Algae-biodiesel production company Solazyme, Inc. will be featuring its SoladieselRD(TM), the world’s first algal-based renewable diesel, at a summit this week in California.
“We are glad to be a part of Governor Schwarzenegger’s Global Climate Summit and applaud him for bringing together U.S. and international leaders to address this critical issue. Moving towards the Copenhagen meeting in December, these opportunities to discuss all solutions to the global climate crisis have become vitally important,” said Harrison Dillon, co-founder, president and CTO of Solazyme. “In this search for solutions, Solazyme has taken a 150 million year process of making oil and condensed it to a matter of days to renewably produce oil that can be converted into fuels that not only address these challenges, but have already been proven to be fully-scalable on a commercial level.”
Solazyme’s unique process grows algae in the dark in large industrial fermentation tanks, where the algae are fed a variety of non-food and waste biomass materials including glycerol and cellulosic biomass. This allows the company to produce oil with a very low carbon footprint efficiently in a controlled environment. Solazyme’s fuels have already been road tested in unmodified vehicles for thousands of miles. Solazyme also recently announced that it has produced the world’s first algal based jet fuel which met all eleven of the tested key criteria for (ASTM) D1655 (Jet A-1). Additionally, Solazyme’s process is the very first bridge from non–food carbohydrates and certain industrial waste streams to edible oils and oleochemicals.
The folks at Solazyme would love to talk to people, one-on-one during the summit. Contact Beth Starkin at 212-931-6108 or bstarkin@peppercom.com.
More than 650 attendees and 50 speakers looked at the future of algae biodiesel at a recent conference in Seattle.
The Algae Biomass Summit, hosted by firms Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Byrne and Company, brought together those exploring the scientific and commercial advances of the field of the slimy green biodiesel feedstock. Our friends at Biodiesel Magazine covered the event sponsored by the Algal Biomass Organization and filed this report (and, of course, several others):
Mario Tredici from the department of agricultural biotechnology at the University of Florence in Italy said algae has many of the properties for a second green revolution that could help satisfy the world’s energy and food needs. However, algae have very specific culture requirements to produce near their theoretical potential. Changing light conditions as the density of cultures increase can limit the efficiency of the plants ability to convert sunlight into biomass. “Algae are not a miracle,” he said. “It must obey the laws of thermodynamics.” He does believe, with the proper technology and understanding of algae’s biology, that yields of 70 to 80 tons of algae can be produced per hectare (approximately 2.5 acres), producing 15 to 20 tons of oil and about twice that much protein.
The true value of algae will rely on the total amount of biomass not just the oil content, said Mark Tegan, chief executive officer of Inventure Chemical. Inventure processes biomass products into value-added products. Algae produce three distinct products – oil, carbohydrates and protein. Each component can be processed downstream into a variety of valuable products. “There is a lot of opportunity available in the chemical market,” Tegan said.
The coverage included discussions on how the current credit crisis might actually be good for the algae biodiesel business and the market potential of the feedstock and fuel.
Candidates for governor in Missouri aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on much these days (and trust me… we’re hearing and seeing plenty of tit-for-tat attack ads here in Central Missouri), but Republican Kenny Hulshof and Democrat Jay Nixon did seem to agree on the importance of renewable energy during their debate this week in Kansas City.
With pocketbook issues uppermost in voters’ minds, both men promised to create jobs by beefing up job training and aggressively marketing the state to employers.
Asked for specifics, Nixon said the state should encourage construction of a windmill plant and an auto assembly plant for flex-fuel vehicles. Hulshof called for an oil refinery and research funding to turn algae into biodiesel.
But just in case you thought this debate was any kind of love fest, it was the ONLY thing the two seemed to agree upon. Oh well… back to the attack ads.
Algae has traditionally been a nuisance to catfish farmers, but it could end up being a new source of income for them and a new source of energy for the southeast.
Ron Putt, an associate research professor at Auburn University, has been studying the feasibility of using algae from catfish farms for biodiesel production. “Currently I have a small project that is going to demonstrate the ability to harvest algae from the catfish ponds in the western part of Alabama,” Putt says. “I see them as the core of the algae farming industry throughout the southeast. My goal is to turn the southeast conference into the new OPEC.”
He says catfish farmers have embraced the idea that believes could help the catfish industry which has been struggling with lower priced imports and high feed costs.
Sapphire Energy is another step closer to bringing algae-based Green Crude Production to commercial scale with additional financing from existing and new investors, including an investment holding company owned by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
The latest investments bring the company’s total funding to substantially more than $100 million, and Sapphire is now financed to scale up its production facilities to full commercial feasibility.
Sapphire Energy uses sunlight, CO2, industrial microorganisms, non-arable land and non-potable water to produce alternatives to common products made from petroleum. Sapphire’s Green Crude is similar to light sweet crude and can be refined into chemically identical fuel products such as gasoline, jet fuel and diesel products entirely compatible with the current energy infrastructure—from pipelines and refineries to cars and airplanes.
Sapphire hopes to achieve initial commercial production capability of 10,000 barrels per day of algae-based oil.
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Algae-biodiesel production company Solazyme, Inc. will be featuring its SoladieselRD(TM), the world’s first algal-based renewable diesel, at a summit this week in California.
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More than 650 attendees and 50 speakers looked at the future of algae biodiesel at a recent conference in Seattle.
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Candidates for governor in Missouri aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on much these days (and trust me… we’re hearing and seeing plenty of tit-for-tat attack ads here in Central Missouri), but Republican Kenny Hulshof and Democrat Jay Nixon did seem to agree on the importance of renewable energy during their debate this week in Kansas City.
Algae has traditionally been a nuisance to catfish farmers, but it could end up being a new source of income for them and a new source of energy for the southeast.
Ron Putt, an associate research professor at Auburn University, has been studying the feasibility of using algae from catfish farms for biodiesel production. “Currently I have a small project that is going to demonstrate the ability to harvest algae from the catfish ponds in the western part of Alabama,” Putt says. “I see them as the core of the algae farming industry throughout the southeast. My goal is to turn the southeast conference into the new OPEC.”
The latest investments bring the company’s total funding to substantially more than $100 million, and Sapphire is now financed to scale up its production facilities to full commercial feasibility. 