Biggie Smalls: Microcrops go mainstream and head for the big time
Lemna growing in a 1-hectare pond at PetroAlgae's customer demonstration center.
All microalgae are microcrops, but not all microcrops are microalgae: a larger family of diatoms, cyanobacteria, and tiny aquatic flowering plants such as the lemna family are increasingly in the mix for biofuels commercialization.
As related in the Digest in recent months, at least two groups – a team of academics in North Carolina, and the publicly-traded PetroAlgae in Florida, have been reporting progress with microcrops that suggest that the next commercialization breakout in biofuels may be based on tiny organisms that even fans of algae-based biofuels may not yet be familiar with.
Further, a report in ScientificAmerican.com suggested that the mysterious and privately-held Joule Biotechnologies in Massachusetts may be using a modified version of watermeal, the smallest flowering plant, as a base for what it is terming “game-changing” renewable fuel feedstock yielding 20,000 gallons per acre and ready for commercialization as soon as 2010.
What is all the more intriguing about the latest news from Joule and PetroAlgae is that they are reporting that they are competitive on price with crude oil, without subsidies, are capable of conversion into drop-in fuels that require no change in infrastructure, do not require the use of land that is currently used for food production. PetroAlgae is also reporting that its technology to commercialize microcrops is ready for licensing today.
Game changing, indeed. Let’s look a little deeper.
New microcrops emerge as candidate feedstocks
The first public hint that new breakthroughs were on the horizon arrived in early April, when a research team at North Carolina State University reported that it has realized up to six times the average corn starch yield by growing duckweed, a microscopic aquatic plant, using hog farm waste water. The researchers concluded that the process cleans up waste water and produces a high-yield biofuel, and the duckweed starch can be converted to ethanol at existing corn ethanol processors.
One of the advantages of the tiny aquatic plants is that so little of their biomass is needed to support their structure, since they float on water instead of standing freely in the air. As little as five percent of some species is fiber – with the rest an attractive mix of proteins, carbs and lipids.
Process diagram of the Joule Biotechnologies system
The researchers said at the time that their process will work on any type of nutrient-rich wastewater, including municipal wastewater. However, the team was not far advanced in developing a large-scale system, indicating that they were in the process of establishing a pilot-scale demonstration of their system for growing, harvesting and drying duckweed.
Later in the spring, PetroAlgae was evolving its message to emphasize “microcrops” over “microalgae”, signaling that it was working on several different aquatic plant platforms.
Last week, Joule Biotechnologies made a cryptic announcement of a novel biofuel production system using a modified and otherwise mysterious aquatic, photosynthetic microorganism that, housed in a closed photobioreactor replete with brackish water, would use CO2 and sunlight as sources of reproductive energy. Lipids and fuels would be continuously harvested without destroying the micro-organisms.
Wolffia, or watermeal, which may be a base for Joule's microorganism, according to a report at ScientificAmerican.com
Joule caught some by surprise because of the unique technical claim; others were simply confused by the jargon with which the announcement was made. As Brendan Borrell remarked at Scientific American.com: “Basically, all you gotta do is you put your HeliocultureTM into your scalable SolarConverterTM and, voila, out comes your SolarFuelTM liquid energy!”
But Borrel also sounded out Rutgers plant ecologist Todd Michael’s reaction, and Michael surmised that the aquatic organism that Joule is reluctant to name could well hail from the Wolffia family, a group of microscopic flowering plants popularly known as watermeal.
Joule also announced last week at entrepreneur Bill Sims will become president and CEO. Flagship Ventures Managing Partner and co-founder Noubar Afeyan remains Chairman of the Board, while Flagship partner and co-founder David Berry serves on the Board of Directors. Flagship has also backed Mascoma and LS9 among many other cleantech and biopharma companies. Sims said that Joule expects to have a pilot plant by next year and will move to commercial-scale by 2011 or 2012.
PetroAlgae biomass after protein separation, ready for insertion into an oil refinery's coker unit for one-step conversion to renewable fuels
For those who lack patience to wait for 2011, PetroAlgae’s system is available for licensing today. In addition to labs in Melbourne, FL and at the Kennedy Space Center, the company has a 20-acre customer demonstration facility in Fellsmere that the Digest first visited back in late January. The change since then is startling – PetroAlgae is really moving down the road.
The customer demonstration facility includes an end-to-end system, from microcrop cultivation to fuel, and in addition to viewing six acres of ponds growing lemna and microalgae, the customer can visit processing where water-soluble proteins are extracted.
The proteins are themselves a high-value product, while the remaining biomass (carbs and lipids) is dewatered with heat assist (potentially recovered from the production process), and produces a mash that can be fed directly to an oil refinery’s existing coker unit, which is capable of thermally cracking the mash into drop-in renewable fuels.
Digest readers had a preview of the microalgae cultivation system last January, but the more recent advances at PetroAlgae have included lemna among other microcrops, which are now cultivated in two 1-hectare demonstration ponds, each divided into an 8×24 array of self-contained modules. Each module sports a covering of the microcrop so heavy that the ecosystem when fully developed is retarding natural water evaporation by 70-80 percent.
PetroAlgae is now reporting that, in its 5000-hectare system, it can produce 9-10 metric tons of purified high-value proteins per acre per year, plus 4700-6000 gallons of biofuels (plus biochar) per acre per year. This pencils out to up to 125,000 tons of protein per year, plus 75 Mgy of renewable fuels, for the full system.
Petroalgae dewatering unit
“The future is not years away but here today,” noted Executive VP Business development Harold Gubnitsky at the Florida Farm to Fuel Summit last week in Orlando. The PetroAlgae system costs, “several hundred million dollars,” according to the company, but has payback within three years, making the investment not for the faint of heart, but potentially lucrative. The company said that the profit imperative is a factor for early adopters, plus the opportunity to be a market leader in climate change.
One fascinating development related to CO2 – PetroAlgae is reporting that adding external CO2 increases per-acre yields by 27 percent.
A feature of both the PetroAlgae and Joule operations are the high yields, and both have emphasized a strong reliance on advanced physics and optics in the development of the systems. As an observer mentioned to the Digest, “all the strong algae ventures have top-notch biologists and chemists on board, but have you noticed that a couple of the early breakouts all seem to have someone with a PhD in physics?”.
The science of cultivation
PetroAlgae, in addition, has established an extensive system of sensors and controls, which are on display in the customer demonstration facility. The sensors look at wind speed, water temperature, biomass concentration, harvest rate, air temperature, humidity, water levels, and controllers in the PA system can alter harvest rates and other parameters both on an automated and manual override basis down to individual 20×20 foot cells within a complete 5000 hectare system.
PetroAlgae continues to give guidance that it will commence generation of revenues from at least the first customer installation of the PetroAlgae system during 2009. Customers bring capital, land and water to the project, and optionally CO2 resources if they are seeking yields at the high end of the range. The company has stated that the chemical composition of the proteins has a high enough value that it can nearly cover the cost of the facility investment through the protein side, and fuel sales provide the remainder of the cost coverage plus profit. The company continues to confirm that its system is cost competitive today, with $70 oil.
From R&D to commercialization
The microcrop story continues to move past the R&D phase, and now appears to have moved beyond engineering and into the commercial realm, although the emergence of lemna as the initial breakout feedstock is a surprise. The limiting factors that have been reported in the Digest for two years – production rates, “shade walls”, oil extraction, CO2 sourcing, dewatering, engineering designs for scale up, appear to have focused down to water, land and capital.
Another way to see it is that it all comes down to capital, to the extent that land is a function of capital and that these systems have sharply limited water usage. That’s a daunting, but far less complex challenge than faced the biofuels industry a few years ago as it moved to revive microcrop R&D when macrocrop economics soured and feedstock limits came into play.
Small is Big, Less is More
The trend: Small is big, less is more, big things may come from small packages; and the period may now be upon us where commercialization is less dependent on R&D as much as the art of the deal. That’s a big deal.
As Biggie Smalls put it in his rap anthem “Get Money”:
You can be as good as the best of them
but as bad as the worst
so don’t test me (get money)
You better move over (get money).”
Biggie Smalls indeed. A page is turning – keep a sharp eye out. And to commercialize in this space, think “now” not later, But by all means get money, if you are aiming for big things at the small end of the biomass spectrum.
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