New CEO at GreenFuel says “algae has come of age”: company to abandon glass tube, plastic bag bioreactors over costs

In Arizona, algae biofuel company GreenFuel Technologies appointed Simon Upfill-Brown as CEO, who pronounced that “algae has come of age”. The company, which shut down a closely-watched pilot project with Arizona Public Service last year over cost concerns and algae blooms, reported that it is setting up a new project with APS and is designing projects to capture CO2 by co-locating with a range of manufacturing enterprises. The company said that it has abandoned glass tube and plastic bag photo bioreactors over cost concerns and will introduce a new set of designs for its closed production process.

Algae background

• In Maryland, Algenol Biofuels announced an $850 million investment from Mexico’s BioFields, using the company’s technology to produce ethanol from micro-algae. The company uses a process developed by CEO Paul Woods in the 1980s to produce ethanol from algae cells, and the company says that its process bypasses the costly step of drying and pressing algae to extract oil for biodiesel.

  The company said that it plans to initially produce 100 Mgy of ethanol at its first plant using saltwater, in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico, and will increase production by 2012 to 1 billion gallons, with a projected yield of 6,000 gallons per acre. The company reported that it had received $70 million from undisclosed private investors in addition to the BioFields proceeds. BioFields said that it has already signed an off-take agreement with Pemex, the Mexican state oil company.

  • In California, algae startup Aurora BioFuels announced that has raised $20 million in series A financing from Oak Investment Partners, Noventi and Gabriel Venture Partners. Gabriel and Noventi has participated in a seed stage round. Aurora will use technology developed by Berkeley professor Tasios Melis for an open-pond algae production system, and will produce biodiesel from algae. The company says that its process reduces the cost of biodiesel production by half, compared to current methods.

• In Washington state, a group of entrepreneurs, scientists and corporate executives have formed the Algal Biomass Organization to accelerate the development and commercial application of algae biomass. The group will organize the second Algae Biomass Summit in Seattle on October 23-24
• “The jury is out on all [algae systems],” Sandia National Laboratory researcher Ron Pate told Popular Mechanics.
• In Washington state, algae start-up Bionavitas said that it will take up to four years to reach commercial levels of production,
  but that its waste water treatment business is developing faster.
• In Florida, PetroAlgae said that it hoped to reach its commercial production stage next year, as algae producers begin to differentiate over varying methods of getting past the algae “shade wall” and other issues in achieving commercial scale.
• New Zealand’s Aquaflow said that it has developed a scalable method for producing and harvesting algae in the wild, and envisioned expanding to a series of 1,000 acre facilities in the US and other countries.
• A research team from the University of Texas has developed a new blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) that secretes a soft cellulose, glucose and sucrose. The team told Science Daily that the microbe “could provide a significant portion of the nation’s transportation fuel if production can be scaled up.” The cyanobacteria is grown from sunlight and salty water at facilities on non-agricultural land. The team said that the
  cellulose is a soft, gel-like type that is easy to break down, and that the microbes secrete the sugars and cellulose, making it possibly to continually harvest biofuels feedstock without destroying organisms and using powerful enzymes to extract sugars.
• In Texas, US Sustainable Energy is awaiting lab results from a test of biocrude production using 20 pounds of algae as a feedstock. The company recently ran its initial test of 20 pounds of 5% oil-content algae feedstock with 40 percent water content, and resulted in an ignitable oil product.

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