Algae Biofuel Company Algenol: ‘We’re a year away from sales’
It looks like we are coming closer and closer to having biofuels from algae with algae biofuel company Algenol stating that it was a year away from selling their fuel.
Nobody is more bullish on algae than Algenol’s Woods, who founded the company in 2006 but has been pondering algae’s potential since he came up with the basic idea behind Algenol’s technology as an undergraduate in 1984. Most algae firms harvest the organisms and squeeze them to extract oil that’s then processed into a fuel, but Algenol’s strains essentially sweat oil in a gaseous form that can be condensed into a liquid. Woods says his system can yield 6,000 gallons (22,700 L) of ethanol per acre annually, compared to 370 gallons (1,400 L) per acre for corn ethanol. At his Florida test facility, Woods kneels and taps on one of his holding tanks. Clear droplets cling to the inside of the lid. “This is it,” he says. “That’s what we’ve learned here — this really does work.”
Woods will soon get a chance to test his idea on a massive scale. With a group of partners that includes a scion of the Corona beer family, Algenol is poised to break ground on a commercial-scale facility in the Sonoran desert of northern Mexico. The plant’s seaside location enables the company to use seawater to grow the algae, and a nearby coal plant could provide concentrated CO2 to turbocharge production. But not everyone is convinced that either algae or Algenol is ready for prime time. “I would say the hype is well ahead of the reality,” says John Benemann, an expert in algae biofuels, who notes that no commercial method yet exists to capture CO2 from power plants and deliver it to algae facilities.
