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.
SEATTLE--Clean energy innovations may be getting off the ground in labs and start-up business plans, but making them commonplace for consumers is another matter.
"We're not getting there very quickly because no one's paying the bill," said Stan Bull, director of research and development at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is exploring alternative fuels such as ethanol from corn stalks, waste paper and wood from forests thinned to prevent wildfires.
The government must do more to speed up the spread of greener technologies, agreed Bull and other experts at Discover Brilliant, a conference exploring sustainability in the business world. Tax breaks and other incentives in Japan, Germany and Denmark have helped to accelerate the development of solar and wind power there, for example, as the United States has lost ground over the last decade and continues to rely upon fossil fuels.
"The bigger problem isn't an energy problem, it's a carbon problem," said Steve Selkowitz, building technologies program leader at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yet, new laws and tax breaks are only part of the picture. And inventing new gadgets won't achieve progress if Americans continue to waste so much energy. "What we can learn from developing countries are smarter lifestyles," he said.
For instance, heating, cooling and lighting buildings accounts for nearly 40 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions, an amount poised to grow faster than in any other sector. Designing new homes and offices as well as retrofitting old ones to shrink energy demands by 90 percent would help, but merely halving energy use indoors would not do the trick, he said.
Selkowitz has advised Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on how to "green" the U.S. Capitol.
Individuals and communities are likely to play a larger role in determining the future of energy, according to both Selkowitz and Bull. No matter what mix of wind, solar, or geothermal power takes hold over the long term, Bull foresees a hybrid between centralized sources and decentralized generation in local communities.
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