Money and Investing Thoughts

Turning algae into ethanol, and gold | Cleantech.com

Although I do not know of a way for the individual investor to participate in the technology discussed in the above article, I thought it would be of interest here. Algae has been touted as a source for biodiesel feedstocks, but this is the first time I have seen the green slime used to produce ethanol. The process is claimed to use algae, CO², sunlight and seawater in closed bioreactors to produce the ethanol. The algae is not harvested, but the ethanol is drawn directly from the 3 ft. x 50 ft. bioreactors. The company, Algenol Biofuels claims they will be able to generate up to 10,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, compared to 400-500 gallons from an acre of corn.

Algenol Biofuels has signed an $850 million contract to build a facility in Sonora, Mexico with production to start in late 2009. Production will ramp up to 1 billion gallons of production from 3.5 million bioreactors in 4.5 years. At least, that is the plan.

Algenol’s website makes the following claims about their process:

1. Does NOT require food based feedstocks like corn or sugarcane.

2. Does NOT require harvesting.

3. Does NOT require fossil fuel based fertilizers.

4. Does NOT require fresh water.

5. Does NOT require large amounts of fossil fuel.

6. Does NOT require arable land.

7. Does use desert land and marginal land.

8. Does make fresh water from seawater during the process.

9. Does use treated manure instead of fossil fuel based fertilizers.

10. Does have an energy balance over 8 : 1 (energy output : fossil fuel input).

At this point it appears, from bumping around the website, that this is all still in an testing and licensing phase for the first plant next year. It will be interesting to see if the technology is actually scalable to commercial levels. If it does it will make ethanol an even bigger part of the solution to replace petroleum fuels.