Heard on the Floor at the Algae Biomass Summit

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ...Couple of good trends to point to: 1. Lot more emphasis on farms and farming these days. It’s still an industry dominated by people in white coats, but there are some more overalls around the ABS than we’ve ever seen before.

2. A little more emphasis on commercial apps can be seen, but it’s not exactly Hollywood-grade product marketing, yet. Not as many blue blazers and khaki marketing mavens as one would like to see.

3. Food, food, food. Algae technology fits the food cost profile better than other large sectors such as fuels or commodity chemicals, and the industry has learned a lot about mouth feel, odor and taste profiles. And more than a few have noticed companies like Beyond Meat headed towards the valuation stratosphere, and said, “hey, algae’s vegan, too”. But when you look at Corbion’s progress with AlgaPrime DHA product line, you begin to realize that the industry is out of diapers now. Algae is a crop, and food is the anciently obvious thing we do with crops. Algama says that consumers are looking for new products, large companies are losing big, innovation is being outsourced, and algae has a big opportunity. Barriers include the high cost of biomass, taste factors and a lack of products (so far) meeting market demands.

4. Clean my water! There are more people at ABS shopping water purification systems than actually buying them but the offerings are stronger now, the technologies more mature.

5. Investors are a little on the scarce side. Still an awful lot of DOE money powering this sector, which keeps companies from actually shouting “fuels are impossible” from the algae rooftops, but sometimes you get the impression that fuels people are putting up the money for food technologies. An interesting development for those readers who survived food vs fuel.

6. News arrived that Cellana, ASU LightWorks and the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation have expanded on a partnership which first began with the Algae Testbed Public-Private Partnership.

7. News arrived that DOE selected the St. Louis-based Danforth Center to lead Deep Green, a multi-institutional collaboration that will predict functions for hundreds of uncharacterized plant genes that could be important to stress tolerance in a range of potential bioenergy crops.

8. In Japan, Mazda is working on carbon-neutral biofuel by giving funding to the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Hiroshima University so researchers can look at genome editing and plant physiology, including microalgae specifically for biofuel. Autocar reported that “Mazda anticipates a gradual transition to biofuel, if that path is taken, with both fuels coexisting for a period until engineered fuel usurps petrol.

9. Biomar says that the future of aqua feeds includes more single cell protein and more ingredients from lower trophic levels, and the majority of the diet will still be vegetable.

10. From the Philippines we are receiving reports that OrbitX, the country’s first space start-up, is developing reusable rockets that will be fueled by liquid methane produced from biogas that uses algae as feedstock. READ MORE