AFS BioOil Invites Strategic Partners to Tour Its Algae Commercial Module
(MarketWatch/PRNewsWire) AFS BioOil has announced that its state-of-the art facility located at a wastewater treatment plant in the San Francisco Bay Area is open for tours for strategic partners and customers. The volume of the system is 150 m3; the annual nameplate capacity is 55 tons of algae biomass. The installed bioreactor is a full-scale system that proves scalability, biomass cultivation yields, and operating costs.
It has been long believed that closed systems also known as photobioreactors are prohibitively expensive for industrial algae cultivation. The facility that the company has built proves the opposite. The proprietary technology and the process make the system almost ten times less expensive than any other photobioreactor-based microalgae cultivation system on the market. This is in part achieved by integrating other technologies into the plant, so that they share a common infrastructure that would otherwise be required for each. The ideal fully integrated 500 acre plant, as the team sees it, will have algae production integrated with other biotech technologies such as microbial fermentation and generation of clean waste heat based electricity. The team, together with its partners, claims to have the technology to make it happen.
AFS BioOil forecasts to produce biodiesel commercially for under $2 per gallon. The company’s unique system allows an algae operator to control key cultivation parameters, which improves biomass production yields and minimizes operating and processing costs. Another great advantage of AFS technologies is that they can work for different algae strains and different operating conditions. The bioreactors are designed with options to produce clean water and collect oxygen enriched gas.
The company is looking for strategic partnership opportunities to move into commercial production. Vadim Krifuks, CEO of AFS BioOil, says that the team is thrilled to see the results of years of extensive R&D effort put in development and scale up of AFS technologies where algae cultivation and microbial fermentation could be combined in a single system. “What we’ve achieved could not have been done without the great talent of our employees and support of our investors and partners,” he says. “We continue to innovate and optimize our systems in order to reduce further capital and operating costs. The next year will be interesting for the algae industry as more and more companies are moving into commercial production.” READ MORE and MORE (Algae Industry Magazine)
