Advanced BioFuels USA

by David Schwartz (Algae Industry Magazine)   … “I’ve always wanted to work on things that are really important, at least to the company where I’m working and, ideally, beyond that. I don’t mind how big the challenge is or how hard it is, if it’s exciting to work on, if it is truly commercially relevant, and if you can solve the problem, then people will care and it will make a difference. I cannot think of a better example than finding a solution to the World’s need for renewable, sustainable liquid transportation fuels.”

…I came to a few personal conclusions around what fuels were better than others, and what technologies were the most viable. It quickly became apparent in 2007 that, at the end of the day, it’s all about the cost of your feedstock. The cost of food oil just went through the roof in 2007. It was crazy, and you had plants that were shutting down because it just didn’t make sense to make biodiesel anymore.

Q: Is that when you came around to looking at algae as a feedstock?
A: Educating myself from that perch it became apparent that it had to be an aquatic plant, simply because of the yield of oil per acre per year, and the fact that you wouldn’t be competing with farm land and, if you did it right, microalgae is the most productive of all of the aquatic plants and was clearly the way to go.

I decided to leave Imperium when I was offered an opportunity I couldn’t say no to — to become Vice President of Downstream Technology, at Sapphire Energy. And that’s when I really got into understanding what algae was all about, all of the different downstream processes, and enough about the upstream to be able to select different strains, to see the plusses and minuses, recognize what the challenges were, and start to address them. 

…  A lot of people over the years drew a parallel between the type of vegetable oil that you can buy in the supermarket, like canola or soy, and figured that algae oil is going to be the same. Well, typically it isn’t. People who are in the field and doing the work are starting to recognize that algae oil can be a very different and much more complex beast.

In algae there are different oil components dispersed throughout the organism to fulfill different roles. So if you just go ahead and do an extraction in the same way that you would extract, say, soybeans, you don’t just get triglycerides, you get all of the other things that Mother Nature put in there, like chlorophyll and phospholipids and all sorts of other things that you really don’t want in the downstream processing.

… 

Another huge commodity product being targeted in the algae space is ethylene (via ethanol and its dehydration to green ethylene). Ethylene is the building block used for roughly 2/3 (mass basis) of today’s petrochemical products (e.g. polymers, resins, anti-freeze, detergents and more).

And then, hopefully, we can stop burning crude oil for fuel and use it for its more valuable components and chemicals, which is kind of where I started from, almost 40 years ago at Shell.    READ MORE