50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy candidate profile: BARD
Biofuel Advance Research and Development (BARD)
Based in: Pennsylvania
2008-09 ranking: Unranked
Business: Biofuel Advance Research and Development, LLC. (BARD) has entered into an agreement with The Green Institute, Inc. to construct and operate a commercial scale algae system pilot facility located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The company is developing a pilot scale facility.
Model: Owner-operator.
Past milestones:
1. BARD won an “Algaeprenuer 2009″ award by National Algae Association at Orlando in June 12 2009 at a conference.
1. Company management said that the plant will commence using algae, produced onsite, as a feedstock in 2010. The plant is located at the Keystone Industrial Port Complex that has spouted with hi-tech business on the site of a defunct steel mill.”
2. Commenced building its first commerical scale alage production pilot plant unit at KIPC, Fairless Hills, PA The engineering company Tetra Tech of Langhorne, PA is engineering and constructing this plant.
Future milestones:
1. Algae production plant is scheduled to be complete in 2010. This pilot plant will be using carbon dioxide from the adjacent power plant (Dominion) and sewer water from the KIPC site itself.
2. The company has also announced plans to construct a 60 Mgy soy biodiesel facility in Fairless Hills, which originally was slated for construction start in 2009.
Metrics: BARD’s closed loop photo-bioreactor technology can produce 66 million gallon of algae oil in 7 acres of land,
which is 8,571,428 gallon of algae oil per acre. The pilot facility will begin by producing 43,070 gallons of algae oil / biodiesel per annum using only six modules of photo-bioreactors covering 84 square feet.
BARD quotable quotes: “There are more than 300,000 strains of algae, with differing ratios of three main types of molecule: oils, carbohydrates and protein. Company scientists and engineers have utilized a new technological screening processes combined with microbial biology to identify natural algae strains that are best suited for biofuel production.”
The Hot 50 for 2009-10 will be released Tuesday, 12/1. Between now and then, you’ll see profiles of potential candidates in the Digest, and you’ll have a chance to vote for your favorites. Reader response will count for 50 percent of a company’s overall score in the preparation of the rankings. The remaining 50 percent is voted by a panel of experts.
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carlhage | Aug 19, 2009 | Reply
Something doesn’t make sense here on the “closed photobioreactor”. Where is the reference for this? I found with sketchy details.
Do the math– 8,571,428 gal/acre/year comes out to 5.8 gal/day/m2 or 222 kWh/m2/day. This is more than 50x the energy intensity of the sun (4 kWh/m2/day in PA) at 100% conversion. The best theoretical conversion efficiency is 11%, so we are talking about 500x more energy than the sun. If they can do this, it would indeed be a hot company– in fact they would need a cooling tower to dissipate the energy not converted to algae.
How about contacting the company and finding out what they mean before posting numbers that don’t make sense? I would believe an extraction plant could produce 5.8 gal/m2/day, but for a growth photo-bioreactor, this is 1000 times the optimistic estimates for solar algae.