nowhere but up (how quickly remains a somewhat open question). Nonetheless, the key to commercialization is profit, and the key to profit in a new technology like algal biofuel production is IP protection.
Federal and university patent policies exist, but need to be carefully managed to nuture this technology.
Scale Up
I'd love to know where the figure of "2.2 billion dollars" comes from. It sounds like a grotesque overestimate. The only big government investment in algae biofuel that I know of was the Aquatic Species Program, which is usually estimated to have cost about $25 million dollars. It was eliminated, unfortunately, in the Clinton administration's war on big government. Although I generally supported that program (and enjoy the fact that it took a liberal like Clinton to produce the only budget surpluses that I've ever known) the damage to our country's algae research is genuinely regrettable. There have been other programs supporting the investigation of algae molecular biology, but these amounted to less than $5 million a year and were not directed towards biofuels.
It is notoriously difficult to keep large outdoor cultures of algae alive. Small organisms called "grazers" (e.g. rotifers) get into the ponds and consume the algae. Also, certain viruses can wipe out cultures of algae. Getting a pond to a high algae biomass is a terribly hard problem. Good luck to Clean Energy, especially since winters are cold in Northern New Hampshire and algae grow slowly at low temperatures.
Does the US really want to get off of foreign oil?
"By even the most optimistic of predictions, however, actually producing fuel from algae at scale and at a cost that is palatable to consumers is a good 10 years away."
We have spent over $2.2 billion dollars on algae research for the last 35 years and nothing to show for it. Algae has been researched to death at universities for the last 50 years in the US. The problem is as long as the algae researchers can say we are 3-5 years away (now 10 years away), its too expensive and they need more research they get the grant money. That is their "canned response". All government grants are for research NOT algae production. All the algae research patents have no value unless you have real production in the US. We need monies going into algae oil production and stop wasting money on research. The real question is "does the US really want to get off of foreign oil or do we want to continue to fund algae research?
anonymous
There is a company in
There is a company in Northern New Hampshire that is proposing just the kind of project that Energy Secretary Chu should be using as a poster child as to just how to do things.This company called Clean Power is building a wood fueled combined heat and power plant in Berlin that will sell electricity and and steam to an operating papermill. The cool part is that they are next to a large sewage treatment plant. They are going to reclaim waste water as the supply to their facility. They are going to use the neutriants in the sewage and sequest CO2 from their smoke stack to raise algae and make bio diesel. They will use waste heat and electricity to run grow lights. I understand that the plant is to be quite efficient. Boy if we could get projects like this all over the country we would be on our way to a better solution related to climate and energy.
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