It's great to see mainstream press beginning to cover the idea.
The Greenest Green Fuel
Elizabeth Svoboda
Take a peak inside the Solix labs to see their oil-from-algae operation up close in our photo gallery and video
“Here it is!” Jim Sears says with a tour guide’s come-see enthusiasm. I
stop, my feet stuck in six inches of fresh powder outside the Old Fort
Collins power plant, but the contraption before us doesn’t exactly
inspire awe. Two parallel tracks, each about 60 feet long, protrude
from the snow like the twin runners of a giant upended sled. A
washing-machine-size box studded with dials and blank displays sits at
one end. Nothing moves, nothing glows, nothing hums. The future of
alternative energy sits silent before me. This is what’s going to make
gasoline obsolete?
Sears chuckles at my confusion.
“Nothing’s really set up at the moment,” he explains. “The bags aren’t
hooked up. We don’t want to damage the equipment by letting it sit in
the snow.” My eyes drift to the only spot of color in the entire
crystalline scene: a wide acrylic tank off to the side that looks like
an aquarium left to ferment in the windowsill. The water inside is
seaweed green and so opaque it’s almost milky. I run my finger over the
top, brushing off snow as I go. “What’s in here?” I ask. Sears eyes the
tank fondly. “This is the first step,” he says. “This is where the
algae starts to grow.”
Little Giants
Algae seems a strange contender for the mantle of World’s Next Great
Fuel, but the green goop has several qualities in its favor. Algae,
made up of simple aquatic organisms that capture light energy through
photosynthesis, produces vegetable oil. Vegetable oil, in turn, can be
transformed into biodiesel, which can be used to power just about any
diesel engine. (There are currently 13 million of them on American
roads, a number that’s expected to jump over the next decade.)
Algae has some important
advantages over other oil-producing crops, like canola and soybeans. It
can be grown in almost any enclosed space, it multiplies like
gangbusters, and it requires very few inputs to flourish—mainly just
sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. “Because algae has a high
surface-area-to-volume ratio, it can absorb nutrients very quickly,”
Sears says. “Its small size is what makes it mighty.”
The proof is in the numbers.
About 140 billion gallons of biodiesel would be needed every year to
replace all petroleum-based transportation fuel in the U.S. It would
take nearly three billion acres of fertile land to produce that amount
with soybeans, and more than one billion acres to produce it with
canola. Unfortunately, there are only 434 million acres of cropland in
the entire country, and we probably want to reserve some of that to
grow food. But because of its ability to propagate almost virally in a
small space, algae could do the job in just 95 million acres of land.
What’s more, it doesn’t need fertile soil to thrive. It grows in ponds,
bags or tanks that can be just as easily set up in the desert—or next
to a carbon-dioxide-spewing power plant—as in the country’s breadbasket.
Sears claims that these
efficiencies will allow Solix Biofuels, the company he founded, to
create algae-based biodiesel that costs about the same as gasoline. But
like any start-up trying to carve a niche in the post-oil age, Solix
must struggle for answers before it can sell a thing: Which species of
algae will produce the most oil? What’s the best way to grow it? And
not least, how do you extract the oil from the algae once it’s grown?
The research and debate at Solix is so fierce that it has already
claimed one casualty—my guide, Jim Sears.
A Fresh Start
Sears, an engineer-turned-inventor, started developing his algae-fuel
technology in 2004, but the events that inspired his venture stretch
back to the last time the U.S. faced an energy crisis. In 1978
President Carter established the Aquatic Species Program (ASP), a
research initiative charged with developing biodiesel from algae as a
clean, homegrown alternative to gasoline. Yet some two decades and $25
million later, the team had failed to produce any significant amount of
oil from algae, and in 1996 the Clinton administration axed the
program. Still, the researchers hoped their work would not go to waste.
“The directors were adamant that we make available a detailed summary
of what we’d done, because they knew that in the future someone would
be interested,” says John Sheehan, a former ASP project scientist.
Sheehan and his colleagues compiled a 328-page report on their work and
uploaded it to a Department of Energy Web site.
At the time, Sears was working
on a smorgasbord of projects in his garage, including a cattle
“hump-o-meter” (his term) intended to tell farmers when their animals
were mating. He had spent time as an engineer with the Navy in the
1980s, designing, among other things, sonar equipment that helped SEAL
divers find pieces of the space shuttle Challenger wreck. During this
stint he made an unforgettable nighttime dive off the coast of Florida.
As he treaded water, streams of phosphorescent algae drifted past him,
tracing trails of light in the murk as far as he could see.
Two decades later, Sears,
looking for a new project, found himself reliving that one sublime
dive. He wondered if algae like that could create enough energy to help
solve the fuel crisis. A little online research turned up the ASP
report.
It was a revelation. Sears
pored over the “Algae Bible,” as he now calls it, for weeks, determined
to find the reason for the gap between the program’s potential and its
results. “I started thinking, ‘Well, if this is as great as it sounds,
why aren’t we all driving around with algae fuel in our tanks?’” He
noticed that ASP researchers had tried to grow the unique oil-producing
algae in open ponds, which were far cheaper to maintain than closed
systems like a sealed aquarium. But wild algae quickly invaded these
open ponds and took over, outcompeting their obese counterparts.
Sears’s solution was inspired
by the most humble of kitchen implements, the Ziploc bag. Clear plastic
sacks, he realized, would let in enough light to help the algae thrive
yet prevent unwanted species from invading. The crux of his innovation
is his design for a full-scale algae “reactor.” Two 350-foot-long
parallel tracks about three feet apart hold the bags in place.
Custom-built rollers occasionally squeeze them like tubes of
toothpaste, circulating the algae; a current gives them the
intermittent sun exposure they need to flourish. Once the algae is
grown, a refinery extracts its oil and converts it to biodiesel.
Sears tried to sell his idea
to venture capitalists and found them skeptical at best. In an effort
to shore up his credibility, Sears approached Bryan Willson, the
director of Colorado State University’s Engines and Energy Conversion
Laboratory. The first time Sears visited the lab—housed in the
converted Old Fort Collins power plant—he knew he had found a kindred
spirit. When they sat down together to go over the Algae Bible, Sears
recalls, they each produced their own well-worn copy. “I had tons of
yellow stickies on mine, and he had tons of yellow stickies on his.”
Sears convinced Willson (along with his gaggle of graduate students) to
sign on to the project and join his fledgling company.
Money, Power, Politics
Nowadays, no one questions the need to quickly develop viable
alternatives to petroleum. The U.S. vehicle fleet pumps 1.3 billlion
tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, and we pay
foreign governments and corporations $820 million a day for the oil
needed to do so. As gas prices rise and the public becomes increasingly
attuned to the unpleasant realities of global warming, even
once-reluctant politicians are beginning to take action. In January’s
State of the Union address, President Bush announced his “Twenty in
Ten” plan to reduce American gasoline usage by 20 percent in the next
10 years. The plan sets mandatory standards to raise production of
renewable fuels to 35 billion gallons per year by 2017.
With the political tides
changing, investors smell money in the water. No one knows for sure if
the alternative-fuel economy will be led by ethanol, plug-in hybrids,
biofuel or none of the above, so venture capitalists are betting on
everything. It’s a good time to be in algae. Heavy hitters like
biotech’s big backer Craig Venter, Bob Metcalfe of Polaris Venture
Partners and Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson have
distributed millions of dollars of seed money to an assortment of
green-ooze-growing firms, including GreenFuel, Aurora Biofuels and
Solazyme. Doug Henston, the former investment banker and real-estate
manager who Sears brought on board as chief operating officer of Solix
in 2006, recently secured $2 million in funding from Bohemian
Investments.
One advantage algae start-ups
have over other alternative-fuel companies is that, by feeding carbon
dioxide from power plants to the algae, they could help utility
companies manage their emissions as well. The European Union already
regulates carbon dioxide emissions, and there are currently four bills
being considered in the U.S. Senate that would impose similar
restrictions. Another start-up, GreenFuel, which originated at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has used CO2 from a power plant
to grow its algae. “Our experiment was a success,” says Ray Hobbs, a
senior consulting engineer at Arizona Public Service, one of
GreenFuel’s utility partners. “We’ve only produced a very small amount
of fuel so far—we were just out to verify the concept—but we now know
that this is doable.”
Ultimately, though, the
success of algae biodiesel, like every other alternative fuel, will
rely on whether the market price of fossil fuels reflects their
environmental costs. “The real unknown is, what is the future of carbon
going to be?” Sheehan says. “Will it have a cost in the marketplace?”
Martin Tobias, a venture capitalist at the Ignition Partners firm, is
more direct about how important carbon regulation is. “The success of
this industry will depend on the price of oil,” he says. “If oil drops
back down to $20 a barrel, you’re going to see all the wind come out of
these companies’ sails.”
Pick a Species, Any Species
If you tossed a Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop and a Munich beer hall in
a blender, you’d get a pretty close approximation of the New Belgium
Brewery in Fort Collins. There are more cruiser bikes in the parking
lot than cars, and bright colors and tie-dye are de rigueur attire for
staffers and patrons alike. Our server greets us above the din and
offers us tasting forms that we can use to request free
samples—provided we also fill out a “personal expression” section
featuring questions like “If you could be in any band, which one would
you join, and what instrument would you play?” (Sears’s answers: the
Beatles, lead guitar.)
New Belgium is one of Sears’s
favorite places to unwind after an 80-hour workweek, so it’s fitting
that he decided to bring the brewery on board as a key part of Solix’s
future plans. As with a coal-fired utility, carbon dioxide is a copious
by-product of the brewing process. Except, unlike a utility’s, New
Belgium’s CO2 is nearly pure, perfect for injecting into the test
reactor that Solix plans to build on an empty stretch of New Belgium
land. If all goes as planned, within the next year New Belgium will
begin to feed gas directly into the plastic baggies, nourishing the
fatty algae as it multiplies. It’s a testbed, a proof of concept for
the partnerships that Solix is negotiating with power plants.
Key to the project is
picking the right type of algae. There are thousands of types of algae
that could potentially produce the right kind of vegetable oil, and
there are times when Amy Boczon, a CSU graduate student in biology,
feels like she has tried them all. Back at Solix’s lab at the Old Fort
Collins power plant, she swings open a refrigerator door to reveal test
tubes crammed in like six-packs. Sears, Henston, Willson and I look
them over. Each tube in the array is a slightly different shade of
green, containing a distinct species of algae that Solix is evaluating
for its fat-production potential.
Boczon’s job is to manipulate
the algae’s environment to maximize the amount of oil it produces. “You
need to make [it] think, ‘Gosh, am I going to go through a time when
I’m not going to have a certain nutrient?’ ” she explains. Yet
switching the algae into oil-production mode by removing nutrients like
nitrogen can also slow its growth and endanger its health. The trick is
to harvest the cells at their peak—after they’ve accumulated maximum
oil stores but before they succumb to overstress.
I cut to the chase. “So, how much fuel have you produced so far?”
Everyone looks askance at one
another, as if I’ve violated some unspoken rule of conduct. Mark
Machacek, another Solix employee, leaves the room for a moment and
comes back with an Erlenmeyer flask. When he holds it up to the light,
I can just make out a trace of brownish liquid, like the last drops of
whiskey at the bottom of a tumbler. “That’s it,” he says. “That’s all
we’ve got.”
It’s Not Easy Being Green
The oil-smudged beaker is a vivid reminder of the challenges start-ups
like Solix face. “Algae fuel is truly in the R&D stage, and to
present it any other way at this point would be a mistake,” says Jeff
Probst, the CEO of BlueSun Biodiesel in Westminster, Colorado. BlueSun
has expressed interest in using algae as a feedstock, but only if Solix
can produce it in large enough quantities.
In theory, making fuel from
algae should be straightforward. The government scientists who ran the
Aquatic Species Program proved that it is possible to grow a whole
bunch of green stuff and add chemicals to extract the oil and make at
least a small amount of fuel. “This isn’t cold fusion—it’s not like
nobody’s done this before,” Willson points out. But replicating and
improving on 20-year-old results isn’t all that easy. Out of the dozens
of brash young algae-biodiesel start-ups, only one, Aquaflow in New
Zealand, has managed to produce enough fuel to power a car engine.
This delay reflects the unique
difficulties of engineering a biological system. Each algae-growing
reactor is a miniature biosphere unto itself, built on the same
delicate web of dependencies as a natural ecosystem. Change one
element, and you can nudge others into disarray. “Algae is a holy grail
because it can grow so quickly,” says Cary Bullock, the CEO of
GreenFuel. “But for it to reach its potential, you have to make sure
all the algae gets just the right amount of light. If there’s too much
or too little, you won’t get a good enough yield.” Spurring the algae
on to Herculean growth rates, he adds, creates its own set of problems.
The swiftly multiplying cells decimate the carbon dioxide supply they
use to make food, and in large numbers, they block out the very light
they need to survive.
These issues, Sears
says, can be addressed with computer systems that limit growth rates by
precisely controlling the amount of nutrients that are added to the
tank. But making such refinements adds to capital costs, which
threatens the bare-bones economic philosophy that algae fuel companies
must embrace to make a product competitive with petroleum-based diesel.
After the harvest, another
conundrum presents itself: how to get the oil out. Algae isn’t fibrous
enough to stand up to cold pressing, the standard way of extracting fat
from plant matter. Processing the green slurry piped out of the bags by
adding chemicals like methanol or hexane is the most obvious
alternative—an efficient and relatively cheap means of removing oil.
But some observers worry about the possible unintended consequences of
the operation. “There are different schemes that are likely to affect
land and water use and, if anything gets loose, there’s a whole variety
of possible impacts,” says Dan Kammen, the director of the University
of California at Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.
Sears also can’t account for
the other variables that will help determine Solix’s fate. Will
lawmakers see fit to subsidize algae fuel at the expense of other
established alternatives, like ethanol? Will U.S. automakers ever
manufacture cars that can run on biodiesel? “The tests that have been
done so far show there’s some promise,” Probst says, “but it’s not at
the stage yet where you want to get people’s expectations built up.”
It’s a long way from a few drops at the bottom of a flask to powering
America.
Hidden Casualties
Sears has learned firsthand how these challenges can affect more than
the bottom line. Last November, Willson, Henston and a representative
of investor Bohemian Investments, not wanting to be bound to the
specifics of Sears’s original reactor design, voted Sears out as CEO.
Henston assumed CEO status and control over the company’s future
research plans, and Sears lost his sure grasp on building the
baggie-and-roller reactor he had originally conceived.
“Jim is a visionary,” Willson
says, “but I don’t have any emotional attachment to his plans.” The
clear implication is that Sears might have blocked any changes to his
original design, even if they were shown to improve the growing
process. (Indeed, although Sears plans to maintain a working
relationship with Solix, he is in the process of forming a separate
company to pursue his original, unadulterated dream.) Later this year,
Solix will test a new prototype design that will not include
rollers—which pose the risk of wearing out the plastic bags—to agitate
the algae; instead, bubbles percolating through the green slurry will
ensure that the mixture is sufficiently stirred. Additionally, new
multitiered, triangle-shaped compartments inside the bags will reflect
the sun’s rays, illuminate the algae from multiple directions, and,
ideally, bump up fuel yields.
It’s been a long year for
Sears, but he knows that Solix’s future—like the future of algae
biodiesel as a whole—depends on so much more than any one person can
foresee. “Who knows,” he says with characteristic equanimity, his
ever-present smile playing around his lips. “Me being thrown out as CEO
may turn out to be a great thing for the company.”
If Elizabeth Svoboda could join any band, she would join They Might Be Giants.
She would play the cowbell
