Chevron, NREL to research algae fuel

Algae fuel is going uptown.

Chevron, the honkin' big oil company, and the National Renewable Energy Labs have announced they will collaborate on identifying and developing strains of algae for fuel. Potentially, the research could result in jet fuel that uses algae as a feedstock.

The collaboration is part of a five-year deal, kicked off in 2006. The two are already cooperating on research for bio-oil reforming, which involves taking bio-oils and turning them into hydrogen and other oils.

In the past few years, a number of start-ups such as LiveFuels, Solazyme, and GreenFuel Technologies have come up with plans to turn algae into a basis for biodiesel or a synthetic form of petroleum. Some of the companies want to genetically manipulate the algae, while others will use natural strains of algae. GreenFuel, meanwhile, will put its algae-growing ponds near electric power plants so that the microorganisms can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and cut down greenhouse gases.

Chevron will work with start-ups too. The idea is that start-ups will incubate ideas and Chevron will try to commercialize the promising ones, said Don Paul, Chevron's retiring CTO, in a speech earlier this month. Start-ups will have a tough path if they want to commercialize fuel themselves. Building a full-fledged commercial-scale fuel plant takes about $3 billion and takes more than a decade, Paul noted. A prototype plant--a facility that can crank out 1,000 barrels of oil a day, a drop in the bucket in the world's 85 million barrel a day diet--costs around $300 million

Algae is an incredibly oily microbe--some species are nearly 50 percent lipid. Algae also grows fast so a hectare can produce 15,000 to 80,000 liters of oil a year, far more than most other oily plants. It also has almost no other value, unlike corn.

So the catch? It's not easy to convert into fuel. Separating water from algae has been one of the big problems. It's not uncommon to have 1 gram of usable algae in every liter of water, according to John Sheehan, vice president of sustainability at LiveFuels. "That's 1,000 parts of water for every part of algae," he said in an interview earlier this year.

Cost is also a problem and it's unclear at this point when or if algae fuel will compete with fossil fuels. Sheehan knows of what he speaks. He oversaw some of the early algae fuel projects at NREL. A lot of the start-ups rely on research from the national labs.

If anything, fuel is clearly running out. We've used up about 1.1 trillion barrels of the traditional sources of oil on the planet, said Paul. By 2012, we will have used 1.5 trillion barrels and not everything down below can be extracted. Thus, there is an opportunity for alternatives.

[johnsmith1967B]

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[Joe Real]

Something wrong with understanding about algae!

It could be true that there is 1000 parts water per 1 part algae in a culture solution, where the alagal cells are growing. Not much energy is really required to separate the algae from the solution that they are grown. It involves simple filtration which can be done with reusable filters, you know, algal cells are several orders of magnitude larger than salt ions or other molecules so there's no need for membranes and such, that even a coffee filter could work via simple gravity. You don't need to evaporate the 1,000 parts water so that you could get the algae, that is a waste of energy that only morons do that.

Now all you have to do is deal with the 50% lipid and 50% water or perhaps other chemicals. After filtration, there is not as much energy required to isolate the oils compared to when it is 1 parts per thousand as the author lead us to believe. A simple mechanical crushing of the cells could release the oil, and a simple phase separation can be done without the need to evaporate the water.

This is not going to be an energy rip-off, and is not that hard to do! Sometimes a little common sense chemistry and physics should be used by reporters before publishing what should have been a much better report!