August 29, 2008

A growing, green biodiesel option

Algae. Pond scum. It’s messy, bothersome, and most of us hate it. And it may one day be the source of an economical, environmentally friendly diesel fuel.

Biodiesel is on the market now, of course, but its availability is spotty, which means there are large segments of the construction industry for which it simply isn’t a possibility yet. But algae?

It turns out that there are thousands of species of algae, and under the right circumstances, these microscopic, single-cell organisms can be a wonderful feedstock for making liquid fuels. They are the fastest-growing plants on earth, doubling their mass every few hours. That means they can be harvested, not once or twice a year as corn is in warmer climates, but daily.

They are immensely adaptable, growing just about everywhere. They are rich in high-energy oils ideal for making biodiesel, and produce 30 times more vegetable oil per acre than either sunflowers or rapeseed. They are also rich in carbohydrates that can become ethanol, and proteins for animal feed.

Algae filter many air pollutants, and act as efficient carbon dioxide sinks — taking CO2 from the air and storing it. And that’s about all they do, except divide, and divide and divide.

All this caught the attention of research scientists, of course, and the result is a company called GreenFuel, which has already crashed once after a South African outfit used GreenFuel’s technology to pump up stock prices in a non-existent company. They got caught, but GreenFuel’s reputation and stock was hurt.

Now, with some fresh faces and a fresh round of venture capital, they are pressing ahead with their plans to make biodiesel from algae.

Fumes from power-station smokestacks are run through a kind of algae soup, and in the process, the algae take up as much as 82 per cent of the CO2 and 85 per cent of the nitrogen oxide. The algae then go through a highly secret chemical process that converts them to diesel fuel.

How much diesel fuel? Well, an acre of soybeans can yield about 60 gallons of biofuels a year, and an acre of oil palms about 600 gallons. But scientists have estimated that an acre of algae could yield 5,000 gallons a year.

Other people are working on other things. For example, a system invented in Germany in the 1920s to turn coal to liquid fuels is showing promise as a way to manufacture biofuels.

The process is the Fischer-Tropsch system, or simply the FT cycle, and is similar in many ways to the pyrolysis system of converting municipal garbage into a gas used to generate electricity. It can use a wide range of biomass, with agricultural and wood wastes being the most common. The resulting “syngas” is then converted to liquid hydrocarbons using a proprietary process.

The company leading the way with the FT cycle is CHOREN Industries, a German firm which is now building its first commercial plant in Freiberg, Germany. It figures it will be able to produce almost 20 million litres of fuel annually, using 70,000 tonnes of waste.

It is so optimistic that it has formed an American division, and plans to build a biodiesel plant in the southeastern United States.

Eric Larson, a research engineer at the Princeton Environmental Institute, reckons that the resulting biodiesel can be competitive with oil selling at $70 a barrel. With oil presently somewhere around $120, this is good news—if CHOREN can deliver.

There are other companies intrigued by the pyrolysis method, of course, including Range Fuels in Colorado, which has just begun construction of a commercial plant that will turn syngas into ethanol, rather than hydrocarbons.

It’s another brass ring that’s shiny enough to reach for. And contractors and other users of diesel equipment, should hope that someone grabs it soon.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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