Canadian researchers commercializing new microorganism biofuel process

In Canada, researchers from the University of Calgary co-founded the startup Solar Biocells which uses an entirely new concept for the capture and conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) into biomass in a innovation for the production of renewable, clean energy.

Solar Biocells uses micro-organisms, like algae or cyanobacteria, which naturally process energy from sunlight and take up CO2 from the atmosphere to grow biomass. The biomass, in turn, can be converted to methane, a liquid fuel or biomass pellets. The micro-organisms can be cultivated in closed systems, called bioreactors, on land that is unsuitable for other uses, like agriculture.

“We threw out the handbook of how to generate algal biomass and developed a combination of novel engineering and microbial ecology methods to reduce operational and investment costs by more than tenfold,” says one of the project leads.

At the same time, the technology used by Solar Biocells yields the highest productivity ever reported in the field’s scientific literature.

Solar Biocells achieved these results using three innovations: the use of high pH and alkalinity to promote CO2 absorption rate and to uncouple absorption and uptake; the use of biofilms instead of suspended cells to cut downstream processing costs, and the use of naturally occurring microorganisms instead of a single pre-selected algal strain, which increases their system’s overall efficiency.

The high pH sources they used are soda lakes located in British Columbia’s Cariboo Plateau.