Dow and Algenol team up on algae biorefinery pilot project
Dow Chemical Company and Algenol Biofuels are working together to create a biorefinery that uses algae to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) to ethanol. Dow, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Membrane Technology & Research, Inc. will be providing science and technology to Algenol’s algae system. The plan is to locate the facility at Dow’s Freeport, Texas site.
The Dow/Algenol refinery will be “using algae, sunlight, CO2, and seawater” to create ethanol. Converting CO2 to biofuel is not a unique concept. At least four other companies Amyris, Petrosun, Solazyme, and Sapphire Energy are using different technologies to do the same thing.
The Algenol process differs in that it does not require arable land and uses sea water not fresh water for the algae. The process not only creates ethanol from CO2 but also produces fresh water from salt water as part of the process. For many countries worldwide, having a process that not only creates biofuel but processes salt water into fresh water would be fantastic because fresh water is so hard to find.
In that respect the Texas refinery will be a multipurpose facility similar to the Renewed World Energy system. While the Texas refinery will provide both biofuel and freshwater it will also be used as a method to clean up emissions from Dow Chemical’s nearby manufacturing plant. The Renewed World Energy system has been designed to convert power plant and industrial plant emissions into biofuel. Both systems will reduce greenhouse gases, improving the environment.
The collaboration between Dow, Algenol, NREL, Georgia Tech and Membrane Technology & Research, Inc should insure the refinery’s success unlike the now defunct GreenFuel’s attempt to develop a commercial refinery. GreenFuel was one of the best funded algae start ups that went bust when its technology developed a glitch and it was unable to meet delivery deadlines.
Algenol has requested a government grant to provide financial support during the pilot project. Once the grant is approved, the other collaborators will begin working with Algenol to get the refinery built and working.
Related Posts:
July 7th, 2009
Growing algae to make biodiesel is being touted as a cure-all for all our biofuel problems, but we are still stuck with the fact that algae need solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel. To make biodiesel, algae are used as organic solar panels which output oil instead of electricity. Researchers brag that algae can produce 15 times more fuel per acre of land than growing corn for ethanol, but that still means we would need an impossibly large number of acres (about 133 million acres) of concrete lined open-air algae ponds to meet our highway energy demands. Those schemes that grow algae in closed reactor vessels, without sunlight, necessitate the algae being fed sugars or starches as a source of chemical energy. The sugars or starches must then be made from corn, wheat, beets, or other crop, so you are simply trading ethanol potential to make oil instead of vodka. If we construct genetically engineered super-algae that are capable of out-competing native algae strains that contaminate open air algae ponds, the new gene-modified algae will be immediately carried to lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and possibly catastrophic results.