What’s up with Algae now? 

Aurora Algae

Aurora Algae is a producer of high-performance, premium algae-based products for the functional food and beverage, dietary supplement, and pharmaceutical markets. The Company has developed the industry’s first commercial-scale photosynthetic platform for sustainable, algae-based product development. Aurora Algae’s proprietary algae strains and production system uses marginal land, seawater and captured carbon pollution from industrial emitters, resulting in more capitally efficient and more environmentally sustainable algae farming, harvesting and processing.

In June 2014, the company began a deep investigation of South Texas as a location for the first commercial plant, and the portfolio was further sharpened, essentially to put fuels on the back burner for some time to come, and focus on omega-3 and omega-7 fatty acids as a first commercial project.

Meanwhile, Texas’ aquaculture and shrimp farming center, near Brownsville, could use the lift. As Granvil Treece wrote in the 2014 guide to the Texas Aquaculture Industry:

“Over the last 21 years, the Texas marine shrimp industry has produced 94.5 million pounds of shrimp with a farm-gate value of $244.3M, contributing an estimated $1.466B to the state’s economy. However, the farm-gate price has been low since 2004, recovered somewhat in 2007 and 2008, but farm-gate prices are still  limiting interest in shrimp farming with low prices being experienced.”

Bioamin

Bioamin is a Mexican biotechnology enterprise dedicated to the investigation, development and production of suytainable agriculture products.

In May 2014, we reported that Bioamin was experimenting with biodiesel production from fresh water microalgaes, saying that doing so is more energetically efficient as well as cheaper than other alternatives while also being less harmful to the environment. The company is using an ultrasound process to extract the oil from the plants.

BioProcess Algae

BioProcess Algae LLC is based in Omaha, Neb. and is currently running a demonstration plant at the Green Plains Inc. ethanol plant in Shenandoah, Iowa. Grower Harvester bioreactors installed in Shenandoah are tied directly into the plant’s CO2 exhaust gas and have been operating continuously since inoculation in October 2009. The company serves five markets: Animal Feed, Nutraceuticals, Fish Feed, Chemicals and Fuel.

Right now the company has completed its “Phase III” system that broke ground in February 2012 and is operating as a small commercial facility — but we haven’t seen firm dates and plans for the very large installments that the technology is capable of and to which the parent companies ultimately aspire. So, we’re in wait-and-see mode. If you know much about Green Plains, they’re not, shall we say, a “science project” company, so you can count on the technology not getting scaled until the partners are confident that the fundamental economics have been optimized. We’ve never actually seen Green Plains staff picking up nickels in parking lots, but if there’s a nickel in a bottle of CO2 or hiding underneath a biofilm, they’re going to find it.

Long-time CEO Tim Burns gave up the day-to-day oversight of the company, taking a board seat role — and the company is now essentially managed out of Omaha, Nebraska where Green Plains is headquartered.

Cellana

Cellana’s patented ALDUO system enables economic, sustainable, and consistent production of photosynthetic, non-GMO algae at industrial scale. Cellana intends to construct and operate commercial facilities to produce these products as integrated algae-based biorefineries. To date, over $100 million has been invested in developing Cellana’s algae strains, patented and proprietary production technologies, and its Kona Demonstration Facility.

Last summer, the US Department of Energy announced $3.5 million for a Cellana algae project aimed at accelerating the development of sustainable, affordable algal biofuels. Cellana was selected to develop a fully integrated, high-yield algae feedstock production system by integrating the most advanced strain improvement, cultivation, and processing technologies into their operations at their Kona Demonstration Facility.

Why significant? This is the first major grant award for algae to a multi-product biorefinery with Omega-3s as the high-value co-product.  (ATP3 maybe counts, but it wasn’t direct to Cellana.)  One observer noted, “DOE has come a long way in broadening their perspectives on how one can scale to achieve both commercial quantities of biofuels and profits simultaneously, rather than one at a time.