Competitive Edge: Scipio Biofuels

Q: What was the reason for founding your organization – what was the open niche you saw that could be addressed with a new product or service? What was the problem, or gap, or opportunity?

Scipio Biofuels was founded to use the company’s innovative algaculture technology to do its part to alleviate the effects of Carbon Dioxide emissions upon the environment by consuming and converting those emissions in large quantities into biofuels, bulk algae, algae products and co-products.

The problems our technology addresses are those of aggregate availability of algae as a resource, the month-to-month predictability of the availability of algae as a resource as well as improving quality of the algae product. To be able to deliver biofuels these had to be overcome, first.

The market opportunities within the algae industry overall are many and widely varied. It seems that every week a new process for making use of algae as a resource is announced. The ability to continually produce algae in quantities needed by all of these new processes is the gap within the value chain of the algae industry as a whole that our Biomass Engine technology was specifically designed to fill.

Q: Tell us about your organization. What do you do?

The core competency of Scipio Biofuels is algae production on an industrial scale and continuous basis.

When crude oil is stratified within the cracking tower of a refinery the layers are different length hydrocarbon (HC) molecules. Each algae the produces a lipid produces a different length HC molecule. Thus, if the correct species of algae is grown for its oil, the oil can be converted directly to the desired biofuel using a number of available processes.

By growing the best algae species for example, for bio-jet fuel (Isochrysis galbana), using our continuously harvested and scalable technology it is possible to co-locate with or adjacent to either a CO2 gross emitter or an airport, military base etc. to create an energy independent, carbon neutral facility at either of both ends of the symbiosis.

Q: What stage of development are you? 

Other – Leaving the lab.

Q: What do your technologies, products or services do and accomplish – how does it (they) work, who is it (they) aimed for?

The Scipio Biofuels Biomass Engine (BE) algaculture technology was designed to make algae deliver on its promise and potential as a resource by re-thinking the batch processes of photobioreactor (PBR) and raceway pond (RP) algaculture technologies transforming algaculture into a far more efficient continuous output process.

By integrating our patented continuous algae harvesting capability with our pump-less sealed PBR, then matching the rate of growth with the rate of harvesting the output stream is continuous 24/7 for up to 6 months at a time. At full commercial scale the current system is projected to deliver between 1.5 and 4.0 tons of algae per day depending upon the algae species being cultivated.

Q: Competitively, what gives your technology, product or service set an edge in cost or performance, sustainability, or any other aspect, that makes it stand out from the crowd, In short, what makes it transformative?

It requires 1.8 tons of CO2 to produce 1 ton of algae. If a Scipio facility is producing 300 tons of algae per day, 540 tons of CO2 is being consumed daily. That’s over 186,000 tons of CO2 consumed annually, per facility.

By co-locating with for example a 50 mega-watt power station and building BE production capacity to match the volume of CO2 the power station emits, the symbiosis transforms ‘dirty petro-power’, into ‘carbon free green power’ and at scale produces carbon neutral liquid transportation fuels right out of the box.

In using BE technology to deliver algae to market year-round with fluctuations in output driven mostly by the solar cycle, the markets for algae will become reasonably predictable. When predictability is combined with consistent availability of industrial quantities, an ‘Algae Futures’ market can be established for the global trade of algae just like other commodities.

Q: What are the 3 top milestones you have accomplished in the past 3 years?

1. Increased the reliability and output of our harvester through improvements in the robustness of the design and changes in materials.
2. Achieved significant reductions in scaling capex through continuous improvement.
3. Meaningful engagement with the federal government through the EDC.

Q: What are the 3 top milestones you will accomplish in the next 3 years?

1. Scale-up to full commercial scale of the system into 4-acre “Nodes”.
2. Fabrication of the mobile technical capacity necessary to expedite production facility construction. Manufacturing and delivering the many thousands of lengths of plastic pipe necessary to build a facility (6,000/acre), for a 100 acre facility would require no less than 30 months. Adequate mobile extrusion capacity reduces that time to just 4 months and then rolls to the next facility site to do it again. We call this a ‘Road Train’.
3. Constructing the first 100+ acre production facility.

Q: Where can I learn more about Scipio Biofuels?

Click here to visit Scipio Biofuels’ website.