“A vertically integrated, scaleable 5,000 gallon/acre algae fuel system”: a Biofuels Digest special report on PetroAlgae
Promoters of roadside attractions know that people need a big reason to stop at a small town.
Hundreds of miles of billboards promote Florida’s Yeehaw Junction, South Carolina’s South of the Border, and Wall Drug in South Dakota. Marblemount, Washington always had a unique selling proposition: “Last Fuel for 80 miles”. King City, Missouri has the world’s largest gas pump (pictured, left). Rochester, Minnesota has the world’s largest ear of corn.
To the list of small towns with a big idea, add one more. Fellsmere, Florida.
Fellsmere?
It’s an unlikely candidate, for sure. Best known previously as the first town encountered if you wrongly headed westward off I-95 while trying to reach the resort towns of Sebastian or Vero Beach.
You will not see giant corn ears, gas pumps or a string of billboards in Burma Shave style at Fellsmere.
What you will see is the first near-to-workable platform for a national energy solution. They, or rather PetroAlgae, is making algal oil in Fellsmere, and nearing completion of a vertically integrated, scaleable, licensable 5-6,000 gallon per acre algae-to-energy production system.
It would be better to simply supply you with the GPS coordinates and encourage you to see it for yourself. But with tight 24 hour security around the 20-acre campus on the south fringe of Florida’s Space Coast, a description of the facility and the model of the business may have to suffice.
There have been higher yield projections in algae-to-energy, and other vertically integrated systems. There’s been a lot of algae hype along the way – hype more in keeping with promoting a roadside attraction that a strategic national resource. But all the others have been slowed by the challenges of oil extraction, self-shading, contamination, or cost per gallon. Or just the monumental difficulties of raising large amounts of project capital in these nefarious economic times we live in.
The PetroAlgae project, by contrast, is far enough along to be rated a better than even-money chance of realizing an actual 5,000 gallon per acre yield, and doing so in the very near term.
At those yields, it would take 12 million acres to produce enough biodiesel to replace all the diesel fuel consumed in the US in a year. That’s 18,750 square miles, or about the lower third of Louisiana. To put this in context, this is about half the acreage used to grow enough corn to supply 10 billion gallons of ethanol in the US this year.
What makes this project different than other algae-to-energy projects that have comes down the pikeway? In a word, feasibility. Even the widely-admired Four S’s, the princes of Algae-to-energy: Solix, Solazyme, Seambiotic and Sapphire – are not yet able to produce at viable scale and cost. At Fellsmere, PetroAlgae has stolen a lead late in the race for the national energy solution.
Technical hurdles remain, and the ultimate outcome is far from certain, but this project has every chance of making Fellsmere a byword for ‘affordable, renewable, domestic energy’. If PetroAlgae were the moon missions, they’d be just now readying for splashdown on Apollo 9. Will they complete the mission? Will they be caught from behind by one of the Four S’s? We will know this year.
The PetroAlgae operation in Fellsmere
The 20-acre campus is home to an open-pond system now scaled to 1/2 acre scale. The model calls for individual units of just this size. After an algae inoculum is developed in the lab, it is transferred to the pond where it blooms. Inner baffles are used to create an eddy that turns the water over and creates uniform “cell light time”, sharing the sunlight evenly among the microalgae to avert a “crash” of the algae organisms that halts blooming.
CO2 supply is critical in algae. 2.2 pounds of CO2 for every pound of algae biomass, in the PetroAlgae system, or 200 tons per acre/year according to the PetroAlgae production plan, which has some cushion. A large power plant, for example the Scherer plant operated by Georgia Power in Juliette, GA, produces 27 million tons of CO2 per year, according to CARMA. That’s enough to CO2 in a month to support a 60 Mgy algae biodiesel plant. PetroAlgae has developed a technology to concentrate power plant emissions, which average 12 percent CO2, to more than 50 percent concentration through a proprietary process that removes sulphur dioxides and mercury. CO2 can be piped in from an economically viable maximum of 10 miles.
The company is using 12 main algae strains, some from Arizona State University, and none of them genetically modified. The typical strains used in test production now have a 30-40 percent lipid content. The company reports that growth rate and doubling rates are where they need to be to have a viable system. Contamination is always an issue but is monitored by roving personnel who are a part of a comprehensive labor plan.
PetroAlgae has developed a continuous flow system to extract algae via pipeline and concentrate the algae down to 50 percent water content, or algae paste, but this process though working is not yet scaled.
From algae paste the oil is extracted, with hexane in use to baseline some numbers on cost, yield and flow rate, while a new systems are in testing. The company says that it is attempting wherever possible to adapt existing technologies while developing intellectual property in dewatering, growth and harvest.
For part II of this story, click here.
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