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Give them a Nobel prize, it will encourage them.

so this is like fusion but only 10 years away instead of 20 !

I'm working on getting fusion power working by slamming algae together using power from cheap solar cells.
I'm still in the planning stages, so I estimate it will be another ten years before commercial applications, such as flying cars, are ready

Several years away...

We've been hearing that for everything, cold fusion, energy storage for electric cars, holographic memory, duke nukem forever... Wake me when we can tell the middle east we won't be needing their product anymore.

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Bioethanol [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]

The more there are pie-in-the-sky technologies out there that have been researched over many years, the more promising and immediately useful (if currently marginally feasible) technologies there will be on hand to frantically improve at the last minute when ever-growing demand for energy peaks and readily available oil has become unaffordable for less important applications. Algae is particularly promising because it relies on a billion years of evolution focussed on minimal-energy solutions to extracting power from sunlight, and because it has relatively little background pollution associated with it (as compared to the array of toxic chemicals used to manufacture solar cells [lowtechmagazine.com], for example). Plus, understanding of genetic engineering can only improve greatly.

I still strongly prefer nuclear energy (safe fission designs for now, fusion later if that ever gets off the ground), but the political controversy surrounding nuclear power plants appears set to make nuclear energy a minor part of future energy provisions. Algae looks to be uncontroversial and usable everywhere there is decent sunlight, with almost no toxic chemicals or proliferation concerns.

The last few bits at the end of the article seem to be the most important...

"It's going to take the right engineering solution with the right species to make it commercially viable,"
In other words, it it's not "perfect" (for varying degrees of perfection), we're just not going to do it.
I find it interesting that they want to find the perfect organism first, rather than get close first, and then refine the process.
And seriously, "extracting its oils without degrading other parts of the algae that can be made into side products and sold as well"?
What is their core operation? Getting the oil, or merchandising the left-overs?
Do the first, well, first; THEN work out the second.

"It's never going to get off the ground without a helping hand,"
translation: we're shell companies set up by multi-billion corps. Give us tax money.

Yeesh... It's no wonder people home-brew this stuff.

I attended a presentation hosted by an Exxon exec last week (for business school). He compared Exxon to BP. BP has been pursuing all sorts of energy alternatives (wind, solar, etc). Exxon's position, in short, is that they are an oil company so that's what they worry about. They don't pursue other energy sources because they are only viable now with subsidies, and they don't want to base their business on that (seems reasonable). BUT, the one alt fuel they are pursuing (ignoring natural gas) is algae. They seem to think it has a real future, and I believe they know what they're talking about.

(And an interesting aside... we often think of BP, Exxon, Shell etc as being these scary, large influential corporations. And maybe they are, but this exec described how truly small they are compared to the Saudi, Iranian and Qatari national oil companies. Exxon and BP combined produce less oil than the Nigerian national corporation)

Biodiesel from algae is most desirable when it is part of a system. For instance, algae can be produced in wastewater pond systems [sdsu.edu] and processed for biodiesel, then it can be processed again for butanol [wikipedia.org], thus serving as part of the sewage treatment process, and providing fuelstocks for two direct-replacement fuels, one for diesel and one for gasoline. David Ramey of ButylFuel, LLC [butanol.com] told me in an email conversation that they would like to use this type of processed algae cake feedstock, but that so far they have been unable to secure a reliable source of the stuff which is not salt-contaminated, which is a problem for their process. (You could also process the waste algae for alcohol, but it is unlikely to be as efficient as Butanol and it is not a 1:1 replacement for gasoline. Butanol can also be mixed into diesel fuel, but that's not its claim to fame.)

This research is decades old, started by the Dept. of Energy in the mid-70's in the wake of the '74 Arab oil embargo. Then there's this group [unh.edu] who told me they had most of the hard problems solved and already had successful pilot tests. That was two years ago. So how can scale commercial still be 10 years off?

I'm wondering if it isn't like the EV-1, GM's electric car. GM didn't want it, oil companies definitely didn't want it, parts manufacturers, mechanics, and state governments faced with losing fuel tax revenues didn't want it (at least right away). On the opposition side of algae oil would be the Saudis, who fund several prominent think tanks in D.C. that tend to be the home of retired politicians and a near endless supply of campaign cash. The oil companies making a lot of money off the status quo and just about anyone in the transportation pipeline.

It will be interesting to see how many players with an interest in the status quo will be inserting themselves into the development of algae oil.

Sounds like someone ought to be talking to Big Pharma. They've been doing this sort of thing for decades. Not with algae, necessarily, but with many species of bacteria that are used to synthesize drugs. I'd think that some of that technology could be transferable (probably have to pay license fees, though.) Hell, for that matter the average brewery is able to reliably grow the desired species of yeast to produce beer.

The problem is that these researchers all want to come up with some invention that they can patent and make a fortune. But the process is really to simple for such an approach. Gradual refinement is what is needed. Here's how to do it: Botryococcus braunii (Bb) is a microalgae which produces a gooey oil outside the cell, comprising up to 83% of its total weight. Because it is outside the cell, the organism does not have to be killed in order for the product to be extracted. This makes up for its growth rate being slower than that of other microalgae, something which is lost on some of these alt-fuel schemesters. The oil it produces can be directly refined into alkanes such as octane (gasoline) and various jet fuels.

Here's how to do it: take as rich of a carbon dioxide source as you can get (but at some point it can be too rich), such as a coal burning power plant, a brewery, or Chicago politician. Hook this up to a tubular photobioreactor of some significant length, so that process can be continuous. When the algal cells have reached some level of oil generation, strip the oil off with a solvent, preferably hexane. Use of the appropriate solvent will not kill the majority of the algae (sheep to be shorn). Cycle the naked algae back to the input of the carbon dioxide source.

A photobioreactor can be made on the cheap. Use tubular plastic sections of good transparency, such as the protectors made for long flourescent tubes, and hook them together with elbows of common plastic plumbing. Suspend these a few inches above a reflective surface. I think it may be possible to take surplus aluminum siding and polish the underside of it. I think you could even use wire coathangers as supports if you didn't have anything better.

The point is, that it's not important to be particularly efficient if you can do it on a large scale, cheaply. Over time, more productive strains of algae can be bred or engineered.

For more information, see the Botryococcus braunii entry on wikipedia.

For a number of years, I've been putting together an extensive spreadsheet including everything ... and I mean everything... that goes into the bottom line profitability of converting the US's total CO2 effluent of fossil fuel power plants into marketable products from algae. It took me a few months back in 2005 to convince myself that it wasn't worth looking at algal biodiesel [youtube.com].

For starters, here is a direct quote from a researcher in algae metabolism made to me in a private communique:

8-10% that [of total sunlight -- jab] can be converted to biomass... theoretical maxima, with actual efficiencies being substantially lower.

This guy has devoted his life to maximizing the photosynthetic efficiency of algae. In reality your are doing amazingly well to get 5% conversion. And, no, it doesn't matter what you do to the algae or which algae you choose. You aren't going to get better numbers.

Do the net present value calculation on this and try to figure out how you are going to pay for the photobioreactor OR raceway pond's amortization as well as the operating costs. The number just aren't there.

  I don't know who is investing all this money but they should fire their advisers.

The only way I've found to convert that much CO2 to algae profitably is to sell the algal protein at the price equivalent of alfalfa protein.

Only problem is, this produces such an abundance of protein, at the price equivalent of alfalfa, that there would be little point in doing agriculture anywhere. The US's fossil fuel CO2 alone would create so much broad-spectrum amino acid protein that if it were directly consumed by humans, everyone in the world could have a diet richer than the US in protein. Oh, sure, you can run it through a couple of trophic layers to get some high grade predator fish farmed out in the ocean desert or something, but then the "environmentalists" who seem to prefer turning the rainforests into soybeans and can't tell the difference between ocean desert mariculture and near-coast mariculture would have a fit, and we can't have _that_ can we?