Algae Biofuel Facility to be Built in Durango, Colorado by Solix Biofuels
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 11.12.08
image: Solix Biofuels
Here’s another algae biofuel company to watch: Solix Biofuels, based in Fort Collins, Colorado has announced that it has raised $10.5 million in a first round of funding, and has reached an agreement with investors for a further $5 million to build an algae biodiesel facility near Durango, Colorado. Ponying up this money are Valero Energy, Infield Capital, and (perhaps most interestingly) the Southern Ute Indian Tribe:
10-Acre Facility Planned for Indian Reservation
The proposed 10 acre biofuel facility will be built on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in two phases: The first of which is expected to be completed in 12-18 months and will consist of four acres of photo-bioreactors for growing algae and a one acre lab facility. The second phase will add five acres and bring the facility to commercial scale.
Which is all great, but as Greentech Media puts it “algae companies are breeding faster than algae itself, it seems,” going on to point out that few of these companies have managed to produce any oil at a commercial scale.
Nevertheless, of all the potential sources of liquid biofuels, perhaps the only one which could produce a high enough quantity of fuel to replace anywhere near current demand for transportation fuels is algae. Which is all a long way of saying: Pay attention to algae.
via: Solix Biofuels (press release)
Algae Biofuels
15 Algae Biofuels Startups to Watch
Solazyme B100 Algae Biodiesel Goes on the Road
$92 Million Algae Biofuels Deal Signed Between GreenFuel Technologies & Aurantia
Nuclear Power Plant to Be Converted to Green Data Center
|
Rio: An Environmentally Conscious Album by Aterciopelados
|
An algal facility in Colorado? How is this a good thing? Any ecologically and fiscally sustainable business would be designed with the climate of the area in mind. Colorado is already in the midst of decades long water wars with surrounding states. This is like growing corn in a desert.
It could be great for purifying wastewater, if combined with bioremediation. There could be ways of using dirty water, which in Colorado has a hell of a time getting applied to anything as we have strange water use laws as well as rights issues here.
It is a closed system, meaning that there is no loss of water via evaporation. There may be a little lost in processing but it pales in comparison to the amount lost in crop irrigation for corn, sorghum and soybeans. I won't bother detailing the amount of fossil fuels and fossil phosphate squandered in trying to wring a drop of biofuel out of tillage crops.
Algae has great potential but closed loop bioreactors will not be the way. Carbon Footprint for all the plastics needed, immense power inputs for light and temperature control (especially in colorado for year round production), and a maximum capacity of 5000 gallons of oil per acre per year. (I was just at the Algae Biomass Conference in Seattle). CapEx on all these system breaks 500k per acre. So if you make 5000 gallons per acre and make 2$ per gallon you only make 10,000$ per acre per year (that would be an awesome rate by the way) so your return on investment is somewhere around 50 + years...and the cheapest bioreactors have produced algae oil at about 500$ per gallon. Seambiotic in Isreal does ponds at coal fired power plants for 17$ a gallon (still expensive).
Look towards companies such as Sapphire producing GMO algae that excrete hydrocarbons, Kent SeaTech that does polyculture mainly to produce food (but the waste algae goes to either biodiesel or methane), and Blue Marble Energy that remediates harmful algae blooms and does nutrient reduction in waste water with wild algae to generate biomass (although to be fair they use the algae to produce methane and petroleum displacement chemicals (instead of fuel)).